Rami's Readings #21
The latest on Quiet Luxury, Uncensored LLMs, Passkey Momentum, Out of Control Tipping, McGill & Canada Representation, Texas A&M ChatGPT Debacle, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #21 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, videos, Twitter threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering technology, business, culture, fashion, travel and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
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I spent most of the week playing with ChatGPT plugins since they rolled out of beta and are accessible to anyone. There are several valuable plugins, my favorite is Kayak. It would be best if you gave it a try to get a good feel for how helpful the plugins are. OpenAI released a dedicated iPhone app which is a slight improvement over their previously mobile-friendly site. Everything else of note:
🤖 AI Reads
The Quiet Luxury of Language
Notes: Fantastic read about quiet luxury, Succession, and the ultra-wealthy to argue points about the future of coded language.
I suspect that as machines become better at sounding like sophisticated humans, the most sophisticated humans will adopt even more nuanced, coded, and complex ways of speaking that are harder to imitate.
The cost of human cognition is not constant over the course of a 24 hour or 365 day period, which is an interesting observation given that we now have price models for non-human cognition which is partially substitutable *and varies in a frequently opposite fashion. From @patio11’s Twitter.
Uncensored and Open Source LLM on Hugging Face - WizardLM
Notes: Hmmm… how can this go wrong?
This is WizardLM trained with a subset of the dataset - responses that contained alignment / moralizing were removed. The intent is to train a WizardLM that doesn't have alignment built-in, so that alignment (of any sort) can be added separately with for example with a RLHF LoRA.
Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
Notes: Read the Hacker News comment threads, mainly because Hacker News is predominantly (or at least was) composed of Y Combinator grads (Sam Altman’s previous job).
Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedback
Notes: Fascinating paper detailing how LLMs can improve on their own in a negotiation game. Read it!
New AI Research Lets You Click and Drag Images to Manipulate Them
Notes: Lots of demos circulating on social media.
Professor Flunks All His Students After ChatGPT Falsely Claims It Wrote Their Papers
Notes: This is an egregious example of exactly what I feared would happen. Except, this is worse… using ChatGPT itself to detect AI-written works instead of a dedicated plagiarism tool. There is a lack of AI literacy everywhere that will only worsen. I covered this topic in multiple newsletters previously. Here is the original Reddit thread in case you hit the paywall.
💼 Business Reads
Ranking of Foreign Undergraduate Programs by the Number of US Unicorn Founders
Notes: McGill represent! The University of Waterloo and McGill University are underrated. I saw the BlackBerry movie recently, and it was a fun watch if you are feeling some Canada nostalgia.
Why Tipping Is So Out of Control in the US
Notes: The tipping examples on Reddit are really wild! Personally, I have lost any shame asking where is the no tip option now. Why should I tip at self-checkout in an airport where literally no one helped me or even bothered to glance in my direction? Out of control indeed.
Instagram’s leaked Twitter competitor, first reported by Lia Haberman.
Apple’s New Headset Meets Reality
Notes: WWDC will be a fun watch this year.
🛡️ CyberSecurity Reads
1Password Is Finally Rolling out Passkey Management
Notes: More passkey momentum! #19 covered Google’s passkey announcement.
Google Might Delete Your Gmail Account If You Haven’t Logged in for Two Years
Notes: Save your accounts!
That is all for this week. Signing off from Sip Stir Coffee House, Dallas which is fitting since I am only an hour away from Texas A&M-Commerce. 😂
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