Apple Vision Pro got out to the market. I saw people using it in different ways, from multi-monitor workspace setup, to watching movies and videos, to cooking food by using different floating timers. Sum of all the feedback I saw is that “if it was not too heavy, you could already forget that you’re wearing it and use it for long hours.” Also, nobody is sure if it’s worth 3.5K at this point. Though, prediction is that it has already sold ~200 thousand units. ¹

Elon Musk is No Longer World’s Richest after judge voids $51 Billion pay package. In return, Musk wants to move the “incorporation” to Texas. ² Now, the richest person on earth is the Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury conglomerate LVMH (related to brands Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Dom Pérignon, Hennessy, Givenchy, Fendi, Bulgari, etc). ³

Product Hunt concluded the Golden Kitty Awards. Surprise, Surprise, GPT-4 won the first place. Arc Max, Notion, and Gemini, became the runner ups. There were many interesting other products in the list as well. ⁴

Bard (Gemini-Pro) got to 2nd place in LLM Arena. (Now it’s at 3rd place). ⁵

Prophetic announced Morpheus-1: The world’s first multi-modal generative ultrasonic transformer designed to induce and stabilize lucid dreams. ⁶

Neuralink held its first human trials. ⁷ There’s not much clarity about the process and its results. You can read more about What scientists think about the first human trials on this link

Layoffs broke the downward pattern (considering number of companies that laid employees off). ⁸ Predictions are that there will be more layoffs in 2024. Microsoft and Google announced another round of layoffs in January.

Arc released “Arc Search” which has a “Browse for me” feature. It will create a webpage for the result rather than showing links only. ⁹

Nvidia’s RTX GPUs can now upgrade SDR content to HDR using AI ¹⁰

OpenAI introduced GPT Store, an app store for GPTs. ¹¹

Thirty four labs from all over the world teamed up to Make a General Robotic Brain. They found out that the collective knowledge of all the robots helped each robot to perform their tasks better. ¹²

Apple hit all time high smartphone market share ¹³

NASA Reveals Incredible X-59, A Unique, Experimental Supersonic Jet ¹⁴

Japan became the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon ¹⁵

America’s first lunar lander in a half-century won’t reach the Moon ¹⁶

Galaxy S24 event was held. ¹⁷

Meta released Code Llma 70B ¹⁸

Disney came up with an elegant solution to VR’s movement problem (Holotile) ¹⁹

Google’s free CAPTCHA goes from 1 million to 10K assessments by April 1st ²⁰

Starlink’s Latest Offering: Gigabit Gateways Starting at $75,000 Per Month (for ISPs) ²¹

Github Copilot Chat is generally available now. ²² It also supports slash commands. ²³

Python 3.13 gets a JIT. ²⁴

Resources:

1. https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/vision-pro首週末預購檢視-符合預期但隱憂浮現-vision-pros-first-weekend-pre-order-review-expectations-in-line-0450c1effe66 ↩︎
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2024/01/31/elon-musk-no-longer-worlds-richest-after-judge-voids-51-billion-pay-package/ ↩︎
3. https://www.businessinsider.com/lvmh-brands-iconic-luxury-goods-bernard-arnault-2019-10?op=1 ↩︎
4. https://www.producthunt.com/golden-kitty-awards/hall-of-fame ↩︎
5. https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard ↩︎
6. https://propheticai.co/ ↩︎
7. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/29/elon-musks-neuralink-implants-brain-tech-in-human-patient-for-the-first-time.html ↩︎
8. https://layoffs.fyi/ ↩︎
9. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/28/24053882/arc-search-browser-web-app-ios ↩︎
10. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/24/24048892/nvidia-rtx-video-hdr-feature-ai ↩︎
11. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store ↩︎
12. https://spectrum.ieee.org/global-robotic-brain ↩︎
13. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/apple-hits-all-time-high-smartphone-market-share-takes-1-spot-for-2023/ ↩︎
14. https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-reveals-incredible-x-59-a-unique-experimental-supersonic-jet ↩︎
15. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/japans-moon-sniper-mission-aims-for-precise-lunar-landing/ ↩︎
16. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/americas-first-lunar-lander-in-a-half-century-wont-reach-the-moon/ ↩︎
17. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/everything-samsung-announced-at-its-galaxy-s24-event/ ↩︎
18. https://venturebeat.com/ai/meta-releases-code-llama-70b-an-open-source-behemoth-to-rival-private-ai-development/ ↩︎
19. https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/22/disney-holotile/ ↩︎
20. https://bytepursuits.com/google-significantly-reduces-recaptcha-free-tier-introduces-new-pricing-models ↩︎
21. https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-latest-offering-gigabit-gateways-starting-at-75000-per-month ↩︎
22. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-01-11-github-copilot-chat-now-generally-available-for-organizations-and-individuals ↩︎
23. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-01-30-code-faster-and-better-with-github-copilots-new-features-in-visual-studio/ ↩︎
24. https://tonybaloney.github.io/posts/python-gets-a-jit.html ↩︎