Meta's AI disaster 🤖, Shopify's leaked AI memo 📝, extinct dire wolf revived 🐺

An unsubstantiated rumor that Meta artificially boosted its Llama 4 benchmark results began circulating on X and Reddit over the weekend ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-04-08 ✂️ Cut your QA cycles down from hours to minutes (Sponsor) If slow QA processes and flaky tests are a bottleneck for your engineering team, you need QA Wolf. QA Wolf's AI-native platform supports both web and mobile apps, delivering 80% automated test coverage in weeks and helping teams ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles to minutes. With QA Wolf, you get: ✅ Unlimited parallel test runs ✅ 15-min QA cycles ✅ 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation ✅ Zero-flake guarantee The result? Drata's team of 80+ engineers saw 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles. No flakes, no delays, just better QA — that's QA Wolf. Schedule a demo to learn more 📱 Big Tech & Startups Meta exec denies the company artificially boosted Llama 4's benchmark scores (1 minute read) An unsubstantiated rumor that Meta artificially boosted its Llama 4 benchmark results began circulating on X and Reddit over the weekend. Meta's VP of generative AI Ahman Al-Dahle has denied the rumors, saying that Meta did not train its models on test sets. The rumor appears to have originated from a post on Chinese social media from a user claiming to have resigned from Meta in protest over the company's benchmarking practices. Researchers have observed stark differences in the behavior of the publicly downloadable models compared with the models hosted on LM Arena. OpenAI reportedly mulls buying Jony Ive and Sam Altman's AI hardware startup (1 minute read) OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to buy the company former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Ive is working with Altman on io Products, a startup that aims to build products 'less socially disruptive than the iPhone'. OpenAI may end up partnering with io Products instead of acquiring the startup. io Products currently has a small team that includes former Apple designers. It has reportedly been working on different concepts of AI-enabled devices. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close (13 minute read) Dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Scientists at Colossal Biosciences have bred gray-wolf pups that carry dire wolf genes. The three animals are currently living in captivity in the northern United States. The technology used to create them could potentially help revive other species and conserve species that have not yet gone extinct. Pictures of the dire wolf pups are available in the article. The 'World's Most Advanced Microchip' Has Been Unveiled (4 minute read) TSMC introduced a 2-nanometer chip on April 1, with mass production expected for the second half of the year. The chips represent a major step forward in performance and efficiency and could potentially reshape the technological landscape. They provide a 10% to 15% boost in computing speed at the same power level or a 20% to 30% reduction in power usage at the same speed as 3nm chips and increase transistor density by about 15%. The new chips enable devices to operate faster, consume electricity, and manage more complex tasks efficiently. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science The day I taught AI to think like a Senior Developer (5 minute read) AI IDEs don't actually understand codebases, they're just sophisticated autocomplete tools with good marketing. The difference becomes painfully obvious on any moderately complex project. The next generation of tools will build rich mental models from multiple perspectives, just like experienced developers do. This article discusses an approach to building an AI that understands where files should be logically placed, which patterns to follow, how to extend existing abstractions instead of creating new ones, and when to reuse code vs create new implementations. Browser MCP (Website) Browser MCP allows users to connect AI apps to their browsers to automate tasks. Automation happens locally on users' machines, resulting in better performance without network latency. Browser activity stays on-device and isn't sent to remote servers. Browser MCP uses existing browser profiles, keeping users logged into all of their services. It avoids CAPTCHAs by using real browser fingerprints. 🎁 Miscellaneous Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion (4 minute read) Large language models generate disproportionate benefit for regular people while their impact is more muted and lagging in corporations and governments. It is a major multiplier to individuals' power levels across a broad range of capabilities. Frontier-grade performance is very accessible and cheap - money can't buy a better ChatGPT. This is a unique situation in the history of technology - the future is already here, and it's shockingly distributed. Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify (4 minute read) Shopify now expects its staff to use AI. The prototype phase of any GSD project should now be dominated by AI exploration. Shopify is adding AI usage questions to its performance and peer review questionnaire to encourage staff to learn to prompt and load context. Teams must now demonstrate why they can't achieve their goals using AI before asking for more headcount and resources. ⚡ Quick Links Google Is Looking Out for #1. It's Time You Do, Too (10 minute read) Google's Store is taking more than double the AI overview real estate of its closest competitors - combined. Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends (Hacker News Thread) New graduates are advised to widen their job searches - while you might end up taking a job below what you expect, it will likely be temporary. Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs (4 minute read) Companies don't care about bugs as they're often too busy with competing priorities, bureaucratic inertia, and profit. Concierge: Talk to your apps with natural language (Sponsor) Wish AI could understand your context and take actions for you? Seamlessly connect your apps (Gmail, Slack, Notion, Jira, HubSpot, Linear, Asana, etc) and ask Concierge anything. Sign up for free. Trade, Tariffs, and Tech (20 minute read) A war in Taiwan would effectively remove China from global supply chains and destroy Taiwan's economic output - including chips from TSMC. OpenAI tests watermarking for ChatGPT-4o Image Generation model (2 minute read) OpenAI recently started testing watermarks for images generated using ChatGPT - ChatGPT Plus users are able to save images without the watermark. Microsoft's AI masterplan: Let OpenAI burn cash, then build on their successes (5 minute read) Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says that it's more cost-effective to trail frontier model builders by three to six months and build on their successes than to compete with them directly. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/c4b06755/ Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.