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Leveraging Diagon’s Expertise in Tesla’s Supply Chain to Boost Small Businesses

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It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla factories that Will Drewery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers procure equipment. Companies in fields like automotive and aerospace can identify qualified suppliers from Diagon’s network of equipment suppliers, system integrators and service providers. East Coast originsThe journey to Diagon for Drewery, who spent most of his career as an equipment buyer, started in Pittsburgh. “This is why I felt the market needs a Diagon,” Drewery said. “Now we are developing tools that help customers find suppliers better or help them interpret and summarize quotes better,” Drewery said.

“Enterprises Embrace Open-Source Generative AI Tools: Intel and Beyond Take the Lead”

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The Linux Foundation today announced the launch of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), a project to foster the development of open, multi-provider and composable (i.e. modular) generative AI systems. Now, OPEA’s members are very clearly invested (and self-interested, for that matter) in building tooling for enterprise generative AI. Domino offers a suite of apps for building and auditing business-forward generative AI. And VMWare — oriented toward the infrastructure side of enterprise AI — last August rolled out new “private AI” compute products.

“Unlocking the Potential of Kubernetes Clusters with Loft Labs’ Virtualization Innovation”

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It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters. Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization, and has built a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications. Loft Labs lets users share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that VMs share server resources. “We’re essentially turning many clusters into one cluster, and then have virtual clusters on top of the common applications,” CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch. And the thing that we learned was the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in the cluster and how hard it is.

Valuation of ShareChat falls below $2B in latest round of funding

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Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market. It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round. Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said. Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms. ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.

“Embracing the Fediverse: Flipboard Expands its Connections with the Open Source Social Web”

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On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its fediverse integrations to 400 more Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself. In total, Flipboard says there are now over 11,000 curated Flipboard magazines available to federated social networking users. In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app. 4.3.25), Flipboard users will be able to see their new followers from the fediverse in their Flipboard Following tab, while their Flipboard notifications will now include fediverse reactions and conversations. The company had already begun curating content for fediverse users across a handful of “news desks” (dedicated fediverse accounts) that directed users to interesting articles and links across topics.

Revamping the reading experience with Nightside’s ambient lamp

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The $350 LED bedside lamp is an intentionally simple product. Our lamp provides significant value for its price, and this is the last bedside lamp I’ll ever need. Color Rendering Index (CRI) is a quantitative measure of how accurately a light source can reproduce the colors of various objects in comparison to a natural light source. Bringing the Nightside lamp to market wasn’t without its challenges. As the Nightside lamp continues to illuminate the lives of its users, Gupta’s story serves as an inspiration for aspiring product-makers.

“Collaborative Efforts: Open Source Foundations Unify to Establish Shared Standards for the EU’s Cybersecurity Resilience Act”

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Seven open source foundations are coming together to create common specifications and standards for Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), regulation adopted by the European Parliament last month. And this is what the seven open source foundations are coming together for now. By coming together as one, this should go some way toward treating open source software development as a single “thing” bound by the same standards and processes. Throw into the mix other proposed regulation, including the Securing Open Source Software Act in the U.S., and it’s clear that the various foundations and “open source stewards” will come under greater scrutiny for their role in the software supply chain. “The open source community and the broader software industry now share a common challenge: legislation has introduced an urgent need for cybersecurity process standards.

“Databricks’ $10M Investment in DBRX Failed to Surpass GPT-4’s Dominance in AI Generation”

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You could spend it training a generative AI model. See Databricks’ DBRX, a new generative AI model announced today akin to OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini. Customers can privately host DBRX using Databricks’ Model Serving offering, Rao suggested, or they can work with Databricks to deploy DBRX on the hardware of their choosing. It’s an easy way for customers to get started with the Databricks Mosaic AI generative AI tools. And plenty of generative AI models come closer to the commonly understood definition of open source than DBRX.

Generative AI Now Accessible to All Developers with Fireworks.ai Open Source API

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Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While lacking the brand name recognition of some of these other players, it boasts the largest open source model API with over 12,000 users, per the company. That kind of open source traction tends to attract investor attention, and the company has raised $25 million so far. “It can be either off the shelf, open source models or the models we tune or the models our customer can tune by themselves. Being an API, developers can plug it into their application, bring their model of choice trained on their data, and add generative AI capabilities like asking questions very quickly.

Open Source Startups Thrive on Rising Demand for AI and Data Infrastructure

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A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up. A broader look at the “top 50 trending” open source startups last year reveals that more than half (26) are related to AI and data infrastructure. This ethos often translates into commercial open source startups which might not have a traditional center of gravity anchored by a brick-and-mortar HQ. For comparative purposes, there are other indexes and lists out there that give a steer on the “whats hot” in the open source landscape. So the ROSS Index has emerged as a useful complementary tool for figuring out which open source “startups” specifically are worth keeping tabs on.