weekend ai reads for 2024-11-08

November 08, 2024

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: AUTHENTICATION

AI Can Now Authenticate Sneakers by Their Smell — An AI start-up working with a major sneaker resale platform believes it has found a way to authenticate footwear and potentially other products through the chemical signatures in their scent. / Business of Fashion (8 minute read)

Aesthetic launches the ‘Shazam for fashion’ / Tech Crunch (6 minute read)

 

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

Leslie Lamport (source)

 

👥 FOR EVERYONE

What Trump’s victory could mean for AI regulation / Tech Crunch (10 minute read)

AI4Culture — Empowering Cultural Heritage through Artificial Intelligence / ai4culture (4 minute read)

It aims to empower users with the knowledge and skills needed to leverage AI for preserving, managing, and promoting cultural heritage.

  • tools, datasets, and upskilling materials

AI search could break the web — Developers should act before governments fall back on blunt tools. / MIT Technology Review (11 minute read)

  • slightly hyperbolic title (aren’t they all?) but interesting nonetheless

 

📚 FOUNDATIONAL

Understanding Multimodal LLMs / Sebastian Raschka, Substack (sorry) (27 minute read)

How I write code using Cursor: A review / Arguing with Algorithms (12 minute read)

  • both a primer and insight into how A.i. is changing coding

  • related: GitHub Spark — Can we enable anyone to create or adapt software for themselves, using AI and a fully-managed runtime? / Github Next (10 minute read)

 

🚀 FOR LEADERS

  • some companies think it’s not “just IT”

AI in Production Guide / Azure, Github (4 minute read)

Our aim is to demystify the complexities of AI project development in Azure, offering a clear roadmap from conceptualizing AI solutions to their full-scale deployment. By consolidating Azure AI information and tools, we facilitate a smoother and more efficient integration of AI into your business operations.

Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Innovation / Aidan Toner-Rodgers, National Bureau of Economic Research (46 minute read)

AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions. … Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.

 

🎓 FOR EDUCATORS

Our results reveal a brighter picture for academic pre-training: for example, although Pythia-1B was originally trained on 64 GPUs for 3 days, we find it is also possible to replicate this model (with the same hyper-parameters) in 3x fewer GPU-days: i.e. on 4 GPUs in 18 days. We conclude with a cost-benefit analysis to help clarify the trade-offs between price and pre-training time. We believe our benchmark will help academic researchers conduct experiments that require training larger models on more data.

 

📊 FOR TECHNOLOGISTS

json_repair — A python module to repair invalid JSON, commonly used to parse the output of LLMs / mangiucugna, Github

  • works as advertised

  • should just be built-in to the LLMs because their JSON frequently has issues, in our experience

Aide — The open-source AI-native IDE.

  • no one needs to learn another IDE, but worth trying

Making ChatGPT Friends with Numbers — So you can trust its results and work really faster / Tobias Zwingmann (8 minute read)

Strategy #1: Code Generation

Strategy #2: Tool Use

Strategy #3: Rankings

 

🎉 FOR FUN

Oasis / oasis-model, Github

We’re excited to announce Oasis, the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model. It’s a video game, but entirely generated by AI. Oasis is the first step in our research towards more complex interactive worlds.

  • demo has 10-minute limit and only runs in Chrome

Holiwise — Personalised Travel Destinations, Itineraries & Hotels

  • beware of hallucinations, but top three recommendations seemed to be accurate in our hometowns; links to Expedia for accommodations

  • how is this better than skimming wikipedia?

 

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

How to Build a Platformer with AI - Full Tutorial / Rosebud AI (29 minute read)

 

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