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Rami's Readings #54 - Announcing Apéro & Intellect #6 🍹 in Toronto!
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A curated weekly digest of standout reads on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and tech, plus my brief expert notes. Trusted by leaders at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Stripe, and MIT. Less noise, more hidden gems.
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Rami's Readings #54 - Announcing Apéro & Intellect #6 🍹 in Toronto!

Announcing Apéro & Intellect #6 in Toronto and the latest on AI, LLMs, Apple's Multimodal LLM, Robots, Crazy Rich Indians, the Seattle Freeze, and more.

Rami Sayar's avatar
Rami Sayar
Mar 17, 2024
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Welcome to Rami’s Readings #54 - 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.


Thanks for reading Rami’s Readings! Are you enjoying this newsletter? Subscribe for free to receive each new post and support my work.


Apéro & Intellect Is Coming to Toronto!

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 to gather a slightly larger group of people. Many of you desired more time among each other, the event will now include fantastic food (FREE) to match the beverages.

I am pleased to announce Apéro and Intellect #6 will take place in 🏙 Toronto, Canada 🍁 on Tuesday, April 9th at noon. If you would like to attend, please apply before March 22nd for priority consideration.

Apply!


🤖 AI Reads

MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training

Notes: Apple just published this detailed, insightful, doozie of a paper. Possibly the most important paper of the week!

OpenAI Powers a Robot That Can Hand People Food, Pick up Trash, Put Away Dishes, and More

Notes: The status update and demo video are cool.

Software Engineers Are Getting Closer to Finding out If AI Really Can Make Them Jobless (Devin)

Notes: Many, many threads on Twitter about Devin. Too early to tell how good it is, but the hype is palpable.

New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal

Notes: Beautiful diagrams and illustrations of matrix multiplication algorithms. These algorithms underpin AI, graphics, data science, etc.

DESIGN AGAINST AI: 2024

Notes: Part of the report series “Design in Tech” from John Meada. Abridged version of his SXSW 2024 talk.

Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models

Notes: Paper from Mila. Go Montréal go!

Training Great LLMs Entirely from Ground up in the Wilderness as a Startup

Notes: “Less Principled, More Yolo” 🤣 Love that expression! On further thought I believe this is true in my current role (UX at Bing) as well.

Introducing StarChat2

Notes: More coding LLMs.

Yi-34B-200K

Notes: Yi and 01.AI continue to impress me. New paper from this group.

In the "Needle-in-a-Haystack" test, the Yi-34B-200K's performance is improved by 10.5%, rising from 89.3% to an impressive 99.8%. We continue to pre-train the model on 5B tokens long-context data mixture and demonstrate a near-all-green performance.

Command-R: Retrieval Augmented Generation at Production Scale

Notes: From the Cohere team, new LLM targeting RAG for enterprises.

AgentKit: Rapidly Build High Quality Agent Apps

Notes: From BCG-X.

Guidance: Language for Controlling Large Language Models

Notes: Haven’t tried it yet, but worth investigating.

Former Twitter Engineers Are Building Particle, an AI-Powered News Reader, Backed by $4.4M

Notes: Neat!

🎨 Culture Reads

Inside the World of Crazy Rich Indians

Notes: I can confirm from first-hand experience, the distribution of wealth across the country is expanding including to much smaller cities. I can’t wait to go back to India.

How Anti-Social Is Seattle? A Survey Comparing Big Cities

Notes: The Seattle Freeze is a real thing. I blame the grey and rainy weather.

landscape photo of city
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

That is all for this week. Signing off from Cambridge, MA.


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By Rami Sayar
A curated weekly digest of standout reads on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and tech, plus my brief expert notes. Trusted by leaders at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Stripe, and MIT. Less noise, more hidden gems.
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