Month: March 2025

Swiss National Bank President Reportedly Dismisses Bitcoin as Reserve Asset

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Swiss National Bank (SNB) President Martin Schlegel has rejected the idea of holding bitcoin as part of Switzerland’s central bank reserves, citing a lack of stability, liquidity, and security, according to local media. Speaking to the Tamedia group, Schlegel cited three primary concerns surrounding cryptocurrencies. The first one is their volatility, which he said makes … Read more

OpenAI launches GPT-4.5, its largest model to date

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Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re diving into OpenAI’s newest, biggest model GPT-4.5, Microsoft pulling the plug on Skype, how Anthropic used Pokémon Red to train its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, the unexpected return of Fyre Festival, and more! Let’s get into it. OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4.5, the much-anticipated AI … Read more

What can a 100-pixel video teach us about storytelling around the world?

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Since its founding in 2007, the Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has used surveillance, TV networks, and digital archives to examine how we move through and record the world. In addition to their film and video projects, the wildly prolific studio runs a rooftop cinema in Mumbai and maintains several online video archives, including the largest … Read more

This Is How You Should Navigate Difficult Situations at Work

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Work is filled with difficult moments—a mean coworker, a boss who ignores your ideas, unrealistic demands from stakeholders, and a problem that turns out harder than expected. Such moments often arouse strong feelings of anger, hurt, frustration, desperation, self-doubt, low self-worth, and inadequacy. Instead of tackling the situation with a clear head, we let our … Read more

Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models: Training

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:::info Authors: (1) Liang Wang, Microsoft Corporation, and Correspondence to (wangliang@microsoft.com); (2) Nan Yang, Microsoft Corporation, and correspondence to (nanya@microsoft.com); (3) Xiaolong Huang, Microsoft Corporation; (4) Linjun Yang, Microsoft Corporation; (5) Rangan Majumder, Microsoft Corporation; (6) Furu Wei, Microsoft Corporation and Correspondence to (fuwei@microsoft.com). ::: Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Related Work … Read more

How to get rid of the new Apple Mail redesign

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There are three inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and tech platforms making design changes that are universally disliked. The latest victim to this phenomenon is the Apple Mail app, which got a major redesign in iOS 18. This update is also rolling out on iPads and MacBooks. The new Apple Mail design separates emails into … Read more

What Is a Diffusion LLM and Why Does It Matter?

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Introduction Today, Inception Labs released the first commercially available Diffusion Large Language Model (dLLM) – Mercury Coder, and caused a big stir both in the research community as well as in the AI industry. In contrast to auto-regression LLMs (all the LLMs you know today), diffusion LLM works like your favorite AI image generators such … Read more