Alex Dobrenko

🤖📈 Adding AI to your platform has become the hottest new craze in Silicon Valley. Everyone from Google to Microsoft to even Amazon (w/ AWS) are all doing it. Well, almost everyone. Notably absent from the headlines has been one of the most innovative companies in the world: Apple.

☝️ David Anderson, a regular visitor at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park, recently discovered a 3.29-carat brown diamond that’s the largest such discovery in nearly two years.

🥪 Every day, ~50% of America eats a sandwich. And according to nutritionists that’s… not exactly great.

☝️ NASA on Tuesday shared this image from the James Webb Space Telescope that shows a star ~30 times larger than our Sun going through a rare phase called Wolf-Rayet, which involves a final burst of activity before a huge star begins to die.

🤖📈 GPT-4, the newest version of the large language model, was released yesterday by OpenAI. And if GPT-3.5 (the old version) was a Motorola Razr flip-phone, the new GPT-4 would be an iPhone 15

☝️ Florida’s southwest coast is currently experiencing a flare-up of toxic red tide algae, which has led to residents complaining of burning eyes and breathing problems, along with hundreds of dead fish washed up on beaches.

💗🍄 Season 1 of The Last of Us ended on Sunday, with its final episode attracting a series-high 8.2 million viewers on HBOMax. And the fungus isn’t the only thing spreading among us: that’s up ~75% from the 4.7 million who watched the series premiere in January.

☝️ You’re looking at a rare weather phenomenon called “ice pancakes,” which were recently spotted on the River Bladnoch in Scotland after unusually cold temperatures across the entire UK.

🏆🍿 Everything Everywhere All At Once made history last night, becoming the first film featuring a romance between two people with hot-dog fingers to win Best Picture. It ended the night with seven total Oscars.

☝️ A new monument honoring famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman was unveiled on Thursday by the city of Newark, NJ, where Tubman reportedly passed runaway enslaved people as part of the Underground Railroad.

☝️ Millions of residents gathered across India this week to celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of love and colors, which also marks the beginning of spring.

🎤🎬 Imagine Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory – except instead of candy, it's full of all the weirdest new tech, film, music, and comedy that you can’t get anywhere else. That, in a nutshell, is the South by Southwest festival.

🎶📱 Yesterday, Spotify announced a significant redesign of its app – and it’s giving TikTok vibes.

☝️ You’re looking at the oldest known reference to the Norse god Odin, which was recently discovered on part of a gold disc unearthed in western Denmark.

☝️ You’re looking at the first-ever image to show sun rays on Mars in high quality (top), as well as an iridescent cloud high in the sky above the red planet (bottom); both images were recently captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

📰🎲 Last week, the Washington Post released On the Record, a trivia game that asks users one quote-based question per day; the launch comes less than a year after the viral rise of Wordle, which WaPo’s new game is hoping to emulate.

☝️ Rapper Lil Wayne recently sold his 10,600-square-foot Miami beach home for just over $22.5 million; the house features seven bedrooms, a home theater, and 110 feet of water frontage.

📹🌐 The January 2023 Global Internet Phenomena Report from intelligence firm Sandive was just released, and there’s one major takeaway: video is king.

🥊 Creed III dominated the US box office this weekend, grossing $58.6 million in ticket sales, a record-high for the nine-film Rocky franchise. It’s also one of the highest sports film openings of all time. But this triumph all started in 1976.

☝️ Nearly half a million Americans from Kentucky to Michigan were without power last night due to an ongoing winter storm that’s killed at least 13 people so far.