#38
कृत्रिम AI and India Models, Optimus Gen 2, Project Ellmann, Zero123, Phi2, OpenAI bans Tiktok, xvtwitter, react-glow, AoDS, npm-publish, gpu-poor and more
👋🏻 Hola & welcome to the 38ᵗʰ Nibble (more than what any of us had imagined).
It’s already the holiday/end-of-year season and if you are spending your time reading emails → congratulations!! you are our ideal reader. (also, nerd, who needs to touch some grass but let’s move on)
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #38 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
🎄 If you are doing Advent of Code 2023, we have a discord channel for discussions.
What’s happening 📰
🇮🇳 Last week, we talked about Sarvam raising funds for building LLMs in India, but this week Bhavish from Ola did a Friday release of Krutrim (कृत्रिम) AI (Sanskrit word for Artificial), a child company of Ola, which plans to build a complete Silicon to APIs/Platform lifecycle in & from India that too from scratch. Some big pointers:
They are rolling out early access and might go GA by the end of the month.
They have built a foundational model from India, trained on 2 trillion tokens (~8-10B params).
They will release their chips to do AI computation by the End of 2025.
🪷 On that note, a lot of interesting development has been happening in Indian Language Models as well:
🐘 SarvamAI launches OpenHathi-Hi-v0.1, the first Hindi LLM from their OpenHathi series of models. This model is trained under compute and data constraints to show that we can get GPT-3.5-like performance on Indic languages at very cheap costs.
🌾 KissanAI launches Dhenu 1.0 which is a domain-specific agriculture model, trained on high-quality conversational dataset, specially focused on Indian agriculture practices.
🤡 You know how changing your name doesn’t change who are you?
TitTokByteDance managed to get blocked again, but this time by OpenAI, yes!!. OpenAI suspended ByteDance’s account as they used GPT to train their model. I mean come on everyone did it, if they were not from China maybe it would be allowed.📖 Google’s Project Ellmann (named after the biographer Richard David Ellmann of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde biography fame) lets AI models tell someone’s “life story”. It would take users’ search results and photos to make a chatbot capable of telling a “bird’s-eye” approach to a person’s life. People could use Ellmann to ask questions like “Did I have a pet”, or “When did my sibling last visit”. (At this point we’re discovering clever ways to intelligently store and retrieve our memories onto machines faster than we are creating the memories. Just saying.)
📦 Stability AI announced Stable Zero123, which allows you to generate 3D Object views from a single image.
🚶🏻 Tesla introduced their latest humanoid prototype Optimus Gen 2, it’s now 30% faster, lost 10kg weight, and has some new sensors for hands to handle delicate objects.
Φ Microsoft drops Phi-2, a 2.7B model trained and distilled on 1.4T tokens of synthetic and real data. Despite its smol size, it matches or outperforms larger models that have up to 25x times more parameters, on various academic and coding benchmarks. It is designed to have common-sense reasoning, language understanding, and logical capabilities.
⛑️ Remember last week when Gemini Ultra benchmarked using CoT @ 32 with CoT 5? Microsoft strikes back at Gemini with Medprompt+ which improves its performance on MMLU beyond Gemini’s.
🤳 Our timelines are getting closer to Her (2013):
🙋♀️ DigiAI launched an “AI Romantic Companionship” and it took Twitter by storm for a few days. They have a single button on their website which says “Start your Relationship” eww.
We tried it and it turns out, it is not as good as it seems in the demo videos. It lacks depth and expressiveness. We are saved for now. Go touch wood and mistletoe while we still are young and humans.🙈 Remember Animate Anyone released by Alibaba Group last week? They release Outfit Anyone (it does exactly what it says) and pipelining it with Animaet Anyone is exactly the last thing our attention-deficit world needs right now Watch the full video on YouTube here.
What brings us to awe 😳
🤯 If you start with two 1kg blocks, sliding on the frictionless plane and assume they hit each other with a perfectly elastic collision (so transfer all of their momentum) and there is a fixed wall on one side of the block. All good till now? Now we calculate the total number of collisions that happen here. What we notice here is that for [Video by 3b1b]
1kg-1kg blocks there are a total of 3 collisions
1kg-100kg blocks there are a total of 31 collisions
1kg-10,000kg blocks there are a total of 314 collisions.
You might have noticed what’s happening here, so if you increase the mass of one block in the powers of 100, the digits in the number of collisions increase to always match 𝞹. (I’m pretty sure readers by now know we are nerds obsessed with Pi, 42, base64, DNS, and whatnot! but this is crazy!)
💪🏻 Advent of Distributed Systems: when AoC problems make you feel dumb, go solve real problems.
🤡 How Many Lines of C does it take to execute a + b in Python? it's just crazy to think about what all happens for that single statement.
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
🎂 Your birthday creeps by 1 week-day every year but creeps by 2 days in a leap year. (not sure about you, but one of us is always excited to know if their Birthday falls on a weekend in the coming year or not)
💡 Tip: You might have noticed that after Elon took over Twitter, the embeds stopped adding previews in Discord, Telegram, and more. Well, there is an easy fix for that. Just change the
twitter
part of the URL toxvtwitter
and it’ll show the preview. (GitHub Repo)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🧱 ts-diagram: Create and plan your code structure using TypeScript
🤛🏻 Emoji Cloud: a package that lets you add vector emojis to your code, with a single line of code.
💡 react-glow: Add a mouse-tracing glow effect to React components.
☁️ sshx: multi-player SSH with shared cursors and infinite canvas. Too much fun for Friday night deployment parties.
🗞️ unwrapped.dev: A yearly recap of your GitHub, like Spotify Wrapped.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🐝 uneebee: Platform for creating interactive courses. (written in Elixir)
📦 npm-publish: GitHub Action to publish to NPM
✨ CopilotKit: Build in-app AI chatbots 🤖, and AI-powered Textareas ✨, into React web apps.
📚 GitHub Learning Pathways: Self-paced tutorials to get the most out of GitHub
💰GPU Poor: Calculate GPU memory requirement and token/s for any LLM
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🎥 Unconventional Advice for Founders by Garry Tan (CEO & President of YC).
(would recommend watching this if you ever want to be a founder)
Some (better watch videos) key points from the video 👇🏻When it comes to tech startups pretty much everything out there you read in media is a first-hand account of something that happened 6 months ago.
“startups end up taking on the personality of their founders”, seek therapy earlier than later
As a founder, you must play lots of Katamari Damacy IRL, when picking up customers, capital & co-founders.
His journey from Chinese immigrant → Microsoft employee → working at startups → a hip-hop editorial photographer → overachiever he is today.
🏴☠️ If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing by Cory Doctorow
criticizes the use of DRM in products & how they can roll back features post-purchase.
gave the example of how HP pushes updates to block 3rd-party ink & Adobe lost the deal to include Pantone colors.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“If you're passionate about your work, it makes the people around you want to be involved too.”
— Wanda Sykes
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Weekly Standup 🫡
Nibbler P had an interesting but busy week. It was his last day at his previous company today (his first job switch), so that’s something! He also caught up with some of his old friends. In the coming week, you’ll be seeing him being a little more active in contributing to Nibble.
Nibbler A had quite a busy week at work and did some chores over the weekend. He is super sad that he’s now lagging on AoC (by at least 7 problems,
thala for a reason). But a little happy that he was able to catch up on the JJK episode on Thursday itself.
thank you for releasing this