📦 Amazon Pivots Drone Program to Arizona, Meta Partners Xbox, Voyager 1 Resumes Updates from Deep Space
Today’s pick
Amazon ends drone program in California, plans to start deliveries in Arizona later this year. Amazon is winding down its drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California, one of the earliest U.S. test sites for the ambitious project. The company said it plans to bring drone deliveries to more U.S. cities, including part of the Phoenix area, later this year. Amazon has been slow to expand the program, called Prime Air, since founder Jeff Bezos first sketched out his vision for drone deliveries in 2013. By Annie Palmer via CNBC
𝕏: Our Same-Day network and Prime Air drones are two innovations helping us deliver even more quickly for customers. So we're excited to bring them together. For the first time, drones will begin delivering orders from our Same-Day delivery site in the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro area, giving customers access to tens of thousands of items they can get in under an hour. - Andy Jassy (@ajassy)
Meta opens Quest OS to third-party headset makers, taps Lenovo and Xbox as partners. The mixed reality operating system that powers Meta Quest headsets can officially be used by third-party device makers, the company announced on Monday. Three major tech players—Asus, Lenovo and Microsoft's Xbox—are the first companies to confirm they’ll be developing new devices that run the software. By Lauren Forristal via TechCrunch
𝕏: Very interesting announcement from Meta, given that Google is very likely to announce Android XR OS (or whatever it's going to be marketed as) next month at I/O - Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman)
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NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth. For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars). NASA
𝕏: In the old days, there were televisions that showed faulty signal until you hit it at specific spot. These amazing people knew how to hit Voyager 1, at distance of 24,000,000,000 km, launched in 1977 at the right spot. Leon Simons (@LeonSimons8)
Elon Musk's Robotaxi Dreams Plunge Tesla Into Chaos. The stock is sliding, a cheaper electric car is deprioritized and the CEO is riling the workforce with his biggest layoffs yet. Elon Musk's underlings at Tesla Inc. are accustomed to chaos. It comes with the territory of working for a chief executive who sets exacting targets and often abruptly switches directions — whose biographer describes his more intense moods as “demon mode.” By Edward Ludlow via Bloomberg
𝕏: People can not grok the future. I've hit this hundreds of times in my career. Investor belief is a crazy thing to study. Tomorrow it is expected that Tesla will have one of the worst earnings calls of its history. So, we get a great chance to study investor belief again. - Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer)
Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences. Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. By Shreya Shankar via arXiv
𝕏: Evals are arguably the hardest part of LLMOps. LLMs mess up, so we check them w/ other LLMs, but this feels icky. Who validates the validators?? We built an interface to align LLM-based evals with user preferences, learning a lot about why this is hard - Shreya Shankar (@sh_reya)
AI news
AI Developers Agree to New Safety Measures to Fight Child Exploitation
Elon Musk's chilling AI claim could come true next year with £80bn 'Matrix' investment
Adobe’s new Firefly Image 3 adds genAI features to Photoshop
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