This Week I Learned - Week #50 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Mistral AI has released Mixtral 8x7B, a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights. Licensed under Apache 2.0. Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. It matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks. It gracefully handles a context of 32k tokens. It handles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It shows strong performance in code generation.

* Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal unveiled its first large language model (LLM) 'Krutrim. It has the ability to use Indian languages and an Indian context. Krutrim in Sanskrit means 'Made artificially'. 

* Microsoft Copilot Studio - Implementation Guide [PPTX]

* OCI’s latest managed PostgreSQL service is featuring 3X faster performance compared to self-managed clusters and 60% less cost than Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL.

* Oracle has opened their 47th cloud region in Bogota, Colombia

* In the YouTube video titled Using Your Own Data with Large Language Models (LLMs) aka Making JohnBot! (58 minutes), John Savill walks us through how to use your own data with Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT by leveraging Azure AI Search.

* Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is currently the main method for aligning LLMs with human values and preferences. RLHF is also used for further tuning a base LLM to align with values and preferences that are specific to your use case.  

* The Executive’s Guide to generative AI [PDF]  

* The <strong> element is for content that is of greater importance, while the <b> element is used to draw attention to text without indicating that it's more important. Each element is meant to be used in certain types of scenarios, and if you want to bold text for decoration, you should instead actually use the CSS font-weight property. While HTML 4 defined <strong> as indicating a stronger emphasis, HTML 5 defines <strong> as representing "strong importance for its contents." While <em> is used to change the meaning of a sentence as spoken emphasis does ("I love carrots" vs. "I love carrots"), <strong> is used to give portions of a sentence added importance (e.g., "Warning! This is very dangerous.") Both <strong> and <em> can be nested to increase the relative degree of importance or stress emphasis, respectively. - MDN

* To set reversed ordering of list items in an ordered list, use the reversed attribute of the <ol> element in HTML. It was introduced in HTML5 and shows the numbering in descending order.

* Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania has been conducting a webinar series very month on a Wednesday - CASI Data Seminar Series 2023. It is practitioner-focused, aimed at researchers, students, academics, journalists, those in government and the private sector, who use data in their work, and would like to be exposed to exciting datasets that they could work with. In the webinar, a leading practitioner presents on an area of Indian data that she has deep working knowledge of, followed by questions from the Zoom audience. A pre-session handout consolidates knowledge for all attendees, and slides are made available after. 

* ISRO'S EO Data portal Bhoonidhi  offers access to an extensive archive of Remote Sensing data from 44 satellites, including Indian and Foreign Remote Sensing sensors acquired since 1986. The best free data till now was 15m from USA & 10m from Europe. The 5 meter datasets are from our Indian satellites Resourcesat-2/2A. Software like QGIS can help you do your analysis with the downloaded files.

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* Out of 3.5 crore state population, 44,12,882 people are getting pensions every month. - Telangana State's Progressive Path 10th Year [PDF]

* A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche pays homage to the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.

* Companies including United Breweries, AB InBev, Bira and Carlsberg together own seven breweries in Karnataka, all operating in three shifts and are among their largest in the country. In India, several state governments also either control liquor retailing or wholesale distribution or both, and taxes on liquor form a major source of their revenues. More than 50% of the retail price goes to state and central governments by way of VAT and excise duty. In August, Karnataka announced a 20% increase in additional excise duty on Indian-made liquor. Beer accounts for 15% of Karnataka's alcohol excise revenue. The state consumes 3.8 million hectolitre beer a year and accounts for 13% of India's overall volume sales. India, a tropical country with promising demographics and increasing affluence, is one of the largest beer markets for the world’s top brewers. But it is heavily taxed, and the government has issued licences to only 80,000 alcohol outlets in the country, where more than 20 million people enter the legal age for drinking every year. Beer accounts for just a tenth of the country’s spirits market, with per capita consumption of two litres, lower than that in most Asian markets. - ET

* Over half of India’s domestic demand for edible oil is met through imports. - ET

* Walt Disney's India business unit Disney Star has about 80 channels. Reliance's media unit Viacom18 has 38 television channels, including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV. Viacom18 has the TV rights for domestic and international matches run by the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Disney has TV rights for the popular Indian Premier League (IPL) until 2027.  Disney's streaming content includes global blockbusters, movies from the Marvel universe as well as National Geographic documentaries. A Disney-Reliance India entertainment merger may be beset with antitrust headaches - ET

* Nations at COP28 climate talks compromised on “transitioning away from fossil fuels” rather than a complete “phaseout” of fossil fuels. It took 28 of these annual conferences on climate change before governments would be willing to name the elephant in the room — fossil fuels — the burning of which is the main driver of planetary warming. - NY Times

KALtoon by Economist's Kevin Kal Kallaugher

* Pay attention to what you can pay attention to discern what to do with their life - Amy Krouse Rosenthal 

* “One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious.” — Paul Graham