Discover more from Rami’s Readings

I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week and send them to you in a weekly digest. Less widely shared articles, more reads missed among the noise. Learn about Abloh's 3% Rule for Creativity, GenAI, Culture, Tech, etc.

Rami's Readings #30

The latest on AI, LLMs, Code Llama, Python × Excel, Nvidia GPUs, Shadow AI, Olive Garden, Digital Art Archiving, and more.

Rami Sayar

Aug 27, 2023

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #30 - 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.

🤖 AI Reads

Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code

Notes: Meta continuing with the excellent free for commercial-use LLMs.

We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B and 34B parameters each.

SeamlessM4T—Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation

Notes: More Meta speech advancements! Follows VoiceBox and MMS.

A single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages.

Introducing Python in Excel: The Best of Both Worlds for Data Analysis and Visualization

Notes: I am classifying this news as AI reads. 😆

Saudi Arabia and UAE Race to Buy Nvidia Chips to Power AI Ambitions

Notes: TII from Abu Dhabi trained a great LLM which you can download from HuggingFace.

Beware the Emergence of Shadow AI

Notes: Fantastic article from friend, Abhishek Gupta, about an emerging AI cybersecurity issue.

💼 Business Reads

Rubbing Shoulders: Class Segregation in Daily Activities

Notes: New paper (long read)! Everyone loves Olive Garden.

Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee's, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors.

The Video Call Revolution Is Dead

Notes: Much optimism early in the pandemic dashed.

What Vivek Ramaswamy Doesn’t Understand About the Dollar

Notes: An opinion piece by Tyler Cowen on trying to stabilize the dollar by tying it to the price of commodities.

The Intrinsic Perspective

The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism

In an age of sclerotic institutions, when the arteries of education and media and government are all thickening in front of our eyes, their decline so often captured in hyper-virality on social media, it is inevitable that conspiracy theories thrive…

4 months ago · 209 likes · 20 comments · Erik Hoel

✈️ Travel & 🎨 Culture Reads

‘THE PALETTE’: Young Chinese Artists Create Meaning in a Diverse World

Notes: For my China-based friends, please visit this exhibit in Changshu.

Stitching Together an Archive of an Endangered Palestinian Art

Notes: Fantastic article on how digital mediums are used to conserve traditions around the world.

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