Rami's Readings #111 - Anthropic & Mistral Releases 🚀
The latest on AI, LLMs, Anthropic, Mistral, MCP == Web 2.0, Stargate, Silence in Big Cities, Pocket App, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #111 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers
Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to a recommendation from The AI Ethics Brief. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.
📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack
🤖 AI Reads
Anthropic Released Claude 4
Notes: For developers, Claude Sonnet 4 achieved 72.7% on SWE-Bench - not a large improvement over Sonnet 3.7 (62.3%) and the input limit is still 200K (Gemini Pro is now at 1M). Simon Wilson has a great summary.
Mistral's Document AI
Notes: Mistral is building an impressive product for document OCR. They own the model and are developing an end-to-end pipeline, so continued improvements seem inevitable. Surprisingly, the document OCR market is larger and growing faster than I expected. While it feels like this market should eventually shrink as digitization becomes more widespread, it’s impossible to predict when. So I guess… In the meantime, why not make billions?
Mistral Introduces Devstral
Notes: Mistral’s take on an agentic LLM for coding. Released under the Apache 2.0 license.
MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0
Notes: As I remind everyone, MCP is just JSON-RPC with some conventions. What's exciting is how many web services are beginning to support it - effectively opening up closed websites to LLMs and developers. Time to party like it is 2004! (While it lasts.)
The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them.
EfficientLLM: Efficiency in Large Language Models
Notes: Excellent paper!
💼 Business Reads
UAE’s AI University Aims to Become Stanford of the Gulf
Notes: More from the UAE and AI.
In Big Cities, Peace and Quiet Is Becoming a Perk Worth Paying For
Notes: Sad, but true. The same problem exists with light pollution.
🔀 Other Reads
Mozilla Is Shutting Down Pocket
Notes: The end of an era. I loved Pocket. However, it always felt as though Mozilla underinvested in it despite the long-time loyal user base. I expected that LLMs would have powered all kinds of new features and improvements in Pocket, but alas not. If you are looking for an alternative, Readwise seems promising.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.