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Reddy, Set, IPO 💸👾
What's Appening: Reddit Goes Public, Berserk AI Bots, Microsoft & Mistral, Bitcoin Nintendo Games
3Advance Team
February 27, 2024
DATA-RICH REDDIT PREPARES FOR ITS IPO
👀 TLDR:
In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover Reddit’s stock marketing listing and user data sales. The social media platform has never made money, but it may be sitting on quite the cash cow - user data, which it will sell to train AI models. The fact that Reddit is now rolling in dough is fortuitous timing, as it is lined up to go public in the coming weeks. We also have news on AI bots going a little crazy, Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral, and Google’s AI games maker. Our Stat of the Week covers Nvidia’s stock market record, and What’s dAppening has a treat for gamers - classic Nintendo games to play on the Bitcoin blockchain. Finally, don’t miss our GPT of the Week, which looks at Screenshot to Code GPT, a potential game-changer for web designers.
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Our Top Take 🎬
📈🤝 Reddit – User Data for Sale to Train AI as Stock Market Listing Looms
Reddit has never made a profit in its roughly 20 years of existence, so it’s a little bit of a head-scratcher to see such excitement over its IPO, which is expected sometime in March. It will be the first IPO for a social media company since Snapchat went public in 2017. The company has something of a carrot to dangle in front of investors, though – its users’ data. Reddit has agreed deals, notably a huge one with Google, to train AI models on its users’ posts, not all of whom are happy about it. It does, however, make sense: Reddit has always been the weird cousin in the social media family, but it is the most “talkative” one. The message board style of the platform holds vast amounts of information. Reddit is the place you go to if you want to learn what happens when you microwave your wet socks or how to bury your grandpa at sea. It’s perfect for training AI on the weird and wonderful spectrum of human knowledge. #RedditIPO Read more here.
🦾 GPT of the Week: Screenshot to Code GPT
Combining GPT-4-Vision and DALL-E 3, this does exactly what the name suggests: You take a screenshot of a web page, and the GPT will generate the code (in HTML, React, Vue, Tailwind CSS, or Bootstrap) behind it, allowing you to see what’s underneath the proverbial hood. You can use that code to generate a clone web page, useful when presenting a prototype website to clients, for example, or simply to save time when converting designs to code. It’s a neat tool for understanding the structures of a web page, bridging the gap between designers and developers. Try it here.
Other Stories 🗞️
🤖🎨 AI Bots – ChatGPT Goes Berserk and Gemini’s Image Blunders
A stark reminder that we still have a long way to go before AI chatbots are perfected. Late last week, ChatGPT suffered a glitch for some users, where it started speaking nonsense in hybrid English and Spanish. The problem was quickly fixed, however, so critics' accusations of AI “going rogue” were a little wide off the mark. Google’s issue with its Gemini image generator was a little more profound, though. It was accused of putting diversity ahead of accuracy, displaying, for example, German World War 2 Nazis as people of color, leading to such an outcry that Google has decided to pause the image feature on Gemini until further notice. Google says it will release an “improved” image generator for Gemini soon. #AIBlunders Read more here.
🗞️ The Best of the Rest: Other News in Brief
🎮 Google DeepMind Unveils Genie AI Games Maker. Of all the sectors ready to be disrupted by AI, game development might be the ripest plum on the tree. Google recently showcased Genie, a generative AI that can create playable games from a prompt. More here.
🧑🤝🧑 Microsoft Partners with Mistral AI on Azure. You think Microsoft is betting all its AI money on OpenAI? Think again. It’s just announced a big partnership with French firm Mistral AI, which will introduce Mistal Large on Azure. Details are here
🎂 Slack Celebrates Its Ten-Year-Anniversary. Slack remains our fav collaboration tool at 3Advance; it’s the engine room that keeps much of our team connected across the globe. It’s just turned 10. HB, Slack. Details on how it keeps innovating are here.
🧐 Stat of the Week: $277B
📈🍟Nvidia – Juggernaut Smashes Single-Day Stock Market Record
We touched on Nvidia’s stock market performance last week, and it seems the chipmaker’s value just keeps going up and up. Last Thursday, Nvidia announced expectation-busting earnings (people really want those chips), and that caused its stock to add $277 billion in a day – the biggest gain in stock market history. If you had bought $1000 worth of Nvidia stock when it went public back in 1999, you would have a cool $2.8 million today. Woulda, shoulda, coulda, eh? #NvidiaBoom Read more here.
🕸️ What’s dAppening?
🪙🕹️ Bitcoin – You Can Now Play Classic Nintendo Games on Chain
Ever wanted to play classic SNES games like Mario Kart on the Bitcoin blockchain? Course you did. Well, it’s now possible thanks to Ordinals, which is effectively Bitcoin’s answer to NFTs. Ordinals allow you to inscribe any media on the Bitcoin blockchain, including images, videos, and, in this case, an emulator for classic video games. It’s fair to say that Bitcoin purists don’t love Ordinals, seeing it as gimmicky. Yet, who doesn’t love a bit of classic Nintendo? Other games available include Pac-Man and Tetris. #BitcoinGames Read more here.
Meanwhile at 3Advance...
This week we’re giving a big shoutout to our longest serving team member, Mark Evans 🙌
Mark celebrated another trip around the sun on Monday, so we’re raising a glass to his loyalty, dedication and of course, his personal success here at 3Advance! For we’re not just celebrating Mark’s birthday. We want to publicly congratulate Mark on his recent promotion to Director of Delivery, where he oversees the successful delivery of all our projects. Mark started as a Junior iOS Developer back in 2013, and has perfected his craft over the years, while also growing and managing the mobile team. His new move gives him more responsibility across our production team and ensures our clients are happy, our staff our happy, and of course our finances are happy too! He ensures projects are run consistently and professionally, while empowering our team to push new initiatives and levels of performance. Mark, you indeed are a Legend! 💪
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