Rami's Readings #77 - 🖐️✂️🏥

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #77 - 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.

I’ll begin this newsletter by expressing my deep admiration for OpenAI’s Whisper. Though the open-source model is now two years old, it is saving me this week. After undergoing a hand surgery 🖐️✂️🏥, I’ve had to rely on Whisper to keep me productive, running it (locally #Edge-AI) constantly to transcribe my speech into text. Perhaps Elon is right—vacations can be dangerous—but at least I won’t be forgetting this sabbatical anytime soon. I will be back at work at Microsoft AI this week.

🤖 AI Reads

Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models

Notes: Excellent release from Meta! Watch the video. GitHub Repo.

Discover the New Multi-Lingual, High-Quality Phi-3.5 SLMs

Notes: Updated Phi released! (Not my organization at MSFT, see disclosure).

xGen-MM (BLIP-3): A Family of Open Large Multimodal Models

Notes: From Salesforce.

LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice: The Minitron Approach

Notes: Nvidia model distillation paper. They compressed the Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral NeMo 12B models to 4B and 8B parameters.

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey

Notes: GraphRAG survey paper.

💼 Business Reads

Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek on Why Europe Should Embrace Open-Source AI

Notes: Written by Zuck and Daniel. Read it!

Seven & I Buyout Would Be a Watershed Moment for Japan Takeovers

Notes: This news is utterly fascinating for me because it combines my passion for Japan’s 7-Eleven (read this from #27) and Canada (Couche-Tard was my local dépanneur growing up 🍁). Read more about Montréal’s dépanneurs, they are as culturally significant as the bodegas of NYC. I’ll be watching this story carefully.