In February, there was a lot of news around Google! First, they renamed Bard to Gemini and released the paid version as Gemini advanced ¹  Then later, they released Gemini 1.5 ² A bit later Gemma open model was released ³ And finally Alphabet closed the month with losing 90 Billion dollars in stock value over AI controversies ⁴ which is quite insane!

Disney announced investing 1.5 billion dollars in Epic games. ⁵ Epic games was 32 billion dollars worth, based on investment by Sony in 2022. ⁶

Things got heated between Musk and Disney to the point he dropped an F bob on an interview with WSJ (his voice is a bit shaky in the video, might have been doubt, might have been anger! 😄 ) ⁷ Besides that he’s paying for legal bills of an actress that is suing Disney. ⁸

Github Copilot Enterprise is now generally available. It trains on your organization’s codebase. As a result, it can produce more relevant results. ⁹

OpenAI released Sora Model that can create minute long videos. ¹⁰ OpenAI hit 2 Billion in revenue. ¹¹ OpenAI is currently valued about 80 Billion dollars. ¹² Sam Altman started looking for 7 Trillion, to build chips. ¹³

Nvidia hit 2 Trillion dollars value because of the AI boom ¹⁴ (At the time of writing, it’s market cap is 1.98 Trillion USD )

Stability.ai announced Stable Diffusion 3, a next-gen AI image generator. ¹⁵

Adobe’s new prototype generative AI tool is the ‘Photoshop’ of music-making and editing ¹⁶

Europe’s deepest mine (in Finland) to become a giant gravity battery. ¹⁷ One form of a gravity battery is one that lowers a mass, such as a block of concrete, to generate electricity. The most common gravity battery is used in pumped-storage hydroelectricity, ¹⁸ where water is pumped to higher elevations to store energy and released through water turbines to generate electricity. ¹⁹

THE QUEST FOR A DNA DATA DRIVE: The world is running out of data storage. Here’s how DNA can save us ²⁰

Layoffs, although less than January, are still going on. Cisco carried the layoff flagship with 4K+ people. Other big names in February were Amazon, DocuSign, Grammarly, Mozilla, Instacart, Expedia, and Sony. ²¹

React team announced that React Compiler is not a research project anymore and it’s powering instagram.com which means it’ll probably be generally available in near future ²²

Reddit files to list IPO on NYSE under the ticker RDDT ²³ Main shareholders currently are Newhouse Family’s Advance, Sam Altman, and Tencent ²⁴

Price surge in Bitcoin price crashed Coinbase ²⁵

Pkl — pronounced Pickle was released, a configuration-as-code language with rich validation and tooling. It can be used as a command line tool, software library, or build plugin. ²⁶

Lenovo’s demoed a laptop with transparent monitor concept ²⁷

Mitchell Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer and co-founder of the Mozilla Project, is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety initiatives, according to Fortune. ²⁸

One of Nginx’s core developer quit the project in security dispute and started “freenginx” fork ²⁹

jQuery 4 Beta was released! 😄 Grandpa of modern web is still alive! ³⁰ On another note, VueJs hit 10 years old. ³¹

1. https://blog.google/products/gemini/bard-gemini-advanced-app/ ↩︎
2. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/15/24073457/google-gemini-1-5-ai-model-llm ↩︎
3. https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-open-models/ ↩︎
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/02/26/googles-gemini-headaches-spur-90-billion-selloff/ ↩︎
5. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/epic-working-with-disney-on-new-gaming-universe-after-1-5b-investment/ ↩︎
6. https://www.reuters.com/technology/epic-games-raises-2-bln-valuation-nearly-32-bln-2022-04-11/ ↩︎
7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/02/08/musk-rages-against-disneys-dei-gestapo-and-doubles-down-on-anti-diversity-crusade/ ↩︎
8. https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-funds-mandalorian-actress-lawsuit-against-disney ↩︎
9. https://github.blog/2024-02-27-github-copilot-enterprise-is-now-generally-available/ ↩︎
10. https://www.engadget.com/openais-new-sora-model-can-generate-minute-long-videos-from-text-prompts-195717694.html ↩︎
11. https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-02-09/openai-hits-2-billion-revenue-milestone-ft ↩︎
12. https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/microsoft-backed-openai-valued-at-over-80-billion-in-latest-deal/ ↩︎
13. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion ↩︎
14. https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/forget-beating-amazon-and-google-now-nvidia-is-part-of-the-2-trillion-club-magnificent-7/ ↩︎
15. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/stability-announces-stable-diffusion-3-a-next-gen-ai-image-generator/ ↩︎
16. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085551/adobe-project-music-genai-control-prototype-tool-hot-pod ↩︎
17. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/gravity-battery-mine-renewable-energy-b2492087.html ↩︎
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity ↩︎
19. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gravity_battery ↩︎
20. https://spectrum.ieee.org/dna-data-storage ↩︎
21. https://layoffs.fyi/ ↩︎
22. https://react.dev/blog/2024/02/15/react-labs-what-we-have-been-working-on-february-2024 ↩︎
23. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-files-to-list-ipo-on-nyse-under-the-ticker-rddt.html ↩︎
24. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/reddit-files-ipo-sam-altman-newhouse-family-investors-1235833080/ ↩︎
25. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/28/following-the-bitcoin-surge-coinbases-app-is-showing-users-a-zero-balance/ ↩︎
26. https://pkl-lang.org/main/current/introduction/index.html ↩︎
27. https://mashable.com/article/lenovo-transparent-laptop-mwc-2024 ↩︎
28. https://www.tekedia.com/mozilla-pivots-to-ai-internet-safety-announces-new-ceo ↩︎
29. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/nginx-key-developer-starts-a-freenginx-fork-after-dispute-with-parent-firm/ ↩︎
30. https://blog.jquery.com/2024/02/06/jquery-4-0-0-beta/ ↩︎
31. https://twitter.com/vuejs/status/1753678155444101385 ↩︎