Rami's Readings #60 - FTC Bans 🚫 Noncompetes

Thank you Martin Trust Center and the latest on AI, LLMs, Text Classification, AI Workflow Generation, FTC's Noncompete Rule, Airline Refunds, Meituan, and more.

Apr 29, 2024

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #60 - 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.

Note: This edition is a tad shorter as I was attending multiple conferences this week.

Thank You Martin Trust Center!

Last Friday, I had the honor of giving a talk at the MIT Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship to students from the Sloan School of Management and School of Engineering. During my presentation, I shared insights from my work on scaling LLMs at Bing, my thoughts on GenAI strategies for businesses and startups, and the development of Bing Deep search. It was a truly great event, and I am grateful to Amrutha Killada, Doug Williams, and Andy Acevedo for making this opportunity possible. Thank you to all who attended!

🤖 AI Reads

This week, a family of small language models was released, and you should do independent research on them. I will not share them in this newsletter as they are from my current organization. (See my disclosure in #7).

Leave No Context Behind: Efficient Infinite Context Transformers with Infini-attention

Notes: Interesting paper from Google.

IBM/fastfit: Fast and Effective Text Classification with Many Classes

Notes: Fast few-shot text classification library from IBM.

FlowMind: Automatic Workflow Generation with LLMs

Notes: Interesting paper from J. P. Morgan AI Research. Who knew they had an AI Research Lab?

AutoCrawler: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Crawler Generation

Notes: Interesting paper from Fudan University and Alibaba.

Many-Shot In-Context Learning

Notes: From Google DeepMind.

An important limitation of our work is that it uses a single model for all its experiments, the Gemini 1.5 Pro.

High Growth Engineer

Why reading whitepapers takes your career to the next level (and how to do it)

Hi everyone 👋, Jordan here. I’m excited to feature Micah Lerner , L6 Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, and author of Micah Learns , a blog with recurring deep dives on technical topics. Micah attributes a large part of his growth to reading technical whitepapers. In today’s guest post, he will share the value he’s experienced and how you can see similar results…

8 months ago · 74 likes · 2 comments · Jordan Cutler

💼 Business Reads

Fact Sheet on FTC’s Proposed Final Noncompete Rule

Notes: The FTC banned noncompetes nationally, matching the long-standing non-enforceability of noncompetes in California. The ban is excellent news for high-tech workers, startups, and the thousands of food workers who are inexplicably forced to sign noncompetes.

Airlines Must Now Pay Automatic Refunds for Canceled Flights

Notes: As a frequent flyer, I have been frustrated by airlines in the past. This is welcome legislation that will make flying a fairer experience for all.

Meituan to Debut in Riyadh in First Expansion Beyond China

Notes: Chinese tech expansion strategies are always interesting to watch. Also, not too surprised with their choice of expansion market. The Middle East’s economic growth and opportunities are under appreciated by most of the world.

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