​AI Tech Circle​

Hey Reader!

Last week was quite busy with the kids attending school, and offices started at full capacity as the people returned from the holidays.

I had a few questions from the community members on the basics of Generative AI, which led me to think about creating some content on the fundamentals. That is why I started a mini-course covering ‘Introduction to Generative AI for Newbies‘. You will get it in 10 emails over the next 10 days.

If you want to get this directly to your inbox, just join here, covering the following topics.

Course Outline: Introduction to Generative AI for Newbies​

1. Introduction to AI and Generative AI
2. Basics of Machine Learning
3. Introduction to Neural Networks
4. Generative Models Overview
5. Deep Dive into Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
6. Exploring Autoencoders
7. Transformers and Attention Mechanisms
8. Ethical Considerations in Generative AI
9. Real-World Applications and Case Studies
10. Conclusion and Future Trends

Before you start this week’s newsletter, I just want to leave the quote from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “This Year, Every Industry Will Become a Technology Industry’”

Weekly News & Updates…

The technology revolution is being fueled by the announcement of new AI tools and products this week.

1. ​GPT Store has been launched
2. ​Kaggle Integration with Keras. all Keras models from the popular Keras CV & Keras NLP libraries are hosted and discoverable on Kaggle Models & have strong integrations with Kaggle Notebooks
3. ​Large language models can be prone to making logical mistakes. An evaluation benchmark for mistake identification across settings and examine how LLMs might learn to correct their own logical errors.
4. ​AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer), a large language model (LLM) based research AI system for diagnostic medical reasoning and conversations
5. ​Together AI Embeddings endpoint: This endpoint is available with 8 open source embeddings models, including top models from the MTEB leaderboard (Massive Text Embedding Benchmark), such as UAE-Large-v1 and BGE models, and the newly released M2-BERT retrieval models for long context (2k, 8k, 32k)

The Cloud: the backbone of the AI revolution

• ​Bridging cloud and conversational AI: LangChain and OCI Data Science platform
• ​Build financial search applications using the Amazon Bedrock Cohere multilingual embedding model
• ​Document AI Custom Extractor, powered by gen AI, is now Generally Available
• ​Picture This: Getty Images Releases Generative AI By iStock Powered by NVIDIA Picasso

Favorite Tip Of The Week:

Here’s my favorite resource of the week.

​Download the report from Nvidia on: AI in Retail: Survey Reveals Latest Trends Driving Technological Advancements in the Industry

Potential of AI

• ​How to build your first semantic search system step-by-step guide with code

Things to Know

• ​Mixtral 8x7B paper: a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model. Mixtral has the same architecture as Mistral 7B, with the difference that each layer comprises 8 feedforward blocks (i.e. experts).

The Opportunity…

Podcast:

• This week’s Open Tech Talks episode 123, “The Future of Call Centers: AI-Powered Voice Solutions with Chris Barkhurst“

Courses to attend:

• ​CS 189 Spring 2022 CDSS – Machine learning
• ​Build LLM Apps with LangChain.js​

Events:

• ​Oracle CloudWorld, Dubai, UAE January 23, 2024

Tech and Tools…

• ​Surya is a multilingual document OCR toolkit
• ​Chatbot UI: The open-source AI chat app for everyone
• ​Convert Github Copilot to ChatGPT
• ​Excalidraw: An open-source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard

Data Sets…

• ​Data.gov: The Home of the U.S. Government’s Open Data
• ​Data.gov.uk: Find data published by the central government, local authorities, and public bodies
• ​Data.europa.eu: the source of open data from the European Union
• ​DATA.GOV.HK: various data from the Government of Hong Kong
• ​OpenData.fcsc.gov.ae: the world of UAE Open Data

Other Technology News

Want to stay on the cutting edge?

Here’s what else is happening in Information Technology you should know about:

• ​CES 2024: The weirdest tech, gadgets and AI claims from Las Vegas​
• ​Do prints from two different fingers belong to the same person? AI can tell​
• ​How to Launch a Successful AI Startup in 2024: A Guide​

Earlier Edition of a newsletter

That’s it!

As always, thanks for reading.

Hit reply and let me know what you found most helpful this week – I’d love to hear from you!

Until next week,

Kashif Manzoor

The opinions expressed here are solely my own conjecture based on experience, practice, and observation. They do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans, or strategies of my current or previous employers or their clients/customers. The objective of this newsletter is to share and learn with the community.