Rami's Readings #117 - Flounder Mode
The latest on AI, LLMs, ERNIE 4.5, TTS, AI in India, Flounder Mode, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #117 - 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 recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Global Fintech Insider, and The VC Corner. 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
The newsletter is a tad shorter due to the holiday week. Wishing you a Happy Canada Day & Happy Fourth of July!
🤖 AI Reads
Baidu Released ERNIE 4.5 (Technical Report)
Notes: Baidu released the ERNIE 4.5 family of models. Natively multimodal, many different sizes and some with thinking mode available. Available on HuggingFace.
Kyutai TTS: A Text-to-Speech Optimized for Real-Time Usage
Notes: Supports English and French. Pretty impressive performance. I find it particularly interesting that their backend is also developed in Rust. More evidence of the swing back to native code.
Inside India’s Scramble for AI Independence
Notes: Interesting perspective on the challenges faced by Indian AI startups.
🔀 Other Reads
Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a Different Way to Do Great Work
Notes: An alternative to the often overhyped hustle culture in startups. Kevin Kelly’s influence on technology is remarkable, spanning numerous projects, including founding Wired magazine. Techies, you don’t have to become billionaires.
Hundreds of Brother Printer Models Have an Unpatchable Security Flaw
Notes: In case you didn’t know, your Brother printer includes a web admin interface powered by an embedded HTTP server. If you haven’t already, please change the default admin password.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.