This Week I Learned - Week #23 2023
This Week I Learned -
* In the brave new world of Generative AI, English is the high-level programming language; prompts are the syntax and semantics of code; tokens are the intermediary language; the foundation models are the runtime. - Janakiram MSV
* AI is the new electricity. Cloud is the power grid that generates the electricity.
* “Attention is All You Need” is the title of the 2017 paper that demonstrated the use of a self-attention transformer method on which ChatGPT is based. It was written by a team at Google Brain.
* Oracle Open Data makes large data sets available to researchers around the world.
* Christoph Schuhmann, a German high school teacher and two other co-founders met on a Discord server for AI enthusiasts. Catalyzed by the launch of OpenAI’s DALL•E in January 2021, they decided to build their own image dataset. The nonprofit group’s datasets — notably LAION-5B (5 billion text-image pairs) — have been used to train Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google’s Imagen, and other text-to-image models. The largest dataset for training text-to-image generators was assembled by volunteers for roughly $10,000. LAION may be insulated from claims of copyright violation because it doesn’t host its datasets directly. Instead it supplies web links to images rather than the images themselves. - The Batch , DeepLearning.AI's newsletter
* Falcon is a pretrained model based on transformers, developed by Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII). The 40-billion parameter model was pretrained to predict the next token on 1 trillion tokens of text. 820 billion tokens came from RefinedWeb, a curated subset of Common Crawl. The remainder came from books, code, academic papers, technical documents, and conversations on sites including Reddit and StackOverflow. The architecture is similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3 with a few differences. The UAE’s Falcon edged out Meta’s LLaMA in the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard to take the top spot. It’s available via the Apache 2.0 license, which is free for commercial applications.
* We have entered an era of LLM democratization. By showing that smaller models can be highly effective, enabling easy experimentation, diversifying control, and providing incentives that are not profit motivated, open-source initiatives are moving us into a more dynamic and inclusive A.I. landscape. This doesn’t mean that some of these models won’t be biased, or wrong, or used to generate disinformation or abuse. But it does mean that controlling this technology is going to take an entirely different approach than regulating the large players. - Slate
* Amazon hires comedians to fill out Alexa’s stock of jokes
* Slack uses the open source List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words, found on GitHub, to help groom its search suggestions. Open source mapping project OpenStreetMap uses it to sanitize map edits. In 2019, Google researchers reported using the list to filter the web pages included in a collection of billions of words scraped from the web called the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. The initial List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words was drawn up in 2012, by employees of stock photo site Shutterstock. - Wired
* A human with perfect eyesight has 20/20 vision. 20/20 vision means that a person can see an object with clarity or sharpness at 20 feet away. Normal vision is known as “20/20”. If you have 20/60 vision, this means you can see at 20 feet what a person with good vision can see at 60 feet. Bald eagles can have 20/4 or 20/5 vision, meaning they can see 4 or 5 times farther than the average person. That means that what looks sharp and clear to us at 5 feet is just as clear to an eagle from 20 feet away. An eagle's head structure and placement of its eyes allow it to have a wider field of vision – which is almost 360 degrees.
* The United Arab Emirates or simply the Emirates is an authoritarian, elective monarchy formed from a federation of seven emirates, consisting of Abu Dhabi (the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain. In practice, the ruler of Abu Dhabi serves as president while the ruler of Dubai is vice president and also prime minister. The area which is today the United Arab Emirates has been inhabited for over 125,000 years. Following decades of maritime conflict, the coastal emirates became known as the Trucial States with the signing of the General Maritime Treaty with the British in 1820 (ratified in 1853 and again in 1892), which established the Trucial States as a British protectorate. This arrangement ended with independence and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971 following the British withdrawal from its treaty obligations. As of November 2020, alcohol consumption for Muslims and non Muslims is legal. In the past, many Muslims have been sentenced to 80 or 40 lashes for alcohol consumption. Flogging and stoning are legal punishments in the UAE. The requirement is derived from Sharia law, and has been federal law since 2005.
* Amazon.in went live on June 5, 2013. Amazon Prime & Amazon Pay came in 2016.
* Every train passenger with a confirmed berth on an Indian Railways train can buy insurance for just INR0.35 per ticket. Earlier, it was an ‘auto selection’ when tickets were bought online. However, after a few consumer activists protested, buying insurance along with the train ticket was made optional for customers. Only 54% of more than a thousand passengers travelling by the two trains on that ill-fated day of the Balasore train tragedy in which 288 passengers were killed, had opted for the insurance cover. - ET
* India may eventually be Unilever's biggest revenue market; their Indian turnover was €6.87bn ($7.4bn) in 2022, only behind the US's €12.1bn. - ET
* Bajaj Finserv, enters as the 43rd player in the nearly INR42 lakh crore mutual funds industry. The top-eight asset management companies hold a substantial 74% of the industry's assets under management (AUM).
* Many of the new sellers on Amazon.in are backed by large business groups. For instance, Cocoblu has been set up by RattanIndia Enterprises, Rocket Kommerce has been set up by RK Group, while DawnTech Electronics has been set up by Salarpuria-Sattva group.
* All the great tales of the world can be graphed revealing the inner life of a society. - Kurt Vonnegut
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