Rami's Readings #77 - 🖐️✂️🏥
The latest on AI, LLMs, Sapiens Foundation Human Vision Model, Phi-3.5, LLM Distillation, Open-source AI, GrapRAG, 7-Eleven, Dépanneurs, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #77 - 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.
I’ll begin this newsletter by expressing my deep admiration for OpenAI’s Whisper. Though the open-source model is now two years old, it is saving me this week. After undergoing a hand surgery 🖐️✂️🏥, I’ve had to rely on Whisper to keep me productive, running it (locally #Edge-AI) constantly to transcribe my speech into text. Perhaps Elon is right—vacations can be dangerous—but at least I won’t be forgetting this sabbatical anytime soon. I will be back at work at Microsoft AI this week.
🤖 AI Reads
Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models
Notes: Excellent release from Meta! Watch the video. GitHub Repo.
Discover the New Multi-Lingual, High-Quality Phi-3.5 SLMs
Notes: Updated Phi released! (Not my organization at MSFT, see disclosure).
xGen-MM (BLIP-3): A Family of Open Large Multimodal Models
Notes: From Salesforce.
LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice: The Minitron Approach
Notes: Nvidia model distillation paper. They compressed the Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral NeMo 12B models to 4B and 8B parameters.
Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey
Notes: GraphRAG survey paper.
💼 Business Reads
Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek on Why Europe Should Embrace Open-Source AI
Notes: Written by Zuck and Daniel. Read it!
Seven & I Buyout Would Be a Watershed Moment for Japan Takeovers
Notes: This news is utterly fascinating for me because it combines my passion for Japan’s 7-Eleven (read this from #27) and Canada (Couche-Tard was my local dépanneur growing up 🍁). Read more about Montréal’s dépanneurs, they are as culturally significant as the bodegas of NYC. I’ll be watching this story carefully.
Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious
Notes: From the great Bruce Schneier.
Dropbox Acquires Reclaim, a Calendar App That Uses ‘AI Scheduling’ to Boost Productivity
Notes: Dropbox has been pivoting hard into AI services through acquisition and other ways.
𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐔𝐒 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬
Notes: McGill! 🍁
Firsts: The History of Computing from the Paul G. Allen Collection
Notes: Auction from the late Paul Allen’s collection. RIP Paul G.
Signing off from Redmond.