Rami's Readings #156 - Multimodal Decision & US Frontier Open-Weight Models

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #156 - 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.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami’s Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, The VC Corner and from the AI in Action Conference in Montréal. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

Introducing Beam: Reflection’s 501B Open-Weight Model

Notes: An open-weight frontier model competitive with GLM 5.2 and Qwen 3.8-Max from a US-based lab. Nvidia is looking to buy them.

Liquid AI: Announcing d1 With Vision

Notes: A multimodal decision model is interesting.

vLLM Semantic Router: Introducing Decision 1.0: Open Decision Foundation Models

Notes: More decision models.

perplexity-ai / pplx-decider-v1.1-27b

Notes: Yet another decision model.

Andreessen Horowitz Backs Jev Maker at $7.5 Billion Value

Notes: What’s the moat?

EmbeddingGemma 2: An Open, Lightweight Multimodal Embedding Model

Notes: The sequel to the first EmbeddingGemma which does very well.

🔀 Other Reads

Why Do We Steal Things From Restaurants?

Notes: Is there any research showing a decline in the prevalence of this behavior since smartphones and Instagram?

China’s Young People Are Turning to an 84-Year-Old Cambridge Professor

Notes: Fascinating!

Signing off from Redmond, WA.