Reddit 🤝 Wall Street

Happy Friday! How did your week go? I hope you hit those goals and, for the last time this week…

Here’s some news: 

💰 Reddit filed to go public and is inviting its most active members to invest. 

💬 Bluesky has opened up federation — allowing anyone to run a server. 

🌑 We’re back on the moon after the first commercial moon landing was a success.

🖼️ Stability AI has launched Stable Diffusion 3, its most powerful image generator yet. 

Google is going the route of open AI. No, not that OpenAI, I mean open-source AI. The tech giant just launched a pair of sister models to its flagship AI Gemini, called Gemma.

Gemma comes in two sizes — Gemma 2B (2 billion parameters) and Gemma 7B (7 billion parameters), which both ship with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants and are built from the same research that informed Gemini’s development.

According to the announcement, Gemma isn’t meant to replace Gemini, Google’s competitor to GPT-4. Rather, they are designed to be lightweight alternatives suitable for more remedial tasks like chatbots and text summaries. 

Don’t balk at the thought of a more lightweight AI just yet, though. What Gemma lacks in size, it makes up for it in speed and accessibility. The company states that “Gemma 2B and 7B achieve best-in-class performance for their sizes compared to other open models,” and they can even be run directly on your laptop using Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Google’s Vertex AI. 

Why it matters: While developers can build on Gemini through APIs, Gemma is open-sourced, meaning developers have more freedom to experiment with the same research that informed the company’s flagship product and even contribute to its direction. 

Of course, this comes with its own concerns as open models are harder to place guardrails on, so Gemma ships with “responsible AI toolkits,” and the models went under extensive testing by “red-teamers” — experts in things like misinformation, hate content, and bias. 

Developers can use Gemma for free on Kaggle, and first-time Google Cloud users will receive $300 in credits to use the models. In the meantime, I’m placing a bet that the next Google AI will be named Gary. 

Reddit finally filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on Thursday, informing the department of its finances and business goals ahead of its heavily rumored initial public offering (IPO). Reddit’s desire to go public isn’t exactly a well-kept secret, and after months of speculation, it looks like the company might finally ring the Wall Street bell as early as March. 

In an unexpected move, Reddit is giving an unspecified number of its active members, like moderators and users with high karma scores, the opportunity to invest in the company’s IPO. That’s something usually saved for high-profile investors who get to purchase stock at a lower price before the big day.

• Dotsy Petcare is an app to help you raise a happy and healthy pet. 
• SuperSquad keeps you accountable by attaching cash to your goals.
• Mindr for Vision Pro places glanceable reminders in your new AR world.

• Wing Playground lets you write, text, and visualize your cloud applications. 
• API Switch teaches you development in a messenger-like interface. 
• Palisade helps make sure your emails land in the inbox, not spam.