Rami's Readings #45
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #45 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X (formerly known as Twitter) 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.
Looking for a Summer Intern?
I’m excited to introduce a rising star in technology: Janelle, an exceptional McGill student I mentor through the McGill Alumni Mentorship Program. Janelle has impressed me with her passion for community and technology. She is actively seeking summer engineering (or product management) internship opportunities in Vancouver or remote positions with North America-based companies. This is an opportunity to bring a fresh, innovative perspective to your team.
About Janelle
❤️ Janelle is a McGill first-year undergrad studying Software Engineering. She founded Project Empathic, an organization that has taught over 1100 elementary school students about homelessness through educational workshops and card-making. Janelle created automation algorithms at the Learning Buddies Network as the non-profit’s IT Manager, decreasing labour costs by $10,000. She developed an app for domestic violence research for the UBC SOAR Project.
🏅 She was awarded the 2023 Schulich Leader Scholarship, one of Canada’s leading STEM awards, to recognize her community involvement and desire to leave a positive mark on society.
Thank you for considering this unique opportunity to support emerging talent in the tech industry. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
NeurIPS is next week, so expect many announcements from industry AI players. As per my vacation notice, I will not be publishing next Sunday due to the holidays. I will do my best to send a few special newsletters before January 13th.
See the prompt in the footnotes1. I am surprised DALL·E 3 generated the text correctly this time.
🤖 AI Reads
I am skipping some competitor news this week (see #7).
NY Times Missed These 12 Trailblazers: Meet the Women Transforming AI
Notes: Professor Joelle Pineau is a rockstar. I regret not being able to take her class while at McGill Engineering.
MLX
Notes: Apple has entered the conversation in typical Apple fashion.
Mistral Dropped Mixtral-8x7B
Notes: Mistral, not taking notes from BigTech, dropped a model via tweet to a Magnet link with no blog post or announcement AFAIK. Great conversations on HN. See Andrej Karpathy’s tweet.
Magicoder: Source Code Is All You Need
Notes: Fully open-source including code, weights, and data while having ≤ 7B parameters. See GitHub repo. Small enough to run entirely locally on a RTX 4090 or a M1.
Nash Learning from Human Feedback
Notes: Interesting.
New RAG Optimized Mistral, Yi, LLaMa 🐲 Dragon Series Models
Notes: I can’t find the paper, but the models themselves are on HuggingFace.
EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anything
Notes: More light-weight SAM models.
LLM Visualization
Notes: Fantastic visualizations of various LLM architectures.
Alibaba’s 72B-Parameter Model: Qwen-72B
Notes: Another LLM from China. Currently, I am partial to 01-ai’s Yi-34B - smaller in size and has fantastic performance.
💼 Business Reads
How Suspects Laundered Billions in Singapore for Years
Notes: Must read.
Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder
Notes: Long read summarizing feelings many founders expressed to me
Why DeepMind Cofounder Mustafa Suleyman Left Google to Start a Human-focused AI Company
Notes: Old, but good.
That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond, WA.