xAI's Grok 3 tops charts 🤖, Saudi megacity begins 🏙️, Rails in the browser 👨‍💻

TLDR 2025-02-18

Feb 18, 2025

Elon Musk's xAI releases its latest flagship model, Grok 3 (5 minute read)

xAI has released Grok 3 and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps. The company used an enormous data center in Memphis that contained around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. Grok 3 is a family of models: Grok 3 mini responds to questions more quickly but at the cost of some accuracy; Grok 3, which beats GPT-4o on some benchmarks; Grok 3 Reasoning, which surpasses the best investigation of o3-mini on several popular benchmarks; and Grok 3 mini Reasoning. Subscribers to X's Premium+ tier will be first to get access to Grok 3.

iPhone 17 design will be dramatically different, says leaker (2 minute read)

A new leak claims that the iPhone 17 Air will have its cameras arranged in a horizontal bar. The iPhone 17 Pro models will use a larger but still horizontal bar. Along with the new camera layout, it's been reported that the iPhone 17 Pro will return to having curved sides. It is unclear how reliable or accurate the rumors are, but the leaker has been accurate about camera details before.

🚀Science & Futuristic Technology

First 1.5-mile stretch of Saudi's audacious Line megacity begins to rise (2 minute read)

Construction has begun on the first phase of the Line, Saudi Arabia's planned 170-kilometer-long megacity in the desert. The first phase, which will stretch 2.5 kilometers, will be named Hidden Marina. It will be made up of three individual modular segments measuring 21 million square meters. Hidden Marina will host an initial population of around 200,000 residents. It will have 80,000 residential units, 9,000 hotel rooms, commercial and retail spaces, fire stations, schools, police and security services, and other amenities. Residents will have access to all daily essentials within a five-minute walk and high-speed rail will provide transit around the metropolis.

Researchers are training AI to interpret animal emotions (1 minute read)

Several teams around the world are working on AI systems to help humans understand animals. A group at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland's Rural College have developed a system called Intellipig that examines photos of pigs' faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress, and a team at the University of Haifa is training AI to identify signs of discomfort in dogs' faces. These systems still rely on humans to do the initial work of identifying the meanings of different behaviors.

💻Programming, Design & Data Science

Ruby on Rails on WebAssembly, the full-stack in-browser journey (19 minute read)

WebAssembly allows server-side frameworks to run locally, blurring the boundaries of classic web development and opening up exciting new possibilities. This post walks readers through how to create a Rails application that runs fully in your browser. It covers how to bring Rails into the browser in 15 minutes, the behind-the-scenes of Rails wasmification, and the future of Rails and Wasm.

Debugging An Undebuggable App (31 minute read)

This article discusses how to debug an app with anti-debugging protections that blocked debuggers from being attached, caused an exit when any code was injected, and crashed the whole phone when run with jailbreak on. It walks through the steps of how to attach a debugger, bypass jailbreak detection, and inject code. The article is detailed and contains a lot of screenshots, logs, and code.

🎁Miscellaneous

My Time at MIT (2 minute read)

Murat Demirbas, a principal research scientist at MongoDB Research, spent a year at MIT's Computer Science department as a postdoc twenty years ago. This post details his experience working with Professor Nancy Lynch. Demirbas was young and he felt like he didn't make as much of the experience as he could have. The post includes lessons learned from the experience.

I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check (6 minute read)

Grok 3 has an around state-of-the-art thinking model that is able to solve some advanced questions. It is likely somewhere around o1-pro in terms of capability and ahead of DeepSeek-R1. DeepSearch can produce high quality responses to various research- or lookup-type questions, but it can still hallucinate information - even URLs. Overall, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models, and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.

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