Rami's Readings #16
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #16 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, videos, Twitter threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering technology, business, culture, fashion, travel and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
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Montréal has become notorious for its unpredictable weather patterns, and this week was no exception. We experienced freezing rain and summer heat in a matter of days. However, one thing remains predictable in this city amidst all the weather fluctuations: AI research remains top-notch. I attended the MILA TechAide 2023 conference last Friday. The conference was a resounding success, raised over $100,000 for Centraide of Greater Montreal, and brought together researchers from various fields to exchange ideas and insights about the state of the art and future of AI.
Three things I took away from the conference:
🤖 AI Reads
OpenAssistant Released - Open source chat model
Notes: Model on HuggingFace. Demo.
WebLLM - Run a chatbot directly in browser
Notes: Edge AI is a reality. Code. Demo.
This project brings large-language model and LLM-based chatbot to web browsers. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and accelerated with WebGPU.
Stability AI announces Stable Diffusion XL
Image generation model built for enterprise clients that excels at photorealism.
Facebook open sources Animated Drawings
You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand
Notes: Tim O’Reilly wrote this 🔥 piece.
The CEO’s Guide to the Generative AI Revolution
Notes: From friend Abhishek Gupta of The AI Ethics Brief
China Proposes To Regulate AI-Generated Content Amid ChatGPT Craze
Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now
Notes: Personally, I have not had a relaxing week since October 2022.
Building LLM applications for production
Notes: 💯👌💪🙌 ⬇️
It’s easy to make something cool with LLMs, but very hard to make something production-ready with them. LLM limitations are exacerbated by a lack of engineering rigor in prompt engineering, partially due to the ambiguous nature of natural languages, and partially due to the nascent nature of the field.
Free Dolly: Introducing the World’s First Open Instruction-Tuned LLM
[2022] Self-Conditioning Pre-Trained Language Models
💼 Business Reads
★ GM, CarPlay, and iPhones
Notes: I don’t think I am ever going to buy a GM car if I can avoid it.
Katie Cotton, Guardian of the Apple Brand for 18 Years, Dies

Friend Daniel Tedesco published his annual letter today. The Craft Podcast is great!
Daniel’s 2022 Annual Letter Dear Friends, For me, 2022 was another year of too much doom and gloom. But—unlike 2021—it was punctuated by many moments of profound delight and optimism. Let’s get the unhappy stuff out of the way first: Uncertainty about the COVID lockdowns in China. Seeing the US and Chinese governments lumber into a lose-lose cold war like two drunken apes. And a w… annual letters · 3 years ago · Daniel Tedesco Daniel’s 2022 Annual Letter
That is all for this week. Signing off from Montréal.
I wrote a disclosure for this newsletter in #7. Please consider reading it.