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Rami's Readings #72 - Mistral AI & Nvidia 🚀🔥

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #72 - 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.



Quite an eventful week! A software update brought down a chunk of the world’s critical business systems resulting in scams, speculation, forcing incredible amounts of manual labor & remediation, and quick tools built to fix it. Here are reads that may have been missed:

🤖 AI Reads

Mistral Announces Mathstral and Codestral Mamba

Notes: Custom models for math and code generation.

Nvidia Partners with Mistral for Mistral NeMo 12B

Notes: Mistral AI is on fire! Try out the instruct model.

ChatQA 2: Bridging the Gap to Proprietary LLMs in Long Context and RAG Capabilities

Notes: Nvidia announced a new model based on Llama 3 that matches GPT-4 Turbo.

A Survey of Prompt Engineering Methods in Large Language Models for Different NLP Tasks

Notes: From NYU. The taxonomy diagram on page 12 is useful.

Salesforce Releases xLAM-1b and xLAM-7B

Notes: A 1B and 7B model for function calling. Non-commercial use only.

YouTube-SL-25: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain Multilingual Sign Language Parallel Corpus

Notes: New multilingual sign language data set.

WebGPU on Safari Enabling LLMs in iPhone Browsers

Notes: Edge AI is advancing thanks to fundamental browser developments.

💼 Business Reads

Apple’s India Sales Surge 33% to Record in Shift From China

Notes: This will likely start to influence product development decisions in the near-term.

You Can Buy This $5,500 House in Japan—and There Are Millions More Like It

Notes: Akiya-Mart.com is the listings site. It seems most of the content is AI generated. Translating listings across languages is a great use-case for LLMs. Browsing through this site makes me miss Tokyo and Japan even more.

A Few Weeks with the Daylight DC-1 Tablet: Rethinking Screen Time

Notes: Price point is too high, but a promising device.

Supreme Court: Bar Exam Will No Longer Be Required to Become Attorney in Washington State

Notes: What do you think about this?

The best and brightest don’t want to stay in Canada. I should know: I’m one of the few in my engineering class who did.

🎨 Culture & Travel Reads

Remembering Hong Kong’s ‘Queen of Swords’

Notes: She played Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Hilton’s Latest Hotel Brand Is Perfect For Luxury Adventure Travelers

Notes: I am not generally a Hilton customer, but this looks interesting.

NYC to Boston in 100 Minutes: A High-Speed Train Proposal Picks Up Steam

Notes: Pretty please! 🥺

Seattle Aquarium’s Ocean Pavilion to Open in August

Notes: Another reason to visit Seattle. 😉

The Potential of a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ Sequel Business of Fashion recently asked me to contribute an opinion piece about the potential of a Devil Wears Prada sequel. Quite often, IP in the entertainment industry is a big eye roll (see: Twisters), but sometimes it works spectacularly (see: Inside Out 2… Back Row · 2 years ago · 77 likes · 6 comments · Amy Odell The Potential of a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ Sequel

Signing off from Redmond.