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Ohio, Quartz, and why ChatGPT sucks at math
Are we sitting on quartz? Who wants to go Ohio? And why does AI suck at basic math?
It’s October 24th… the 29th birthday of the definition of the ‘Internet’ (as defined by Federal Networking Council)! This is the last year of the Internet’s 20s, meaning that it will probably act out and hit the clubs a few more times before settling down. Thirty isn’t that bad, Internet. Just remember to moisturize regularly and get ready for your metabolism to take a nosedive.
In this edition:
📰 News Roundup - Helene devastates quartz mines, Microsoft’s new data center investment, ChatGPT’s math skills.
👨💻 Job Opportunities - Looking for work? There are positions open at the big two (Crowdstrike and McDonalds).
🛩 Industry Moves - Google, Oracle, and a big acquisition in the DevOps space.
💽 Data Upload - some of our favorite recent questions on Experts Exchange.
Without further ado, lets get to it:
📰 News Roundup
Hurricane Helene damages America’s most valuable quartz mines
Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in North Carolina, temporarily closing a crucial mine in Spruce Pine that is the primary source of high-purity quartz used in semiconductor production, according to Business Insider. Over 2ft of rain over 5 days caused the mines, owned by Sibelco and QuartzCorp (catchy name!), to shut down entirely and remain closed for the foreseeable future. This has global ramifications for the semiconductor industry which of course means fewer chips, which means supply chain issues. Which means for you and me: higher prices! Of quartz this would happen!
OpenAI is worth $157B…
After a brand new round of funding netted the ChatGPT makers an additional $6.6B in funding, the company is now worth $157B. The round of funding was led by Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital, and backed by Khosla Ventures, Fidelity Management, chip-maker Nvidia, Microsoft, and probably Skeletor, too, if we had to imagine the room. This new round of funding should prove especially beneficial for the company, who conveniently just restructured themselves from a non-profit to a very-very-very-much for-profit company. As we reported last week, the restructuring gave CEO and top Google search for “Estonian Hugh Grant” Sam Altman a sizable percentage of the company.
… and ChatGPT still can’t do math
You could pretty much stop the news article right there, but this is all happening as the world grapples with a simple, unassailable fact: ChatGPT isn’t as smart as this cabal of superrich would like us to believe.
A report by our buds over at TechCrunch says that ChatGPT — and most consumer-grade AI programs such as Claude, Gemini, and Llama — are really bad at math and don’t really know what numbers are. This is largely due to tokenization; a tokenizer (dumbing it down massively: a tokenizer is a little worker bee inside of AI) will actually have a favorite number, and just keep picking that one over and over again and finding ways to work it into things.
So, on one hand, $157B. On the other, a machine-brain that thinks numbers are people. The train may have left the station on “why is there so much money going here”, but we do kinda wonder where this train is going.
Microsoft invests $420M in Ohio data centers
What the Ohio lacks in good Mexican food (I’ve been there, and several people thought “Carne Asada” played shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds), it is about to make up for in data centers. Excitement in Ohio hasn’t been this palpable since someone found $20 in Hocking Hills State Park. Come, children! Come and see the data centers! Watch as 0’s and 1’s turn into even smaller 0’s and 1’s and get sent all the way to Dayton! The project will create (drum roll) 30 jobs (sad_trombone.wav) in the state, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
👨💻 Job Opportunities
Gitlab: Senior Fullstack Engineer (Ruby), Data Stores: Tenant Scale Github is looking for a Senior Fullstack Engineer. Fully remote, fully interesting, and fully career-advancing.
Instacart: Senior Staff Software Engineer, Ads Infrastructure & Systems If you want to work with cutting-edge distributed systems, data technologies, ML infrastructure, scalable designs, AND people delivering groceries, this job is for you.
Crowdstrike: Senior Engineer, Product Security Nobody likes breaches. Breaches get steaches. To combat the scourge of breaches, you could work security for security mavens Crowdstrike! That’s, like, double the security.
McDonalds: Chapter Lead, Digital Backend Burger impresarios McDonalds are looking for someone to lead their API software engineering team. An incredible job opportunity. Hold the pickles.
🛩 Industry Moves
Google spends $2.7B to rehire AI guru who quit Google
Is your name Noam Shazeer? If it is, you just got rehired by Google after quitting in anger and frustration with the tech behemoth back in 2021. Quick recap: Shazeer—who authored a seminal 2017 paper on AI called ‘Attention Is All You need’ that is widely regarded as kickstarting the current AI boom—quit after Google refused to release his techbaby, a chatbot generator named Character.AI. After the program sputtered after launch, Google bought Character.AI for a cool $2.7B… so long as Noam came back to work for Google. This is good news for Noams everywhere.
Oracle invests $6.5B into cloud technologies in Malaysia
The tech giant Oracle… well… yeah… the headline did a pretty good job explaining what happened already, didn’t it? Ah, well. The move comes soon after Amazon invested $6.2B in Malaysian cloud facilities in 2023. Oracle expects to make $100B in cold, hard profit by 2029 as the demand for AI and cloud computing grows.
Gearset acquires Clayton
If you know Salesforce, you probably know Gearset, who specialize in DevOps solutions for Salesforce. They just bought Clayton, who’s main product is a code analysis platform designed to be used in… you guessed it… Salesforce. Big news for “things buying things that are used within other things.” Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but you can bet your patoot that the numbers will be in Salesforce at some point.
💽 Data Upload
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