Rami's Readings #128 - DeepSeek-OCR 🤯
The latest on AI, LLMs, DeepSeek-OCR, olmOCR 2, Sphere Computers, AWS Outage, Data-Driven VC, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #128 - 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, Life in Conversation with Salmi, Product Byte, 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
DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression
Notes: Another excellent 🤯 paper from DeepSeek. I don’t know how far this research path will go, but in short, this paper shows how ‘visual tokens’ can be used to compress text tokens at a higher rate while maintaining comparable performance on a number of tasks. The Reddit thread is a great read too.
olmOCR 2: Unit Test Rewards for Document OCR
Notes: Writing of OCR models, Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) just released an update to their olmOCR model. It does best DeepSeek-OCR on their benchmark, while also having open model weights, training data, training code, inference code, and model license. Just goodness for the world.
Lookahead Routing for Large Language Models
Notes: This is an excellent paper with immediate application for high-scale AI systems that rely on multiple models.
💼 Business Reads
Go Computer Now! – The Story of Sphere Computers
Notes: I love reading business non-fiction books and I have never heard this story about Sphere Computers. I backed the project on Kickstarter.
The Peter Principle and Exploiting Overconfident Workers
Notes: Interesting paper on the Peter Principle, from MR.
What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet
Notes: It’s always DNS or BGP routing. The HackerNews thread is very informative.
Data-Driven Investors
Notes: Interesting paper about how data influences startup financing.
🔀 Other Reads
Scripts I Wrote That I Use All the Time
Notes: This is a great collection of small scripts. I used to have a complicated collection of dotfiles (with vim plugins and all kinds of goodies), but it fell by the wayside once I had to go back to full-time development on a Windows machine about 10 years ago. Although with WSL2, I should probably resurrect it again and open source it. Chezmoi looks pretty neat!
Signing off from Redmond, WA.