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Rami's Readings #53 - Takeaways From the MIT AI Conference

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #53 - 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 International Women’s Day! I am grateful to have celebrated the day with my lovely mother in Montréal. Juliette et Chocolat was how we chose to celebrate 🎉 and I highly recommend a visit on your next trip to the city. Apéro & Intellect was a great success! A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended for engaging in meaningful discussions about AI and creating a truly enjoyable atmosphere. Stay tuned for the announcement of our next event in the coming weeks. Don’t forget to refer your friends to stay in the loop and hear about it first!

Refer a friend

🤖 Three Takeaways From the MIT Sloan AI & ML Conference

I had the pleasure of attending the MIT Sloan AI & ML Conference on March 9th. The event was fantastic and very well organized. Congratulations to the organizing team for assembling an incredible set of speakers and panelists. I would like to share my three key takeaways from the conference. Please note that these are my own recollections and interpretations, and not direct quotes from any of the speakers.


🤖 AI Reads

The Claude 3 Model Family: Opus, Sonnet, Haiku

Notes: Claude 3 is excellent. Paper linked above.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey

Notes: A great survey of RAG methods.

Design2Code: How Far Are We From Automating Front-End Engineering?

Notes: Neat project from Stanford and Georgia Tech. I plan on trying their model Design2Code-18B soon.

Introducing mxbai-embed-larve-v1

Notes: Open source embedding model competing with OpenAI’s text-embedding-v3.

Alibaba Backs $2.5 Billion AI Firm in Second Big 2024 Deal

Notes: Big funding rounds for startups building LLMs.


My fellow classmate, James Villarrubia, Presidential Innovation Fellow at NASA, did a podcast about AI. My favorite quote from the episode:

“LLMs are like jawbreakers… lots of layers of candy squeezed down into one hard thing.”

The jawbreaker analogy is another way to think about LLM training as a “compression of the internet” as Karpathy explains it.

That is all for this week. Signing off from an Airbus A321neo over Lake Michigan.