Rami's Readings #63 - 📢 GPT-4o & Cassette Tape Nostalgia

The latest on AI, LLMs, GPT-4o, Pandas GPU Acceleration, NER models, Startups, Chinese Real Estate, Cassette Tape Nostalgia, and more.

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #63 - 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.

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Thank you to all my wonderful subscribers for your warm messages of congratulations, thoughtful ideas, and collaboration offers. I am genuinely excited to explore the fantastic projects you've proposed in June.

Rami's Readings #61 - 🏖️ Sabbatical Announcement

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🤖 AI Reads

GPT-4o Released, Gemini 1.5 Technical Report and DeepMind’s Veo Model

Notes: 🤯

NuMind Released 3 State-of-the-Art Named Entity Recognition Models

Notes: NER is an under appreciated problem. These small models outperform GLiNER (previously shared).

Nvidia-Backed OSS Library RAPIDS Makes Pandas Insanely Faster

Notes: 1-line code change lets Pandas use GPU acceleration. Requires WSL2 on Windows.

%load_ext cudf.pandas

State-of-the-Art Exact Binary Vector Search for RAG in 100 lines of Julia

Notes: Julia is like Python & C crossed into one programming language.

Right now were at ~1-1.3ms for 1M rows. 10M rows would be ~10-13ms.

rashadphz/farfalle: Open-Source AI-Powered Search Engine

Notes: Runs locally with Ollama.

There’s An AI For That

Notes: 😂

TII Released Falcon2-11B

Notes: Falcon2-11B is an 11B parameters causal decoder-only model built by TII in Abu Dhabi.

💼 Business Reads

America Is in the Midst of an Extraordinary Startup Boom

Notes: YES!

Silicon Valley Is Searching for Its Piece of the AI Action

Notes: Great article. It highlights the importance of long-term execution.

It’s important to distinguish papers are not products.

AI Agents Are Disrupting Automation: Current Approaches, Market Solutions and Recommendations

Notes: From Insight Partners (VC firm).

China Considers Government Buying of Unsold Homes to Save Property Market

Notes: 😟

🎨 Culture Reads

Cassette Tapes Are Getting a Boost From an Unexpected Source

Notes: Growing up, I spent hours listening to my parents' cassette collection, full of music, musicals, and theater shows. Nowadays, finding those old tunes on Apple Music is nearly impossible (80% is missing), and the uploaded copies on YouTube have terrible quality. That’s why I’m excited about the return of cassette players. I pre-ordered this one from We Are Rewind (I love the teenage engineering design vibes). It is rechargeable with USB-C and supports Bluetooth wireless headphones. While I already have a decent vinyl collection, the vast majority of my parent’s collection was in cassettes. It will be nice to just listen to them again (maybe even digitize the collection). 😊

Related Notes: I digitized our family’s old VHS tapes last summer and will be experimenting with AI video upscaling during my sabbatical. Let me know if you have any tips!

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

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