Rami's Readings #119 - Mistral Released Voxtral ⭐
The latest on AI, LLMs, Mistral, LLM-as-a-Judge, MCP, Jane Street, Apple EarPods, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #119 - 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
🤖 AI Reads
One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge
Notes: Yikes. This paper presses pause on an assumption I constantly overhear: human annotation is no longer necessary.
Despite the seeming simplicity of this comparison task, we find that generative reward models exhibit surprising vulnerabilities to superficial manipulations: non-word symbols (e.g., ":" or ".") or reasoning openers like "Thought process:" and "Let's solve this problem step by step." can often lead to false positive rewards.
Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance
Notes: From Chroma. Yep…
Energy-Based Transformers are Scalable Learners and Thinkers
Notes: Really interesting paper from UVA, UIUC, Amazon GenAI, Stanford and Harvard.
EBTs are the first instance of an approach that scales at a faster rate than the Transformer++ during pretraining across both continuous and discrete modalities.
Voxtral: Mistral’s Speech Understanding Model ⭐
Notes: Outperforms Whisper v3 (which is already incredible).
Agentic-R1: Distilled Dual-Strategy Reasoning
Notes: From CMU.
The Lethal Trifecta for AI Agents: Private Data, Untrusted Content, and External Communication
Notes: Simon Wilson is just always on point.
As a user of these systems you need to understand this issue. The LLM vendors are not going to save us! We need to avoid the lethal trifecta combination of tools ourselves to stay safe.
Universal Tool Calling Protocol (UTCP)
Notes: GitHub. UTCP vs MCP comparison.
trymirai / uzu: A High-Performance Inference Engine for AI Models
Notes: Designed only for Apple Silicon.
💼 Business Reads
Ambani’s Jio Agrees to Reinsurance Venture With Allianz in India
Notes: Huh…
Jane Street’s Trading Secrets Spill Into Open and Face Rivals’ Scrutiny
Notes: Wild.
🔀 Other Reads
cppyy: Automatic Python-C++ bindings
Notes: Cool project! But I do wonder how debuggable this setup is… ah, there it is. 😂
Canadian Cross
Notes: Not what you think it is. 😂 But on trend with the Canadianism dictionary I shared last week.
Why I Love My Apple EarPods
Notes: I guess I’m not alone in preferring wired audio, especially when it comes to lossless quality. See #106 and #108.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.