Rami's Readings #66 - NY TechWeek and Apéro & Intellect AI Takeaways
Sharing NY TechWeek and Apéro & Intellect takeaways and the latest on AI, LLMs, SSMs, Finetuning, RAG, Government R&D, Canadian Brain Drain, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #66 - 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.
NY TechWeek and Apéro & Intellect Takeaways
NY TechWeek was excellent! The density of events in New York is higher compared to other TechWeeks across the U.S., and the MTA makes traveling between events quick and easy. My fireside chat with Jag Gill at an MIT AI Alumni event was so much fun! The event was hosted in gorgeous Art Deco room at The Ned Hotel - I highly recommend that space for events if you are in NYC. Apéro & Intellect in NYC and Boston were well-attended, and I finally had the chance to meet one of my top subscribers, who has been very engaged with my content, but had a mysterious email. Here are my three main takeaways from the week:
Funding for AI startups is readily available, but after speaking with many angels and VCs, I've been told there is a surprising lack of AI startups reaching the Series A and B stages. This is based on anecdotal evidence, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Existing 'brand name' AI startups are not achieving the high ARR one might expect. This contrasts with the perceived size of the AI opportunity. Many potential customers appear to be tightening their SaaS budgets despite claiming to invest in AI or purchase AI software from startups. It seems the SaaS Valley of Death phenomena is strong.
AI startup business models are challenging, with some companies offering per user/month pricing and others using performance-based pricing. Both approaches have issues. Companies offering per user/month pricing see their customer subscriptions decline over time as customers use AI to achieve more with fewer resources. Meanwhile, performance-based pricing companies struggle to create recurring revenue due to the nature of large company budget cycles. Even if an AI solution reduces operational costs, companies often don't know how to budget for it, leading to a constant need to convince customers to continue paying year over year. Not exactly the recurring revenue you want in today’s funding environment.
Overall, it was a very insightful week, with many valuable connections made across both the NY and Boston ecosystems.
This week is Apple’s WWDC so it should be equally exciting!
🤖 AI Reads
WildBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Challenging Tasks from Real Users in the Wild
Notes: From UW and Allen Institute for AI in Seattle.
Scaling Neural Machine Translation to 200 Languages
Notes: Interesting paper in the Nature journal scaling machine translation to 200 languages. One step closer to a SciFi Universal Translator.
Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality
Notes: SSMs, LSTM, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, etc. Many architectures vying to displace Transformers.
Part Two & Three of What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs
Notes: Highly recommended reading.
Alibaba Releases Qwen2
Notes: 5 models released with claims to besting Mistral 8x22B
Infiniflow / ragflow: Open-Source RAG Engine Based on Deep Document Understanding
Notes: Another interesting RAG project.
Lightning-AI / litgpt: Pretrain, Finetune, Deploy 20+ LLMs on Your Own Data
Notes: Another finetuning pipeline.
💼 Business Reads
Crowdsourced Boston Area Funders List
Notes: Add your VC firms and Angel Syndicates here.
What I Learned from the UN’s 'AI for Good' Summit
Notes: From the MIT Technology Review.
The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from U.S. Appropriations Shocks
Notes: Interesting paper to read on R&D spending (and underspending).
Canadian Brain Drain
Notes: I moved in 2017 for an opportunity in NYC. 2022 outflows are approx. 60% higher than 2017!
Where Wealth Is Concentrated in Africa
Notes: Not surprised to see Nigeria so highly ranked.
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.
That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond.
