Rami's Readings #69 - OpenAI, Fast Crimes, & James Beard Award for Albi 👨🍳
The latest on AI, LLMs, Chinese LLMs, AI Grant, Fast Crimes at Lambda School, James Beard Award Winners, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #69 - 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.
🤖 AI Reads
OpenAI’s China Block to Reshape AI Scene as Big Players Pounce
Notes: The most interesting read of the week for me. DeepSeekV2 already precipitated a massive drop in inference prices (see #64). Now, OpenAI exiting the market will lead to an even more intense competition between the local Chinese LLMs providers (there are many!), as they compete over who will take the remaining market share.
AI Grant Batch 4 - Opens July 16th
Notes: The previous batches included impressive AI startups.
Boomer Candy Business is Booming
Notes: Matt Levine on AI & VC.
Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL
Notes: A great survey of natural language to SQL LLMs.
Karpathy’s LLM Course is Coming!
💼 Business Reads
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Notes: I always found Lambda School’s claims to be sketchy. I guess I wasn’t wrong. Now, I do believe the diffusion of technical skills is valuable to society, but this model wasn’t the right one. I am still optimistic for MOOCs, but they haven’t panned out as well as I had hoped (especially with respect to student engagement, completion rates and their valuation by employers). I know few people who list MOOCs completed on their resumes.
WWDC 2024: Apple Intelligence
Notes: John Gruber on Apple Intelligence. Always worth a read.
🎨 Culture Reads
The 2024 James Beard Award Winners
Notes: Congratulations to Outstanding Chef Rafidi. Albi in DC is just incredible! I went with a local friend, and we both couldn’t handle how good it was.
Apple Watch notifications were sending me crazy — so I bought this 'dumb' smart Casio G-Shock for iPhone and have never looked back…
Notes: My friends know my collecting obsession with mechanical watches and analog things (Leica M-A… you will be mine one day). I don’t have this Casio G-Shock, but I empathize with the sentiment. I also oscillate between wearing my Apple Watch and mechanical watches - I guess it’s triggered by how annoyed I am about a technical problem at work. And also, sometimes this…
Signing off from Redmond.