Rami's Readings #52 - ASCII Art Is Back!
The latest on AI, LLMs, EdgeAI, ASCII Art, complex systems, Singapore and Monaco drama, oversized pants, cultural modernity and expats in China, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #52 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X (formerly known as Twitter) 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.
Apéro & Intellect is Expanding!
Apéro & Intellect is a curated series of intimate gatherings discussing Artificial Intelligence designed to stimulate both your mind and your palate. After receiving great feedback from the three pilots last year, I am expanding the event series this year. The event will include fantastic food (FREE) to match the beverages.
I am pleased to announce the next Apéro and Intellect #5 will take place in 🏙Cambridge, MA on Sunday, March 10th starting at 11:30am at a brunch spot steps from Harvard and MIT. This event is taking place on the heels of the MIT AI Conference, so make it a twofer. Last chance to apply, there are few spots left.
It was a weird week. The Musk lawsuit is… odd. Apple cancelled their car project. Sony layoffs. Techstars is shutting down their Seattle accelerator. 😞 Just weird.
🤖 AI Reads
Announcing Mistral Large, Our New Flagship Model
Notes: 😉
StarCoder2 and The Stack v2
Notes: Comparable to DeepSeekCoder (my current coding model).
The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits
Notes: Further evidence that local LLMs running on consumer devices is within grasp.
India’s Tech Leaders Jockey For Slice of $300 Billion AI Market
Notes: Anyone played with BharatGPT? Reach out to me!
Genie: Generative Interactive Environments
Notes: From Google DeepMind.
The first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches.
ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs
Notes: ASCII Art is back! 😂 From the University of Washington. #GoHuskies
Based on this observation, we develop the jailbreak attack ArtPrompt, which leverages the poor performance of LLMs in recognizing ASCII art to bypass safety measures and elicit undesired behaviors from LLMs. ArtPrompt only requires black-box access to the victim LLMs, making it a practical attack. We evaluate ArtPrompt on five SOTA LLMs, and show that ArtPrompt can effectively and efficiently induce undesired behaviors from all five LLMs.
Singapore's $1B AI Boost Will Help Sustain Competitive Edge in Digital Era
Notes: A good start, but more would be better. I may be biased.
GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy
Notes: For the curious.
Envisioning Information Access Systems: What Makes for Good Tools and a Healthy Web?
Notes: New paper from Chirag Shah and Emily Bender.
💼 Business Reads
How Complex Systems Fail
Notes: An oldie (2002), but a must read. Super short too.
Hindsight bias remains the primary obstacle to accident investigation, especially when expert human performance is involved.
I am constantly defending against this particular bias at Bing. The “we should have known this will fail” is an incredibly toxic statement after an incident.
Singapore’s Richest Banking Dynasty Grapples With Succession
Notes: Succession Singapore Style.
Top Takeaways From Businessweek’s Investigation Into Monaco’s Royal Family
Notes: Fascinating.
Canada Tightens Foreign Takeover Rules for Video Games and VR
Notes: Hmmm… I will need to see the data.
🎨 Fashion & Culture Reads
Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?
Notes: I am obsessed with raw Japanese denim. You can’t wear those in a skinny fit, trust me. A reasonably priced brand carrying raw denim is Naked & Famous Denim. They are based in Montreal in the old garment and textile district on Chabanel. If you live in NYC, I like the Brooklyn Denim Co. They have much more in-store than online. They also have a decent cafe and will do free hemming in the same day.
Shanghai Confidential: An Expat’s Journey From Sous Chef to Food Writer
Notes: I love reading #expat stories. ☺️
The Former Journalist Trying to Reinvent Traditional Chinese Culture
Notes: I always found these experiences to be magical.
That is all for this week. Signing off from Montréal, Canada.