Rami's Readings #29

The latest on AI, Llama 2, LLMs, Argentinian Dollarization, Michelin Guides, Maui, My Favorite Black-owned Restaurants in Seattle, and more.

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #29 - 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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Vacation Notice: Back to our regularly scheduled programming. I hope you had a great summer! The readings included in today’s edition span the past 30 days.

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🤖 AI Reads

These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI

Notes: If you must read one article this week, this is the one.

Llama 2 Released! Available for free for research and commercial use

Notes: Meta released an upgraded version of the most consequential open-source LLM model in multiple sizes (7B, 13B, 70B). Now also available for free for research and commercial use.

Stability AI releases Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool

Notes: Neat!

A Survey of Large Language Models

Notes: This comprehensive survey was recently updated! Great read.

AI Startup Anthropic Releases Claude 2

💼 Business Reads

Argentina’s Future Is With the Dollar

Notes: Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution for Bloomberg. From my experience in Lebanon, dollarization is hard and impacts sectors differently. Granted, Lebanon is implicitly dollarizing, so it is not the same as Milei’s proposal. Either way, someone should start importing Hitachi banknote counters to Argentina. Hitachi importers seemed to be the only economic winners I saw in Beirut.

Zhongzhi Is Facing a Liquidity Crisis

Notes: Keep an eye out. I am curious to hear from my China-based readers about their perspectives.

✈️ Travel Reads

‘Let Maui heal’: Grieving Hawaii residents want tourists to go home

Notes: Please stop traveling to Maui and consider donating to Hawai‘i Community Foundation, Maui Fire Relief Fund, and American Red Cross.

As Michelin Expands, Black Chefs Continue to Miss Out on Stars

Notes: Disappointing. Thankfully, we do not have a Michelin Guide for Seattle. In my conversations with restaurateurs, a star can be a blight or a blessing. Some cooks, chefs, waitstaff, etc., in Seattle, left their previous employers in other cities because of the intense pressure a restaurant gets with a star. The Michelin guide is helpful in classical foodie cities like NYC, where I tend to be biased towards Michelin restaurants. I found their selection paltry outside of Manhattan. There is so much great food in Flushing! The selection in Vancouver (a new Michelin city) needs to be revised.

My favorite restaurants in Seattle are Black-owned:

• Fat’s Chicken and Waffles. My brother and I loved it and still dream of returning to Fat’s. On the same street corner, there is also an excellent selection of Ethiopian food.

• Jerk Shack. Walking distance from my first apartment in Seattle, we spent many nights eating there.

• Ezell’s Famous Chicken and Heaven Sent Fried Chicken. There is a long story, but both follow Ezell Stephens’ fried chicken recipe.

• Boon Boona Coffee. An executive at Microsoft introduced me to this cafe, and it hit the right spots for me.

🛡️ CyberSecurity Reads

Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack

Notes: Be careful what you scan, especially with zero-day hacks out there.

That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond.