🤔 OpenAI Exodus

Hey everybody.

Last week I asked you guys which IDE you use the most (you can find the answers towards the end of this newsletter).

Today we’ll look at the exodus of staff from OpenAI, a blog post with really practical AI use cases whilst coding, plus a bunch of other cool blogs.

AI

John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, announced on X Monday that he's leaving the Microsoft-backed company to join Anthropic, an AI startup funded by Amazon.

This move follows OpenAI's decision to disband their superalignment team, which aimed to ensure AI systems remained controllable even as they surpassed human capabilities.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and competes in developing top-tier generative AI models. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 took the spotlight earlier in the summer after surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-4o in many benchmarks. However, OpenAI still owns the lion's share of the market.

Additionally, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, will take an extended leave until the end of the year to "relax and recharge.".

With Schulman's exit, only three of OpenAI's 11 original founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba, head of language and code generation.

Development
How to Use AI
Nicholas Carlini recently posted a blog titled "How I Use 'AI,'" where he discusses his perspective on large language models. He doesn't believe that these models are over-hyped, acknowledging that while new technologies attract grifters and buzzwords like "Using AI" are often overused, the advancements in AI are genuine.

Over the past year, Nicholas has spent several hours weekly interacting with various large language models, consistently impressed by their ability to tackle increasingly difficult tasks. This has made him at least 50% faster at writing code for both his research and side projects. He categorizes their utility into two main areas: helping him learn and automating boring tasks.

Learning with AI allows him to tackle challenges he previously found difficult, while automation frees him to focus on solving hard problems.

This blog post is insightful, providing practical examples of how AI can be used in your daily workflow.

Quick Links

📆 How I program in 2024
Kartik Agaram, principal engineer at Rec Room, shares his current insights on programming durable things.

📕 Jailbreak your Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor
Adhityaa jailbroke his Kindle to use it as an e-ink reader.

🧠 I Finally Tried The AI-Powered VS Code Killer
Dohyun Kim gave a really great review of the IDE called Cursor, which has gained a ton of popularity recently, with some calling it the VS Code killer. He praised how seamlessly AI models have been integrated into the experience and showcased some real-life examples.

🕷️ How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process 
Understanding how search engines crawl, render, and index web pages is crucial for optimizing sites for search engines. It’s tough to keep track of what works and doesn’t—especially with client-side JavaScript.

📹️ Meta introduces Segment Anything Model 2 
Meta has released the Meta Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), a segmentation model that enables fast, precise selection of any object in videos or images.

🦾 How to build extremely quickly

The results of the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey have been released. After reviewing the data, much of it aligns with previous trends.

Rust remains a favorite among developers, while Python and JavaScript continue to dominate in popularity. As expected, developers in the US tend to earn higher salaries.

However, some of you have asked for my perspective. In this video, I'll highlight five key findings from the survey that I believe are particularly insightful.

Also, in the video I mention the FREE 2024 tech market report. Since you’re already subscribed. You can find it here. Enjoy!

Today’s Poll

Last Weeks Result (No Surprise!)

Which IDE do you use most?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔵 VS Code
🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔷 IntelliJ IDEA
🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🟡 Atom
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔴 Sublime Text
🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🟢 PyCharm
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔶 Xcode
🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⚫ Vim
🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📓 Jupyter Notebook
🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📝 Notepad ++
🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🖊️ Other (write-in)

M.T: Clion
D.M: Jupyter Notebook for prototyping; Spyder if i know clearly what I like.
S.M: Visual Studio

Until next week,

Travis.