Good morning! NVIDIA has unveiled Nemotron-4 340B, a groundbreaking large language model designed to address the growing challenge of data scarcity in AI development. In other news, Oracle has decided to shut down its advertising business due to declining revenues and increased privacy concerns in the digital advertising landscape. Meanwhile, a former Microsoft security employee has revealed a significant security vulnerability that the company allegedly ignored, leading to the massive SolarWinds hack and raising questions about prioritizing profits over security.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

NVIDIA Unveils Nemotron-4 340B

LLMs are beasts when it comes to data, and real-world info is getting harder to come by. NVIDIA saw this coming and came out with the Nemotron-4 340B to tackle the problem.

What's it all about?: Well, it's a bunch of open models working together to make high-quality fake data. Think of it like a chef, sous chef, and taste tester all in one kitchen. They've learned from 9 trillion bits of text and can keep 4,000 words at once.

This LLM also speaks over 50 everyday languages and gets 40+ coding languages. Plus, NVIDIA's made it super easy for businesses to use with a friendly license.

Now, let's talk performance:

• The reward model is crushing it on the Hugging Face RewardBench - it's sitting pretty at #1.

• It goes toe-to-toe with GPT-4 and leaves others like Mixtral-8x22B, Claude-Sonnet, and Llama3-70B in the dust.

Why should you care? This lets coders make LLMs for specific jobs without needing a mountain of real-world data. It's like a shortcut to pushing AI forward in all kinds of fields.

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Oracle Shuts Down Ad Business

Oracle just pulled the plug on its advertising business. Why? Well, they were only pulling in $300 million this year, which might sound like a lot, but it's peanuts compared to the $2 billion they made back in the day.

What happened? A bunch of stuff, really:

• Privacy became a big deal.

• Facebook (sorry, "Meta") shut the door on third-party data after that whole Cambridge Analytica mess.

Oracle tried to keep up. They threw billions at buying ad tech companies like DataLogix and Moat. But in the end, it was like trying to plug a leaky dam with bubblegum.

Bottom line: privacy is king now, and the ad world needs to roll with the punches.

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Microsoft's Money-First Security Mistake Exposed in SolarWinds Hack

A former Microsoft security employee spilled the beans on a huge security hole the company knew about but didn't bother fixing. Why? They were too busy making more money. This mess-up led to the massive SolarWinds hack.

The weakness was hiding in something called Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). Basically, it let hackers whip up fake SAML tokens and waltz right past multi-factor login checks.

Here's what happend:

• Microsoft ignored warnings from their own people

• They shrugged off published demo hacks by researchers

• And they flat-out refused to fix the "Golden SAML" weakness

Why?: Well, the fix (turning off easy single sign-on) would've messed with their plans to land some sweet government contracts. Can't have that, right?

The problem was in how AD FS checks users across local and cloud setups. Hackers could break into local AD FS servers, cook up tokens that looked legit, and then access important cloud stuff without anyone noticing.

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🔥 More Notes

• Dave Burke retires as VP of Android engineering

• Announcing the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium

• People struggle to tell humans apart from ChatGPT in five-minute chat conversations, tests show

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