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Rami's Readings #66 - NY TechWeek and Apéro & Intellect AI Takeaways

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #66 - 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.

NY TechWeek and Apéro & Intellect Takeaways

NY TechWeek was excellent! The density of events in New York is higher compared to other TechWeeks across the U.S., and the MTA makes traveling between events quick and easy. My fireside chat with Jag Gill at an MIT AI Alumni event was so much fun! The event was hosted in gorgeous Art Deco room at The Ned Hotel - I highly recommend that space for events if you are in NYC. Apéro & Intellect in NYC and Boston were well-attended, and I finally had the chance to meet one of my top subscribers, who has been very engaged with my content, but had a mysterious email. Here are my three main takeaways from the week: Overall, it was a very insightful week, with many valuable connections made across both the NY and Boston ecosystems.

This week is Apple’s WWDC so it should be equally exciting!

🤖 AI Reads

WildBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Challenging Tasks from Real Users in the Wild

Notes: From UW and Allen Institute for AI in Seattle.

Scaling Neural Machine Translation to 200 Languages

Notes: Interesting paper in the Nature journal scaling machine translation to 200 languages. One step closer to a SciFi Universal Translator.

Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality

Notes: SSMs, LSTM, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, etc. Many architectures vying to displace Transformers.

Part Two & Three of What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs

Notes: Highly recommended reading.

Alibaba Releases Qwen2

Notes: 5 models released with claims to besting Mistral 8x22B

Infiniflow / ragflow: Open-Source RAG Engine Based on Deep Document Understanding

Notes: Another interesting RAG project.

Lightning-AI / litgpt: Pretrain, Finetune, Deploy 20+ LLMs on Your Own Data

Notes: Another finetuning pipeline.

💼 Business Reads

Crowdsourced Boston Area Funders List

Notes: Add your VC firms and Angel Syndicates here.

What I Learned from the UN’s ‘AI for Good’ Summit

Notes: From the MIT Technology Review.

The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from U.S. Appropriations Shocks

Notes: Interesting paper to read on R&D spending (and underspending).

Canadian Brain Drain

Notes: I moved in 2017 for an opportunity in NYC. 2022 outflows are approx. 60% higher than 2017!

Where Wealth Is Concentrated in Africa

Notes: Not surprised to see Nigeria so highly ranked.

Thank you to all my wonderful subscribers for your warm messages of congratulations, thoughtful ideas, and collaboration offers. I am genuinely excited to explore the fantastic projects you’ve proposed in June.

That is all for this week. Signing off from Redmond.