Rami's Readings #90 - Mistral Released Pixtral Large 🚀
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #90 - 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.
Apéro & Intellect Is Coming to New York City!
Apéro & Intellect is a curated series of intimate gatherings discussing Artificial Intelligence designed to stimulate both your mind and your palate. I am pleased to announce Apéro & Intellect #10 will take place in 🗽 New York City on Tuesday, December 10th, at 8am. It will be fun! Only 2 spots left!
🤖 AI Reads
Mistral Released Pixtral Large 🚀
Notes: Mistral released a larger version of Pixtral (Multimodal LLM). Fits 30 high-res images in context. Available on Hugging Face.
Achieving Efficient, Flexible, and Portable Structured Generation with XGrammar
Notes: Structured (JSON, XML, etc.) Generation is important for LLM applications. XGrammar brings a flexible and zero-overhead generation everywhere.
pingcap/autoflow: Graph RAG-Based Conversational Knowledge Base Tool
Notes: Open-source conversational search - as always, it is important to stay up to date with the open source community.
facebookresearch/Kats: A Kit to Analyze Time Series Data
Notes: Newish time series forecasting and anomaly detectionPpython library from Facebook Research.
DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview Is Now Live
Notes: Great to see DeepSeek keeping up with o1 preview.
nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper: Verbatim Automatic Speech Recognition with Improved Word-Level Timestamps and Filler Detection
Notes: CrisperWhisper detects fillers and pause words much better than regular Whisper. This level of ASR is important if you’re trying to build creative apps a la Descript.
💼 Business Reads
AI’s $1 Trillion Hysteria Offers Fat Payday for Wall Street Bankers
Notes: It is really approaching hysterical levels at this point.
US Homebuilder Sentiment Reaches Seven-Month High After Election
Notes: Good news for US homebuyers.
Wall Street Banks Team With BlackRock to Provide Bond Price Data
Notes: Woah! Just a reminder, the bond market is much larger than the stock market so better price data will result in improved market efficiency.
HSBC Managers Are Competing to Keep Their Jobs in CEO’s Revamp
Notes: Hunger games in banking are not new, but it is still interesting to read.
Business School Professors Contend With a Fraught Publishing Landscape
Notes: Sigh… scams are everywhere.
Why Luxury Cheese Is Being Targeted by Black Market Criminals
Notes: I did not expect to include cheese in my imaginary portfolio of luxury goods. Wine, watches, Birkins… and cheese! There is a joke to be made here. I’ll publish the best one I get.
🎨 Culture Reads
63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide
Notes: I love Szechuanese and Fujian cuisine the most. This is an excellent guide to the amazing diversity in Chinese cuisine. Hot pot anyone?
Signing off from Redmond.