Rami's Readings #64 - Announcing Apéro & Intellect in NYC & Boston!
Announcing Apéro & Intellect in NYC & Boston and the latest on AI, LLMs, Chinese LLMs & Inference Speed, Flight Turbulence, Global Real Estate, Baby Boomers, Leonard Cohen, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #64 - 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.
Apéro & Intellect Is Coming to New York City & Boston in June!
Apéro & Intellect is a curated series of intimate gatherings discussing Artificial Intelligence designed to stimulate both your mind and your palate. I am pleased to announce Apéro & Intellect #7 will take place in 🗽New York City on Tuesday, June 4th at 8am. If you would like to attend, please apply before May 31st for priority consideration.
I am pleased to announce Apéro & Intellect #8 will take place in 🏙 Boston on Tuesday, June 6th at 5pm. If you would like to attend, please apply before May 31st as well.
Additional events will be announced next week, with locations on the West Coast and in Canada. If you have friends in these areas, please share this newsletter with them so they don't miss out!
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.
🤖 AI Reads
Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet
Notes: From the Anthropic team, this paper presents incredible progress in LLM interpretability—the most profound read of the week with fantastic visualizations that make it easier to follow the text. If you could only read one thing, this would be it.
Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models
Notes: Very interesting! I am going to spend time during my sabbatical trying to reproduce their results.
Agent Planning with World Knowledge Model
Notes: Another great paper this week from the Zhejiang University - Ant Group Joint Lab. #China
Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI
Notes: This paper is extensive with contributors from 16 institutions.
We argue that, overall, the benefits of open-source Gen AI outweigh its risks. As such, we encourage the open sourcing of models, training and evaluation data, and provide a set of recommendations and best practices for managing risks associated with open-source generative AI.
DeepSeekV2 Forcing Price Drops to 1% of Previous Prices
Notes: The introduction of DeepSeek V2 is directly impacting inference pricing for Chinese model providers. If you can run your models faster → prices will fall. My main coding LLM is still DeepSeek-Coder on my Mac because of the inference speed.
DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data
Notes: The DeepSeek team is just incredible.
OmniGlue: Generalizable Feature Matching with Foundation Model Guidance
Notes: From Google Research.
SAROS: A Dataset for Whole-Body Region and Organ Segmentation in CT Imaging
Notes: 🔥 dataset for medical modeling applications.
Intel/neural-speed: A Library for Efficient LLM Inference via Low-Bit Quantization (On CPUs)
Notes: From Intel. Supports LLMs in GGUF format. Inference costs will eventually be free. #Edge-AI
Cohere For AI Launches Aya 23, 8 and 35 Billion Parameter Open Weights Release
Notes: A notable open-weights release due to the multilingual capabilities.
Mistral-7B v0.3 Released
Notes: Supports function calling now.
💼 Business Reads
These Flight Routes Suffer the World’s Worst Turbulence
Notes: My condolences to the family and loved ones of the man who passed away in the Singapore turbulence flight incident. Please wear your seatbelts generally, especially when the flight attendants tell you or the seatbelt sign turns on. Singapore Airlines is changing its service rules as a result of this incident. From my experience flying between Seattle and Boston consistently, there is a patch of the flight path where unexpected turbulence happens so often that I almost always put away my laptop. This article shares the routes with the worst turbulence.
Luxury Real Estate Prices Dip in NYC as Asia (Tokyo, India, etc.) Drives Global Gains
Notes: I am not surprised by the Tokyo price gains given the weakness of the yen and to see Indian Real Estate in tech-heavy cities appreciate (Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad).
Boomers Bought Up the Big Homes. Now They’re Not Budging.
Notes: Ignore the sensationalist headline from WSJ. The article's point is that high interest rates impact people who already own homes and are looking to downsize and new entrants into the market, effectively exacerbating the generational divide between Millennials and Baby Boomers in the US. High interest rates cut both ways.
🎨 Culture Reads
The Case for Japan’s Amazing Clothes-Drying Bathrooms
Notes: Line drying is the superior option, but this is an interesting alternative to tumble dryers.
Notable People of the World
Notes: Cool website visualizing data from this Nature paper. I love that Leonard Cohen shows up for my hometown of Montréal. We have quite a few pictures from our wedding with the Leonard Cohen mural behind us. ❤️
That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond.