Welcome to Rami’s Readings #156 - 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, Product Byte, The VC Corner and from the AI in Action Conference in Montréal. 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.
🤖 AI Reads
Introducing Beam: Reflection’s 501B Open-Weight Model
Notes: An open-weight frontier model competitive with GLM 5.2 and Qwen 3.8-Max from a US-based lab. Nvidia is looking to buy them.
Liquid AI: Announcing d1 With Vision
Notes: A multimodal decision model is interesting.
vLLM Semantic Router: Introducing Decision 1.0: Open Decision Foundation Models
Notes: More decision models.
perplexity-ai / pplx-decider-v1.1-27b
Notes: Yet another decision model.
Andreessen Horowitz Backs Jev Maker at $7.5 Billion Value
Notes: What’s the moat?
EmbeddingGemma 2: An Open, Lightweight Multimodal Embedding Model
Notes: The sequel to the first EmbeddingGemma which does very well.
💼 Business Reads
Canadian Investor, Philanthropist Stephen Jarislowsky Dies at Age 101
Notes: An important pillar of the Montréal finance community has passed away.
France’s Bond Turmoil Raises the Specter of Contagion in Europe
Notes: Hmmm… not good. See #154.
France’s Debt Is Riskier Than 38% of Nation’s Company Bonds
Notes: The last time a US company traded cheaper than US Treasuries was Microsoft for a very brief period.
🔀 Other Reads
Why Do We Steal Things From Restaurants?
Notes: Is there any research showing a decline in the prevalence of this behavior since smartphones and Instagram?
China’s Young People Are Turning to an 84-Year-Old Cambridge Professor
Notes: Fascinating!
Signing off from Redmond, WA.