🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #196

It's Tuesday! Keep grinding, success is on the way!

#DeepSeek - BIGGEST gossip ever! American companies, after having spent billions of dollars on training LLMs and attempting to gatekeep AI were taken by storm when a new LLM named DeepSeek, created by researchers from China, exceeded benchmarks (set previously by OpenAI’s o1) and became the number 1 app on the App Store. The biggest shock? They spent just around 5 million dollars to train - and the model can run on AMD and Huawei GPUs and not just Nvidia’s! Stock markets tumbled on the news that the world may no longer need to rely on American Tech in the GenAI space.

#AppleLeaks - So, apparently the new iPhone SE 4 has been leaked and it's got a similar design to the iPhone 14, but with an older notch.

#Twitter/X - Elon Musk wrote an email to employees of X stating that X is barely breaking even. Not much surprising with increased competition from BlueSky and Threads.

#AsteroidMistake - This one’s a bit funny. Astronomers were reportedly excited after they spotted what appeared to be Asteroid but it turned out to be Tesla’s Roadster vehicle which was launched previously.

#Microsoft365 - Apparently, Microsoft’s 365 Copilot launch turned out to be a total disaster, due to a name change and huge price increase that nobody saw coming.

Sridhar Vembu Steps Down As Zoho's CEO
Zoho is a software company that provides a range of products for businesses, like CRM and productivity tools. Its CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Vembu, is stepping down from the role, taking on a new position as chief scientist to focus on R&D, especially on artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

Fiitjee In Trouble: Founders Booked For Breach Of Trust
FIITJEE is a well-known coaching institute in India, providing training for competitive engineering exams. Today, its owner and 11 others were booked by Noida Police for breach of trust and criminal conspiracy, after several centres in Delhi-NCR shut down abruptly, leaving thousands of students in the lurch with unpaid fees.

Nothing Phone Launch Date Revealed
Nothing is a UK-based consumer tech company known for its minimalist designs. They just announced the launch date of their new phone, Phone (2), which will debut on March 4. This comes after their successful Phone (1) launch last year.

ChatGPT - Introduced Operator, a general-purpose AI agent that can automate tasks such as booking travel, making restaurant reservations, and shopping online, initially available on the Pro subscription plan.

Tipex | A goto styled text editor for SvelteKit; based on TipTap;

Yek | A fast tool to read text-based files in a repository or directory, chunk them, and serialize them for LLM consumption.

Kronotop | Kronotop is a Redis-compatible, distributed and transactional document database backed by FoundationDB.

Software Engineering's Tectonic Shift
AI transforms software engineering, redefining the profession. Many industry professionals debate whether AI will augment or replace developers, but the real story is how it's already changing the nature of software engineering, particularly with the rise of specialisation and automation, making some traditional roles obsolete.

Tiktok Refugees Flock To Chinese Apps
After TikTok's US ban scare, users turned to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese lifestyle e-commerce and social media platform, and Lemon8, another ByteDance product, for similar algorithm-driven experiences, highlighting China's dominance in social commerce. An analysis of why Chinese social media apps fare better.

Logrocket Design Insights
Explore the latest UX design trends and best practices, including bento grids, tones of voice, response bias, and competitive analysis, with expert insights and step-by-step guides from LogRocket.