Know what's happening in the tech world

Mar 24, 2022

Google to pilot third party billing options with Spotify

TL;DR

Spotify can now add its own billing system along with PlayStore’s billing option.
What’s the big deal?
1. Google has been criticized in the past for its monopoly and charging 30% commission.
2. South Korea had ordered Google to allow alternate payment options.
3. Allowing third party billing systems is a significant change from its existing way of operating.

Mozilla announced its vision for web

TL;DR (key points)

Protect user privacy: What people do should remain private and not be subject to surveillance.
Give users the power to experience the Web on their own terms: Ensure that users, not sites, control their experience, whether that means blocking ads or viewing content in accessible form.
Provide a first-class experience for non-English-speakers

John Roach, pioneer of personal computers dies

Back in the 70s, when small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, Roach convinced his company Tandy to launch personal computers. He had then hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write software for personal and home purposes.

Web3

Concept talk

Play2Earn (P2E) Players can earn cryptocurrency by playing games. They get rewarded when they win battles, complete quests etc.

Such projects are called GameFi, combination of gaming and decentralised finance (DeFi).

Argentines prefer “play-to-earn” crypto games over normal jobs amid record inflation. Argentia is accounting for 25% of users in P2E platforms. Users of several Latin American Companies are venturing into it due to their unstable currencies.

AI/ML

Microsoft breakthrough in language translation models

Translation models typically use billions of parameters. Managing them and deploying them in production is challenging.

Z-code models utilize a new architecture called Mixture of Experts (MoE), where different parts of the models can learn different tasks.
The models learn to translate between multiple languages at the same time.
The Z-code MoE model utilizes more parameters while dynamically selecting which parameters to use for a given input.
At runtime, the model uses the relevant experts for the task, which is more computationally efficient than utilizing all model’s parameters.