A Billion Dollar Bet 💰
📚 Reading
Microsoft invested $1B into recently converted non-profit-to-LP startup OpenAI. This is interesting for a few reasons, namely 1) OpenAI is making use of its new for-profit corporation structure to follow through on previously unavailable funding opportunities and 2) Microsoft is building much needed street-cred for its Azure platform within the machine learning community. OpenAI has attracted the ire of prominent machine learning researchers over the last year due to ambitious statements around creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). They also do not sell any products or have any publicized plans to create products in the future. Link.
Academics working in Computer Science have been forced to keep up with pressure to publish papers involving neural networks and/or deep learning lest they fail to capitalize on the latest conference buzzword. A recent analysis attempted to recreate the results of 18 algorithms presented at top research conferences and demonstrated that nearly half could not be reproduced. For the rest, a simple heuristic was sufficient to outperform the complex neural networks. A note to practitioners entering the industry: if your only tool is a hammer, then everything will look like a nail. Link.
Project Euler is a website that lets you brush up on your math skills to solve challenging problems. It’s targeted at students and professionals who want to keep their problem solving and mathematics on the cutting edge. Link.
Last week we discussed the blurring lines between corporations and governments as Google continues to drive global web infrastructure. A remote island off the coast of South Africa may become the next hub for satellite control ground stations thanks to a high-speed fiber cable from Google. It has attracted the attention of companies like OneWeb, a StarLink competitor. Link.
A fantastic guide to modern developer frameworks and languages. Link.
An in-depth guide on assessing the quality of fabrics. Link.
The IRS has sent letters to individuals with active cryptocurrency trading history, reminding them that, yes, tax laws do apply to currency exchange through unsanctioned Chinese websites. Link.
🧐 Question of the Week
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
credit: Project Euler
💎 Quote of the Week
It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
- Frank Herbert, Dune
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