JUNE 03, 2024
Salesforce’s stock suffers its biggest drop in two decades: Salesforce’s stock plummeted 19.7% on Thursday, representing the company’s largest single-day percentage drop since 2004 and the biggest one-day point drag for a single stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 20 years. Investors were spooked by Salesforce’s cut to its subscription-revenue outlook and its discussion of heavy scrutiny on spending by its customers, signaling weakening fundamentals that are weighing heavily on the overall software sector.
The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam: The rapid pace of progress in artificial intelligence has started to slow, as the field grapples with challenges like data scarcity, compute constraints, and the difficulty of scaling up models. While AI remains a transformative technology with immense potential, the AI revolution is losing some of its initial steam as researchers confront the inherent limitations and complexities of developing truly general and capable AI systems.
The Fed Might Soon Have to Worry About More Than Just Inflation: The Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes to combat high inflation are starting to take a toll on the broader economy, raising concerns that the central bank may soon have to shift its focus beyond just reining in price pressures. As the impact of the Fed’s actions ripples through sectors like housing and manufacturing, policymakers may need to carefully balance their inflation-fighting mandate with the risk of triggering a deeper economic downturn.
Better RAG results with Reciprocal Rank Fusion and Hybrid Search: Assembled, a company that provides an issue resolution engine for customer support, encountered challenges with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) relying solely on vector search, as it sometimes failed to return relevant results for specific keyword-based queries. To address this, Assembled developed a hybrid search infrastructure that combines vector search with keyword search, using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to effectively integrate and rank the results from both search methods, leading to more accurate and relevant responses for their customers.
How Waymo Outlasted the Competition and Made Robo-Taxis a Real Business: Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out from Google’s original project, has emerged as the leader in the autonomous vehicle race by taking a cautious, responsible approach to scaling its robo-taxi services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, while avoiding the serious accidents and setbacks that have plagued competitors like Uber, Cruise, and Apple. Despite the progress, Waymo acknowledges that the technology still has a long way to go before widespread deployment, as it faces ongoing challenges from rivals like Tesla, Amazon’s Zoox, Ford, Volkswagen, and Chinese automakers, but its steady expansion, deep-pocketed investors, and ability to mostly stay out of trouble have put the company in a strong position to continue innovating and adapting in this highly competitive landscape.
Supersharers of Fake News on Twitter: A small number of highly active Twitter users, dubbed “supersharers”, are responsible for spreading the majority of fake news on the platform, according to a study published in Science. These supersharers, who make up less than 1% of Twitter’s active user base, account for over 70% of the fake news shares, highlighting the outsized influence a small group can have in amplifying misinformation on social media.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Most Distant Known Galaxy: Using the powerful instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a galaxy that existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, shattering the previous record for the most distant known galaxy in the universe. This remarkable find provides unprecedented insights into the early formation and evolution of galaxies in the first few hundred million years of the universe’s history, challenging existing theoretical models and suggesting there may be many more such luminous and massive galaxies waiting to be discovered.
Microplastics Are Everywhere. Here’s How to Avoid Eating Them: Infants could encounter microplastics and nanoplastics in significantly greater quantities than adults, warranting attention and concern, but experts emphasize addressing known health risks like safe sleep, avoiding secondhand smoke, and practicing good nutrition as priority measures before focusing on potential unknown risks from microplastics. To minimize infant exposure, experts recommend avoiding microwaving or heating formula in plastic bottles, thoroughly rinsing heat-sterilized plastic bottles, and opting for glass or silicone bottles instead of plastic.