Rami's Readings #88 - Announcing Apéro & Intellect #9 in Boston!
Announcing Apéro & Intellect in Boston and the latest on AI, LLMs, Conversational Audio Models, Agent Systems, Business Ready 2024 Report, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #88 - 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 Boston!
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 #9 will take place in 🏙 Boston on Saturday, November 16th at 6pm.
🤖 AI Reads
Introducing Hertz-Dev, The First Open-Source Base Model For Conversational Audio Generation
Notes: Hertz-Dev is exciting for its small-ish size (8.5B parameters), that it is open source, and can be further used to train specific audio tasks.
OuteAI/OuteTTS-0.1-350M: Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Notes: OuteTTS is interesting for its small size (350M can be run on Mobile devices) and that it has a relatively simple architecture. It is also easy to install with pip so any developer can try it in your organization.
Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks
Notes: From Microsoft Research (not my organization). I keep an eye on MSR because they’re focused on pushing AI frontiers. This paper shows a new architecture for agentic systems for handling general tasks. It is built on AutoGen, another open-source agent framework from MSR.
IBM Docling: Document Parsers for LLMs
Notes: An open-source alternative to Unstructured.io. Data engineering is a critical component for any RAG system and unfortunately most of the world’s data is trapped in PDFs. This library also supports OCR PDFs (Scanned PDFs).
AI Startups Will Need 'Quality Of Revenue' To Raise In 2025, Seed VCs Warn
Notes: The VC funding frenzy seems to be cooling.
💼 Business Reads
World Bank Published Business Ready 2024
Notes: The World Bank published their Business Ready 2024 results. As an expat and investor, having a deeper understanding of global business environments and how they impact startups and tech companies is essential to success. I suggest you read this report and their methodology. Any ranking is only as relevant as the methodology behind it.
Saudis Plan $100 Billion AI Powerhouse to Rival UAE Tech Hub
Notes: Abu Dhabi’s TII FalconLLM was memorable for being open source and free for commercial use early on. Great to see regional competition and investment.
Signing off from Redmond.