Rami's Readings #77 - ๐๏ธโ๏ธ๐ฅ
The latest on AI, LLMs, Sapiens Foundation Human Vision Model, Phi-3.5, LLM Distillation, Open-source AI, GrapRAG, 7-Eleven, Dรฉpanneurs, and more.
Welcome to Ramiโs 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.
Iโll begin this newsletter by expressing my deep admiration for OpenAIโs Whisper. Though the open-source model is now two years old, it is saving me this week. After undergoing a hand surgery ๐๏ธโ๏ธ๐ฅ, Iโve had to rely on Whisper to keep me productive, running it (locally #Edge-AI) constantly to transcribe my speech into text. Perhaps Elon is rightโvacations can be dangerousโbut at least I wonโt be forgetting this sabbatical anytime soon. I will be back at work at Microsoft AI this week.
๐ค 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.
๐ผ 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 Japanโs 7-Eleven (read this from #27) and Canada (Couche-Tard was my local dรฉpanneur growing up ๐). Read more about Montrรฉalโs dรฉpanneurs, they are as culturally significant as the bodegas of NYC. Iโll 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 โAI Schedulingโ to Boost Productivity
Notes: Dropbox has been pivoting hard into AI services through acquisition and other ways.
๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ง๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง๐๐ฅ ๐๐ง๐ข๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ฌ๐ข๐ญ๐ข๐๐ฌ ๐๐๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ง๐ข๐๐จ๐ซ๐ง ๐
๐จ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐๐ซ๐ฌ
Notes: McGill! ๐
Firsts: The History of Computing from the Paul G. Allen Collection
Notes: Auction from the late Paul Allenโs collection. RIP Paul G.
Signing off from Redmond.