This Week I Learned - Week #23 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft 365 Education is a productivity cloud suite. Microsoft 365 builds on top of Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook and provides enhanced management, security, and compliance tools. Microsoft 365 Education has three tiers of academic plans: A1, A3, and A5. A5 has the most comprehensive plan features [PDF]. Microsoft partnered with experts to develop Learning Accelerators tools Reading Progress and Reading Coach.

* DBRX is Databricks' Foundation Model

* In Forrester's 21-criterion evaluation of AI Foundation Models for Language providers, Google, Databricks, NVIDIA emerged as Leaders in Q2 2024.

* The first car was driven by a neural network in 1988. Twenty-five years later, Andrej Karpathy took his first demo ride in a Waymo. A decade after that, the company received its driverless permit. That’s thirty-five years of rigorous  engineering, testing, refinement, and regulatory navigation to go from prototype to commercial product. - What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs

* Many of the Generative AI models are now used to copy individual artists, through a process called style mimicry. Home users can take art work from human artists, perform "fine-tuning" or LoRA on models like stable diffusion, and end up with a model that is capable of producing arbitrary images in the "style" of the target artist, when evoked with their name as a prompt. Many artists have discovered significant numbers of their art pieces in training data such as LAION-5B, without their knowledge, consent, credit or compensation. Seeing the artistic style they worked years to develop taken to create content without their consent or compensation is akin to identity theft. Glaze is a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry. At a high level, Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style.

* The key difference between AI assistants and chatbots is that AI assistants have access to a wide range of data sources, providing additional insights and context for intelligent conversations. They can also remember past interactions and respond intelligently. The key difference between AI assistants and agents lies in their learning ability and autonomous execution. While AI assistants typically require a human in the loop, well-designed agents can accomplish tasks with minimal human intervention. As language models become more powerful, so will agents. By combining proven automation and integration techniques with the reasoning abilities of LLMs, agents may gain surprising new capabilities. - Forbes

* Meta is using Facebook and Instagram data to train AI models.

* NCR Voyix Corporation, previously known as NCR Corporation and National Cash Register, is an American software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and electronic products. NCR was founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1884 by John Patterson. Patterson formed NCR into one of the first modern American companies by introducing new, aggressive sales methods and business techniques. It manufactured self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check processing systems, and barcode scanners. In the 1980s, NCR manufactured two proprietary series of mini-to-midrange computers NCR developed the world's first SCSI interface chip. By 1986, the count of American mainframe computer manufacturers had dwindled from 8 (IBM and the "seven dwarfs," namely Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric, and RCA) to 6 (IBM and the "BUNCH") and further reduced to 4 (IBM, Unisys, NCR, and Control Data Corporation). NCR was acquired by AT&T Corporation in 1991 for $7.4 billion and was joined with Teradata Corporation in 1992. In October 2023, NCR Corporation was split into two independent public companies: the Digital Commerce business was named NCR Voyix while the ATM business was spun-off as NCR Atleos.

* ...because electric cars aren’t just vehicles — they’re batteries as well. Unlocking their full potential could speed the integration of more wind and solar into the world's electricity networks. Petty regulations, corporate timidity, and a shortage of key components are holding that back. California’s 1.5 million EVs can provide roughly three times as much energy as its utility-scale batteries (assuming the average utility-scale battery runs for four hours and the average US EV battery is 60 kilowatt-hours), but despite years of study the prospects of turning them into backup for the power network still seem remote. Cars are idle 95% of the time. Using them as batteries when they’re parked seems the perfect way of paying off that car loan - Bloomberg

* In a bid to foster inclusivity, Carrefour recently launched a pilot project at its Brussels Auderghem hypermarket, where blind and visually impaired shoppers can now navigate the store independently with the help of advanced assistive technologies. From the moment a customer enters the store, a tactile and audio map provides a comprehensive guide to the store's layout, while special QR codes, detectable from up to 20 meters away using a dedicated application, offer detailed information on product composition and price.

* An otolaryngologist is a doctor specializing in treating conditions that affect the ears, nose, and throat, as well as head and neck surgery. Otolaryngologists are referred to as ENTs for short.

* Food and Beverage (F&B) category is one of the most popular categories on Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and accounted for 10.2 lakh of 88.5 lakh orders on ONDC in May 2024. 

* "India's greatest achievement in this Modi era has been the rise of global capability centres...we now have perhaps up to 4,000 multinationals with a total revenue of more than 100 billion. These guys are exporting an enormous amount and that has saved our bacon. If you just look at the merchandise trade deficit, it is humongous. But we have been saved by service exports, especially GCCs. There was one Deloitte report suggesting as much as 42% of the guys involved in the GCCs were in engineering R&D. India has become an R&D centre because of the globalisation and the MNCs coming in." - Swaminathan Aiyar

* At 28.55 crore, the National Stock Exchange of India on June 5 broke the world record for handling the highest number of single-day trades.

* The NSE Nifty 50 recorded its biggest single day fall (5.9%) in over four years after the Indian markets crashed on 4th June after results for the 2024 general elections disappointed street expectations. The last time the index had seen a fall this big was March 23, 2020, when it fell over 13%. SBI Bluechip Fund, SBI Magnum Midcap Fund, SBI Small Cap Fund fell less than their respective indexes. 

* Since 2000, NIFTY 50 plunged 5% in a single day on 31 occasions. 18 out of 31 times, it soared over 20%. 

Source: ET Money

* A data breach involving HawkEye, an application created for Telangana police, was reported on BreachForums, a notorious marketplace for stolen data.  HawkEye was developed by Venturewise, represented by Shiva Nag. - ToI

* Jatin Kumar, a 20-year-old student from Noida and a native of Jhansi has been arrested for hacking the data of the Hawk Eye and TSCOP applications of the State police department. The hacker had posted details of the breach on databreachforum.st, offering the compromised data for sale at $150. He provided the Telegram IDs Adm1nfr1end and Adm1nfr1ends for interested buyers to contact him regarding the Hawk Eye and TSCOP data, respectively. According to officials involved in the probe, all the transactions related to the data were done in cryptocurrency. - The Hindu

* “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein's life advice in a letter to his son Eduard

* “We are naturally driven by self-interest; it’s necessary to survive. But we need wise self-interest that is generous and cooperative, taking others’ interests into account” - Dalai Lama