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Meta Introduces Code Llama: An Advanced Tool for Code Generation and Debugging

Meta recently announced the release of a novel tool named Code Llama. The tool, which is built on Meta's Llama 2 large language model can generate new code and debugging existing code.

Code Llama will operate under the same community license as Llama 2 and will be free for both research and commercial use. This tool has the ability to create code from prompts or complete and debug code when directed towards a specific code string.

Alongside the base Code Llama model, Meta also introduced two specialized versions: Code Llama-Python and Code Llama-Instrct. The former is designed specifically for Python coding, while the latter is capable of understanding instructions in natural language. However, Meta emphasized that these versions of Code Llama are not interchangeable, and the base Code Llama or Code Llama-Python is not recommended for natural language instructions.

Meta's goal with Code Llama is to streamline developer workflows, allowing them to concentrate more on the human-centric aspects of their jobs. They stated, “Programmers are already using LLMs to assist in a variety of tasks, ranging from writing new software to debugging existing code”.

According to Meta, Code Llama performed better than the publicly available LLMs based on benchmark testing, although they did not specify which models they compared it against. In the code benchmark HumanEval, Code Llama scored an impressive 53.7 percent. Furthermore, it demonstrated the ability to accurately write code based on a text description.

Meta plans to release three sizes of Code Llama, with the smallest size being able to fit on a single GPU, making it suitable for more low-latency projects.

In the context of the broader tech industry, code generators have been assisting developers for some time. Other tech giants like GitHub, Amazon, and Google have also released or plan to release similar tools. For instance, GitHub launched Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, to quickly write and check code. Amazon’s AWS has CodeWhisperer, which also writes, checks, and updates code. Google is reportedly working on AlphaCode, although it has not been released.

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AI Platform Hugging Face Now Worth $4.5 Billion After Google and Amazon Invest

Hugging Face is a platform that serves as a hub for machine learning and artificial intelligence models. It's like GitHub for artificial intelligence. Allowing for sharing, collaboration, and enhancement of AI models, codes, and datasets. The platform hosts a vast number of AI models and has gained popularity due to its focus on open-source projects.

In August 2023, Hugging Face secured a significant investment of $235 million in a Series D fundraising round. This funding came from notable tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and IBM. With this investment, the valuation of Hugging Face has significantly increased, bringing it up to a very impressive $4.5 billion.

How to access Hugging Face

Accessing Hugging Face is a straightforward process. Users simply need to navigate to the Hugging Face website where they can explore a wide array of AI resources. The platform also offers an API, which allows developers to integrate Hugging Face's models into their own applications.

Several popular AI models are hosted on Hugging Face. For instance, BlenderBot, an open-source chatbot developed by Facebook AI, is known for its advanced conversational abilities, such as empathy and personality. Another example is LXMERT, a transformer framework designed to learn visual and language connections. It is often used for visual question-answering tasks.

Before you begin using Hugging Face, it's important that you understand the specific use case and purpose behind it. The platform offers multiple models and transformers, each designed for specific tasks. Users can filter and search for models based on tasks, libraries, datasets, and languages.

Once a model is selected, users can set up their environment. Hugging Face supports several libraries, including popular ones like TensorFlow, Pytorch, and FastAI. These libraries can be installed using pip commands, such as !pip install torch for PyTorch and !pip install transformers for the transformer library.

Whether you're looking to do some text classification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, language translation, there's probably a model that's right for you on Hugging Face.

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Rise Of The ChatGPT Alternatives

Just as Facebook wasn't the first social network and Google wasn't the first search engine, the AI race hasn't been won yet and it would be too early to declare ChatGPT and OpenAI the winner.

There are a lot of new entrants coming into the field, both big and small. One small entrant that I like is phind.com. Here you can see how they're building both a search engine which is more like a personal assistant.

It gives you both the sources as well as the solution built from the sources. And unlike Bing, it can give you some pretty decent code output.

So, stay tuned to the generative AI space because there are a lot of interesting companies and products being built on these AI models and the compute power is going through the roof so I expect chip makers, GPU makers etc to do really well in the coming years.

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Making Those Balenciaga Harry Potter AI Videos

If you've seen those viral Harry Potter by Balenciaga videos, you might be wondering how they created the videos. Interestingly, pretty much everything was created by AI.

The most impressive components are the image generation, the voice cloning and converting the images to videos. So let's start from the beginning:

You need to use MidJourney to create high quality AI images. There are other options like StableDiffusion but MidJourney's the best out there right now. Too bad the free version's pretty limited right now because of the costs involved.

Voice Cloning

Next, you want to clone the voice by using Eleven Labs: https://beta.elevenlabs.io/

To get a sample, you can use a youtube video of your chosen actor reading some text. There are tons of them.

Video Animation

For the video animation, head to https://www.d-id.com/ where you can add your video, text, audio and create talking avatars all for free. You have around 20 free credits. Pretty decent if you just want to get one video out.

If your video's a hit, you could look into buying more.

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So that's a quick intro into the tech and sites that you will need to create one of those viral talking avatar videos using AI.

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Hopefully Smart Glasses Become A Thing

As someone who has had to wear glasses practically all my life, I always wished we had a way to augment reality and give us real time information about the objects and places we're seeing.

The phone has some capability but a voice interface and smartglasses would be a more natural user experience. Like imagine if you could look at a building or landmark and speak, "what is that building?" The lens would then use a speech to text to convert it into a search query and do an image search.

Compared to the current flow of either pointing your phone or taking a picture and doing an image search. Well, that's the hope really and I think such an interface is becoming more and more a reality especially with the new AI tools we're getting. It's an AI arms race out there.

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Sources Will Be More Important Going Forward

As much as the hype of LLMs like ChatGPT and Google's Bard is understandable, how sure are you that the answer is accurate? A lot has been made of Bard's flub in their launch demo but that only serves to highlight how important going over the sources are after you've gotten an answer.

The next problem that LLM AI models have at the moment is that a lot of content is censored or blocked because of 'safety'. It can get pretty silly at times because even asking who would win a fight between two animals gets blocked. Because of violence.

If you ask how to scrape a gambling site for data, that too gets blocked because of the content type. Knowledge should be free and less restricted.

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Now AI Can Even Make Music

The AI Wars are definitely heating up with the latest news that Google's new AI can make music from short prompts.

Google Has Developed a Music-Making AI Bot

The AI takeover hits the music industry.

Some samples can be found in the project's GitHub page but the AI itself won't be launched to the public just yet. Google's definitely taking a more cautious approach to AI than some of its competitors.

Creative endeavours were supposed to be left for humans to do once we automated all the boring stuff but now it seems even that is for robots. Then what will we do in the 21st and 22nd century?

A dystopian future has been one many have warned about but it has one big problem. If there's no one left to buy the goods that are made, those with the tech advantage don't really have an advantage.

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AI Can Now Even Imitate Voice

VALL-E AI can mimic a person’s voice from a 3-second snippet

Are you really saying what I’m hearing?

First it was text, then art, then code and now even voice can be imitated by AI. Vall-E is the AI that you should check out if you want to spoof voices.

And beyond the fun stuff, imagine the ramifications in court proceedings if someone were to play a fake audio clip. It's definitely a matter of when, not if.

Like plagiarism tools that we have to check whether text content is AI output or not, we'll need a way to detect whether audio is 100% real. But the problem is that we can't tell with certainty.

Right now, there are tons of false positives when it comes to detecting AI generated content. Also, is 50-50 between AI generated and human generated content considered AI generated?

So many ethical questions remain in the AI space and with everyone running out to make their own AI enhanced app, it feels like the wild west in crypto like it was a couple of years ago.

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Microsoft Adding ChatGPT To Bing?

It will definitely be interesting times ahead as Microsoft gets ready to add ChatGPT to the search results in Bing. What will this mean for anyone with a website? Probably means that creating a website will no longer be profitable except for a few lucky folks.

Here's how I think the Internet will change. Low level blogs that rely on Google or Bing for traffic will die. Basically, any site that doesn't have a brand is going to get killed off. StackOverflow, Inc. etc will still survive.

Sites will probably switch to more affiliate marketing in order to stay afloat. They've already been moving into this in the last couple of years and this should accelerate the trend.

Google will also probably be forced to release something similar and their revenue will take a hit. Probably forcing them to focus more on video and maps to place ads on.

Then there is the question of what will ChatGPT curate if no one wants to make a website anymore. Sure, money isn't the only reason why people create blogs but it sure doesn't hurt.

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Apple To Raise Battery Replacement Prices

If you want to continue using your old iPhone, you're going to have to get that battery replaced. The only place you can do that is at the official store. It's going to cost an extra $20 for most out of warranty models:

Of course, how 'right-to-repair' will affect this remains to be seen. One thing that's for sure is that Apple has a very loyal fan-base compared to the other phone makers.

Nokias and Blackberries were popular at one point and I'm sure that the sun will set on Apple one day but it's unlikely to be any time soon.

Speaking of batteries, I wish they would fix their Apple Watch battery so that I don't need to charge it every day. My old Fitbit could go for a couple of days at least without requiring a charge.

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I have to admit, 'it works on my machine' is my go-to line.

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India Makes USB-C Charging Mandatory From 2025

Gadgets in India are going to require having the option of USB-C charging from 2025. This is a massive step towards an industry standard.

Some highlight that this is the Brussels Effect. Basically, the EU with their huge market size is able to implement and enforce standards that other countries then implement.

In truth, India and China are other huge markets that would be able to do so if their average consumer's spending power were to catch up.

This should also bring down the price of cables. Apple cables are around $20 and you can get Apple certified ones for around $5. Pretty reasonable and we definitely look forward to the day when we can just have a couple of standard cables around the house that we can then just use for all our devices.

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Classic anime about programming... 10/10, would recommend.

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Not gonna lie... i'm not particularly good at front-end lol

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Netflix Gonna Crack Down On Password Sharing In Early 2023?

There has been a rumor floating around that Netflix plans to stop allowing password sharing in early 2023. This means that only one person or household will be allowed to use a Netflix account. A big change from how it is today when you can even share the same account across different countries.

I don't buy the reason that they're doing this to improve the user experience. It's clearly a revenue play.

Netflix's revenue growth has been impressive as they captured the streaming market during the pandemic from 2019 to 2021. But as competitors like Disney+ and HBOMax enter the market, they're going to face some tough competition. Also, by this point, the number of people who don't have access to a Netflix account is rather small.

But this might not be so straightforward as Netflix hopes. Many subscribers say they will simply cancel their subscription if they aren't allowed to share with family members. After all, they're paying for the subscription for the whole family and it doesn't make sense for each member to get their own subscription for multiple streaming services.

The last thing Netflix would want is pushing their customers into the arms of illegal streaming sites.

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Does Email Encryption Matter?

Email encryption can be important for privacy and security. When you send an email, it is transmitted over the Internet and may pass through a number of servers and networks before reaching its intended recipient. If the email is not encrypted, it can potentially be intercepted and read by unauthorized parties along the way.

There are several different types of email encryption that you can use, including S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), and TLS (Transport Layer Security). Some email providers and clients offer built-in support for email encryption, while others require the use of additional software or plugins. There's recent news that Gmail is going to start rolling out support for email encryption.

In general, email encryption can be especially important for individuals or organizations that handle sensitive information, such as financial data, personal identification numbers, or confidential business documents.

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Supplement your learning and deepen your understanding of programming concepts by watching some video tutorials. Here are some benefits over traditional learning in school:

Visual learning: Some people learn better when they see a demonstration as opposed to just reading about it.

Supplement other learning: You've done your reading. You've done your tutorials. Watch a video to cement the learning and deepen your understanding.

Access to expert knowledge: Many programming videos are done by experts who can provide you with best practices from the field. For example, a VBA expert might tell you what's the fastest way to do something as opposed to alternative ways.

Convenience: It's hard to beat the convenience of videos. You can fast-forward and rewind. Repeat the video as many times as you want. Also, with a pair of bluetooth earphones, you can even get work done around the house while still listening to the audio.

Personally, the biggest advantage of videos is that you get real world experience instead of theoretical knowledge. For example - there are many ways to delete rows in Excel - but what's the fastest?