#77 (TECH) “ Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse” — Meta’s Decentralized Social Network, Discord’s AI Experiences, and MIT’s X-Ray Vision AR Headset”
- First up – Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent lenders in the world of technology start-ups collapsed on friday forcing the federal government to step in.
- Our second story – Meta plans to build a text-based decentralized social network.
- Our third story – Discord has just joined the AI frenzy and is launching a set of new AI experiences to a number of servers.
- For our fourth and final story – MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision.
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What’s going on everyone?! Welcome to the LEO podcast Tech episode, where we explore the world of technology and innovation. I’m your host, Kevin Muñoz, and in these episodes, we dive deep into the latest trends and advancements in the tech industry. From new gadgets and cutting-edge software to the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we’ll cover it all. Join us as we share insights, and uncover the stories behind some of the most exciting developments in technology today. So sit back, relax, and get ready for an informative and engaging episode of the LEO podcast.
With technology advancing at an unprecedented pace, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest trends and developments. In this podcast, we’ve got you covered! We’ve handpicked four top stories from the world of technology that you won’t want to miss. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a professional in the industry, or simply someone who wants to stay up-to-date, join us as we dive into these exciting updates and explore the implications they may have for the future. So, without further ado, let’s jump right into the world of tech!
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Article 1:Silicon Valley Bank fails to find buyer as run on bank outpaced sale process
For our first story, Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent lenders in the world of technology start-ups collapsed on friday forcing the federal government to step in. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced that it would take over Silicon Valley Bank, a 40-year-old institution based in Santa Clara, Calif. This is the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history and the largest since the financial crisis of 2008. The move put nearly $175 billion in customer deposits under the regulator’s control.
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure came two days after its emergency moves to handle withdrawal requests and a precipitous decline in the value of its investment holdings shocked Wall Street and depositors, sending its stock careening. While the woes facing Silicon Valley Bank are unique to it, a financial contagion appeared to spread through parts of the banking sector, prompting Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to publicly reassure investors that the banking system was resilient.
The biggest banks operate in a vastly different world, as their capital requirements are more stringent, and they have far broader deposit bases than banks like Silicon Valley, which do not attract masses of retail customers. Regulators have also tried to keep the big banks from focusing too heavily on a single area of business, and they have largely stayed away from riskier assets like cryptocurrencies.
Silicon Valley Bank’s downward spiral accelerated with incredible speed recently, but its troubles have been brewing for more than a year. The bank had long been a go-to lender for start-ups and their executives. It kept a fraction of the deposits on hand and invested the rest with the hope of earning a return. In particular, the bank put a large share of customer deposits into long-dated Treasury bonds and mortgage bonds which promised modest, steady returns when interest rates were low. But it bought huge amounts of bonds just before the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates a little more than a year ago, then failed to make provisions for the possibility that interest rates would rise very quickly.
To pay those redemption requests, Silicon Valley Bank sold off some of its investments. In its surprise disclosure last Wednesday, the bank admitted that it had lost nearly $2 billion when it was all but forced to sell some of its holdings.
Although this is not expected to touch off fears of widespread destruction in the financial industry or the global economy, Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse raises serious concerns about the stability of the banking sector.
Article 2: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
For our second story, Meta plans to build a text-based decentralized social network. The company is in the early stages of building a dedicated app, codenamed P92, for people to post text-based updates. According to the company, the app is a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. Meta plans for the network to be decentralized, and individual users will typically be able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated.
In addition, building a decentralized network could let Meta experiment with an app that pushes back on standard criticisms of Facebook and Instagram. Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.
Furthermore, making its network interoperable with others could help Meta as it faces ongoing scrutiny over whether it has maintained its market power through anti-competitive acquisitions. However, no one has yet built a profitable, global-scale decentralized network. Among the challenges for developers is that basic social-network functions like following users become complicated when accounts are located across a vast network of servers.
Despite the challenges, Meta’s exploration is exciting, especially considering Twitter’s revenue is collapsing, and the site itself is going down for hours now on a regular basis. Other platforms are sensing the opportunity, and a decentralized social network with top-notch design and user experience, functional trust and safety team, and Meta’s skilled growth hackers could disrupt Elon Musk’s ailing, brittle network.
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For our third story, Discord has just joined the AI frenzy and is launching a set of new AI experiences to a number of servers. Let’s dive into the details.
Discord is updating its Clyde bot with OpenAI ChatGPT technology, which will allow users to have extended conversations with the bot. According to Discord’s blog post, you can type @Clyde in a server to chat with Clyde in any channel, and ask Clyde to start a thread for a group of your friends to hang out. Clyde can recommend playlists and access GIFs and emojis just like any Discord user. The company is testing and iterating the product and believes that it will become a fundamental part of the Discord experience.
Discord is also updating its AutoMod moderation tool to harness the power of large language models. AutoMod now uses OpenAI technology to find and alert moderators whenever server rules may have been broken while being aware of the context of a conversation. The AutoMod AI experiment begins in a limited number of servers today. The company says that since introducing AutoMod last year, the tool has automatically blocked more than 45 million unwanted messages from servers before they even had a chance to be posted based on server rules.
Discord is also launching AI-generated conversation summaries. This new feature is designed to bundle streams of messages into topics so users can quickly catch up or join in on topics they’re interested in. Some users will start to see a new panel on the right side of their screen that will outline topics that have been discussed. Conversation summaries can be enabled in Server Settings and will be rolling out to a limited number of servers starting next.
In addition to these three new AI experiences, Discord shared that it’s open sourcing Avatar Remix, an app that lets users remix each others’ avatars through generative image models. The company is also exploring a shared visual space to collaborate with friends and colleagues that includes an AI-powered text-to-image generator users can experiment with together.
Discord also announced that it’s launching an AI incubator and dedicating resources to developers who want to build AI on Discord. The incubator is launching as part of Discord’s $5 million commitment to funding developers and startups to bring their expertise to the platform. Participants will get access to cash grants, office hours with Discord development teams, and early access to Discord platform features.
Since its launch a few months ago, Open AI’s ChatGPT has dominated the internet and become increasingly popular, which has led to AI becoming an increasingly trending topic over the past few months. As a result, it’s not surprising that Discord is adding an AI chatbot to its own messaging platform. Discord isn’t the only platform that has added new AI features, as Snapchat and Slack recently integrated ChatGPT-like features into their products as well.
Article 4: X-Ray Vision: MIT’s Augmented Reality Headset Enables You To See Hidden Objects
For our fourth and final story of the day, MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. This invention combines computer vision with wireless sensing to enable users to see hidden items. In this way, it can guide users toward these items for retrieval, even if they are in boxes or around corners. This new technology has many applications in various fields such as retail, warehousing, manufacturing, and smart homes.
The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed X-AR with the goal of building an augmented reality system that allows people to see things that are invisible, thus truly allowing you to see the physical world in ways that were not possible before.
To create this headset, the researchers first had to outfit an existing headset with an antenna that could communicate with RFID-tagged items. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals that can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna.
The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset verifies that they have picked up the correct object.
When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy.
X-AR has many potential applications. For instance, it could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.
THE END
That’s all for today on the LEO podcast. I’m Kevin Muñoz and as always feel free to send me a voicemail through my website latinamerianeo.org simply click the purple “send voicemail” popup and record your thoughts or any interesting topic that you’d like to see covered and I might just feature it on the next episode!
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Otherwise, I’ll see you all in next week’s episode!
Sources:
Article 1: Silicon Valley Bank fails to find buyer as run on bank outpaced sale process
Article 2: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
Article 4: X-Ray Vision: MIT’s Augmented Reality Headset Enables You To See Hidden Objects
