Business
Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI. Nvidia published a paper saying that Small Language Models are better equipped than Large Language Models in handling a variety of small tasks. It makes sense. Why use a big and very expensive tool to handle small tasks? If you use an LLM to craft an email, it doesn’t need to have billions of parameters. What I am curious about is the ramifications of this observation on the AI industry. Every big player races to build huge and wildly expensive models. Can they break those models up into smaller and specialized ones?
Mark Zuckerberg Plans to Shake Up Meta’s A.I. Efforts, Again. I can see why Generative AI can benefit advertisers and Facebook. However, I fail to see how any potential benefits can justify the kind of investments that they have made. Is this a harbinger of reality settling in? Is this going to be another Metaverse?
Corporate America’s Newest Activist Investor: Donald Trump. The US has always been the beacon of free market. I don’t know if having the government participate in the decision making and being held at gunpoint are a good idea. Unprecedented time.
Inside Heineken’s limited-edition NA beer campaign at the US Open. Non-alcoholic beverages, including beer, are having their moment under the sun. It’s interesting that it took a powerhouse like Heineken to come up with its own take on non-alcoholic beer and to roll it out globally. The Dutch company is known for creative marketing campaigns and this one at the US Open is another example.
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
Are mangoes good for diabetes? Indian studies challenge conventional wisdom. Good news for mango lovers. Though, it’s not a license to consume them uncontrollably.
The world’s sixth ‘Blue Zone’: Why Singapore values both quantity and quality of life. Singapore has done a lot of things properly to become a Blue Zone and is an example for other countries in the world to follow.
Should we all be taking vitamin supplements? The best treatment to your health and body is to have a balanced diet. However, many of us don’t eat enough fruits or vegetables. Hence, we need supplements so that our body can have its share of vitamins and minerals which our body can’t make. The problem is that overdosing of these vitamins is not only NOT beneficial, but in some cases, it can be harmful.
Some nuggets of wisdom from one of my favorite financial writers, Morgan Housel.
Google says it dropped the energy cost of AI queries by 33x in one year. “The Google team describes a number of optimizations the company has made that contribute to this. One is an approach termed Mixture-of-Experts, which involves figuring out how to only activate the portion of an AI model needed to handle specific requests, which can drop computational needs by a factor of 10 to 100. They’ve developed a number of compact versions of their main model, which also reduce the computational load. Data center management also plays a role, as the company can make sure that any active hardware is fully utilized, while allowing the rest to stay in a low-power state. The other thing is that Google designs its own custom AI accelerators, and it architects the software that runs on them, allowing it to optimize both sides of the hardware/software divide to operate well with each other. That’s especially critical given that activity on the AI accelerators accounts for over half of the total energy use of a query. Google also has lots of experience running efficient data centers that carries over to the experience with AI.”
Stats
“Only 8% of U.S. consumers engage in online transactions every day”
Minh Quang Duong 
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