Rami's Readings #129 - 5,426 Data Centers
The latest on AI, LLMs, EmbeddingGemma, SOTA TTS, DeepResearch, DGX Spark, US Data centers, Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, LM8560, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #129 - 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
EmbeddingGemma: The Best-in-Class Open Model for On-Device Embeddings
Notes: I missed this release while I was away. There is a paper on ArXiv too. Available on Ollama.
Meet EuroLLM
Notes: Open source LLM trained to perform well on all the official EU languages (24). Reminds me of the Swiss National LLM a few weeks ago.
Cartesia Released Sonic 3 & Raised $100M
Notes: State-of-the-art TTS startup, the model is based on SSM and not Transformers. See the LinkedIn post from the founder.
Tongyi DeepResearch
Notes: Deeply researched and interesting paper. Haha!
Reasoning Models Reason Well, Until They Don’t
Notes: From University of Washington. Yay Seattle!
DGX Spark and Mac Mini for Local PyTorch Development
Notes: From Sebastian Raschka. If it wasn’t for CUDA, the DGX Spark would be a hard sell compared to the M4 chip.
💼 Business Reads
5,426 Data Centers in the US
Notes: This chart blew my mind. It’s not even a competition.
How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise
Notes: More reporting on the complex deals being made. Previously covered in the newsletter.
Some Simple Economics of AI and Macro Cycles
Notes: From Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution).
So without the AI boom yes we would have had a lower gdp growth number, but by no means do those resources just disappear. We also would have lower expected returns from the alternate resource allocations and lower risk.
How Silicon Valley Enshittified the Internet
Notes: A podcast with Cory Doctorow that forces reflection.
🔀 Other Reads
LM8560, the Eternal Chip from the 1980s
Notes: A fantastic read! I was surprised to realize I can still decipher circuit diagrams even though I studied them over a decade ago. I still have a few old alarm clocks at my mother’s that run on this chip, complete with the classic red LED display. These days, my go-to is the Philips SmartSleep, which recently became my wife’s favorite too, the soft amber-red light doesn’t wake the baby (or me). AND you don’t need a damn app to program it despite all the features.
uv Is the Best Thing to Happen to the Python Ecosystem in a Decade
Notes: I agree 100%. I switched entirely to uv.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.