​AI Tech Circle​

Hey Reader!

This week, I had a chance to visit WebSummit Qatar. This was the first time Web Summit was held in the Middle East, and I received an invitation as part of the Web Summit Qatar scholarship program. I was thinking, shall I go or not? Finally, I have decided to move on with the plan, and now I can say it was the right decision. As the world of AI is everywhere, the whole event was dominated by AI talks and showcases.

I had a chance to attend many sessions, and I can say that it was the first time I spent considerable time visiting the different Pods from so many startups, starting from the Alpha, Beta, and Growth stages to attending master classes. It gave me a different perspective and a chance to understand niche solutions to solve specific business problems.

Another thing about the event was, it was organizing Monday/Tuesday night networkings far from the conference areas. Which brought attendees to have open discussions on a wide range of topics.

As the focus was on AI throughout the event, the most notable sessions were from Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, and many more.

The most innovative session from the creator of Groq Jonathan Ross with the live demo, on the showcase of LPU (Language Processing Unit) Inference Engine is a new end-to-end processing unit system that provides the fastest inference for computationally intensive applications like large language models (LLMs).

Weekly News & Updates…

This week’s unveiling of new AI tools and products drives the technology revolution forward.

1. ​StarCoder2: announced by BigCode Community, managed by ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and Nvidia. It is trained in 619 programming languages. It can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more.
2. ​Prompt engineering for business performance, several techniques documented for Claude
3. ​Detectron2 is FAIR’s next-generation platform for object detection and segmentation. It is Meta AI’s library that provides state-of-the-art detection and segmentation algorithms.
4. ​Large language models and moonshots: Are you thinking too big? WEF has covered a simple strategic framework for deploying LLMs
5. ​What the Heck is RAG? And How to Build It

The Cloud: the backbone of the AI revolution

• ​Guide to prompt engineering: Translating natural language to SQL with Llama 2. This article gives you insight into how to use natural language for SQL queries.
• ​Use RAG for drug discovery with Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock
• ​Microsoft and Mistral AI announce new partnership to accelerate AI innovation and introduce Mistral Large first on Azure

Favorite Tip Of The Week:

Here’s my favorite resource of the week.

• ​How to make AI Real, a session from Groq CEO & Founder Jonathan Ross, at Web Summit Qatar 2024. Watch a 21-minute video on the live demo of talking with the Generative AI.

Potential of AI

• ​What Is Sovereign AI? The country should produce artificial intelligence using its infrastructure, data, workforce, and business networks.

Things to Know

• ​Code samples to get started building generative AI apps on Google Cloud. Code samples and best practices to help you quickly get started on different use cases covering customer service, increasing the productivity of software development and content development, and driving process efficiencies through automation.

The Opportunity…

Podcast:

• This week’s Open Tech Talks episode 128 is “Crafting a Mindful Digital Diet through AI with Alex Fink. Alex is the founder of ‘Other Web’

Apple | Spotify | Google Podcast

Courses to attend:

• ​Building Production-Grade LLM Apps, scheduled for 7th March, register quickly to attend.
• ​Get started with Gemma Google’s NEW open-source LLM model
• ​Machine Learning with Graphs from Stanford CS224W. This course covers essential research on the structure and analysis of such large social and information networks and on models and algorithms that abstract their basic properties
• ​Geometric Deep Learning Course – Second Edition (2022). Video recording of the Second Edition course taught in the African Master in Machine Intelligence in July 2022.

Events:

• ​Leap, KSA, 4-7 March, 2024, Malham, Saudi Arabia
• ​Nvidia GTC AI Conference and Expo, March 18–21, San Jose, CA and Virtual
• ​KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe March 19-22 | Paris, France
• ​GISEC, Global, 23-24 April, Dubai, UAE

Tech and Tools…

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Data Sets…

• ​GLUE: The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark is a collection of resources for training, evaluating, and analyzing natural language understanding systems.
• ​TriviaQA: A Large Scale Dataset for Reading Comprehension and Question Answering
• ​SQuAD is a reading comprehension dataset consisting of questions posed by crowd workers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage, or the question might be unanswerable.
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Other Technology News

Want to stay on the cutting edge?

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

• New Hugging Face Vulnerability Exposes AI Models to Supply Chain Attacks, as reported by The Hacker News​
• OpenAI rival Cohere says some AI startups build Bugatti sports cars, ‘We make F-150s, an interview published by CNBC​

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 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.