Saturday Links: Google Gets a Hug, Revolutionary Rabbit, and Apple's Malicious Compliance

Steven Willmott

Jan 27, 2024 • 2 min read

The week got away from me again, so we're one day late with these. Hopefully, they will still add something to your weekend:

Hugging Face and Google partner for open AI collaboration. Hugging Face is the biggest model-sharing community, and this extension focuses on making it easier to build and run more models. For Google, getting more workloads built on the infrastructure is an obvious win. This seems unlikely to be exclusive, so we'll probably see similar things happening on other cloud infrastructures over time.
Jason Kalacanis Interviews Jesse Lyu (CEO and Founder of Rabbit.Tech): This is hands down the best interview I've seen with the team behind the Rabbit R1 device. Whether you are into new hardware or not, this is a really important listen packed full of important points about how to build AI-driven user experiences. One of the most important takeaways is that the Rabbit back-end servers contain a model trained to use the human AI of phone and Web apps, skipping API integrations entirely. This kind of change has many implications for app makers, Google and Apple + even for user identity.
Apple's EU Store Rules changing to permit side-loading: While this isn't specifically about AI and Apple is fighting change, new court rulings are forcing phone operating systems. These are the first cracks in the armor of app store supervision and gate-keeping and may say they don't go anywhere far enough. Apple is only maliciously complying. (To see a concrete example, see what a bind changing to Apple's specific implementation of new rules would leave Spotify in.) Still, the legal momentum is at least pointing to more openness.
Data Engineering in 2024 by Oz Katz: at the other end of the spectrum, a nice post at Datanami about what's likely to happen at the datalayer to support all these new AI driven applications.
A nice post on Ben's Bites on writing code using AI for non-technical people. This is a nice post on Ben's Bites on writing code using AI for nontechnical people: it's still hard to be truly productive, but you can see the outlines of the way the world will work. Small teams of domain specialists + AI + 1-2 people who can code. This potentially cuts out a lot of loops between product, engineering, and domain specialists.

Wishing you a great weekend!