Feb 20 2025 67 mins 3
Welcome to the cozy corner of the tech world where ones and zeros mingle with casual chit-chat. DataTopics Unpluggedis your go-to spot for relaxed discussions on tech, news, data, and society.
This week, we’re unpacking everything from AI-powered vacations (or the lack thereof) to corporate drama, and even a deep dive into the quirks of COBOL. Join Morillo, Bart, and Alex as they navigate the latest happenings in data and tech, including:
- Airbnb AI: The CEO of Airbnb thinks AI trip planning is still a pipe dream. Is he right?
- Anthropic’s next AI model: A new Claude model could be just weeks away, promising a hybrid of deep reasoning and speed.
- OpenAI’s roadmap: Sam Altman lays out vague but ambitious plans, blurring the lines between AI models.
- Elon vs. OpenAI: Musk offers $97B for OpenAI, Altman claps back. Just another day in AI power struggles.
- RIP Viktor Antonov: The legendary art lead behind Half-Life 2 and Dishonored passes away at 52.
- Project Sid AI agents: 1,000 AI agents left to their own devices in Minecraft… What could go wrong?
- DeepSeek R1 breaks speed records: The latest AI model boasts a staggering 198 tokens per second.
- Perplexity’s Deep Research is now free: A game-changer for AI-powered search? We discuss.
- COBOL and the mystery of 1875-05-20: Why do old systems default to weird dates?
- Polars Cloud: A new distributed architecture to run Polars anywhere.
- Pickle AI avatars: Deepfake yourself into meetings. Ethical? Useful? Just plain weird?
- Vim after Bram: How the legendary text editor is surviving after its creator’s passing.
- Working Fast and Slow: A take on productivity, deep focus, and why some days just don’t work.
- We were wrong about GPUs: Fly.io admits they misjudged the demand for GPU-powered workloads.
