Rami's Readings #49 - Happy Lunar New Year
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #49 - 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.
Happy Lunar New Year!
Wishing you a Happy Lunar New Year filled with prosperity and sweet moments! If your celebrations leave you with an abundance of desserts, remember, my door is always open for surplus treats. 😉
Curious about the prompt, see the footnote1.
🤖 AI Reads
Why Nvidia Is Entering The $30B Market For Custom Chips
Notes: This article has a speculation disclaimer from the author. Meh. In my opinion, AI model architecture and needs are still evolving. I don’t expect FPGAs and custom silicon to become a big business driver for Nvidia. I think the industry fell into this specialized hardware trap before around 2015-2016, didn’t we? If I remember correctly, GPUs were in high demand for AI workloads, so companies started offering FPGAs for AI workloads and then custom silicon, only for these solutions to get quickly outdated and irrelevant. The hardware cycles were too slow for the pace of innovation, so most workloads went back to bigger, faster and more general-purpose chips (like Nvidia GPUs).
Apple Made an AI Image Tool That Lets You Make Edits by Describing Them
Notes: Apple has entered the chat.
More Agents Is All You Need
Notes: Analogous to the wisdom of the crowd.
Introducing Qwen1.5
Notes: Alibaba flexing its LLM muscles. I am using DeepSeek & Yi regularly. There was much speculation that Chinese Big Tech wouldn’t catch up with the US on LLMs. This is now proving to be utterly false.
AnyTool: Self-Reflective, Hierarchical Agents for Large-Scale API Calls
Notes: Interesting.
NVIDIA NeMo Canary Model Pushes the Frontier of Speech Recognition and Translation
Notes: New Speech Recognition and Translation model from Nvidia.
Introducing MetaVoice-1B
Notes: A 1.2B parameter base model for text-to-speech with zero-shot cloning.
Generative AI for Disciplined Entrepreneurship from MIT’s Martin Trust Center
Notes: MTC is using LLMs to help startups create plans faster.
💼 Business Reads
AI Boom Reawakens Silicon Valley’s Housing Market
Notes: I confirm we are seeing a pick up in home sales and pricing in Redmond and Bellevue.
San Jose is in the lead with the fastest home-sales pace. There, 61% of new listings went under contract in less than 14 days, according to Redfin Corp. data measuring the four weeks through Feb 4. In second place was the Seattle market — home to Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. — where 59% of listings disappeared that quickly.
Wall Street Snubs China for India in a Historic Markets Shift
Notes: Will it finally be the start of the Indian century?
Fake LastPass App Targets People Trying to Do the Right Thing
Notes: I am shocked Apple let this through onto the App Store.
🔀 Other Reads
Rapid Progression of Dementia Following COVID-19
Notes: A big concern for many families post-COVID.
That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond, WA.