DSB #149

Hi,

Christmas is over, the New Year is incoming, and so is the DSB – to make your life better! But first some general information, you can now subscribe to or unsubscribe from the DSB directly on our web. Now, start improving your life today with our very first article about the new version of BERT. Happy New Year!

And as always, enjoy your reading.

 

Science

https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-12-19-modernbert.html – ModernBERT is a new family of state-of-the-art encoder-only models designed to replace older generation encoders like BERT. It was developed by Answer.AI and LightOn and brings several improvements: a larger context window, greater memory efficiency and faster performance. I like that the authors stress the importance of practicality. The article also mentions rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) which is state of the art positional encoding. (rcmd by reader)

https://github.com/andrewyng/aisuite – aisuite is an open-source Python library recently announced on LinkedIn by Mr. Ng. It provides a unified and user-friendly interface for working with multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Mistral…).

https://explosion.ai/blog/pdfs-nlp-structured-data – Processing PDFs is always a challenge. In this practical article, Ines Montani presents a new modular workflow for converting PDFs to structured data. The workflow leverages tools such as Prodigy, spaCy and Docling.

https://modal.com/gpu-glossary – I love this. Comprehensive yet brief and understandable GPU glossary that covers topics across various categories, including device hardware, device software, and host software.

Pop

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/global-ai-power-rankings-stanford-hai-tool-ranks-36-countries-ai – Classical HAI Stanford index ranks 36 countries in AI. The USA leads significantly, followed by China in second place and the United Kingdom is third. Interestingly, Belgium, the only KBC country listed, ranks 13th. Where is Czechia? The answer is here, in this another more generous AI index, where we placed 33rd.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/international/2024/11/28/ai-cuts-scam-losses-speeds-up-home-loans-at-top-australia-bank/ – Amidst all the hysterical hype around AGI, genAI proves its worth where it matters. For example, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) successfully lowered frauds by 30% and cut call center customer wait times by 40% with its help.

https://medium.com/@evolutionequity/limitations-of-current-ai-rapid-development-and-what-is-beyond-1a406295c0c9 – Czech AI expert and enterpreneur Michal Pěchouček summarizes the current status of AI, describes potential challenges, and provides his prediction about the future lookout.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/principal-engineer-roles-framework-mai-lan-tomsen-bukovec-142df – What is the role of a principal engineer acording to AWS’s Vice President of Technology? Read this article, which outlines a structured approach to defining the responsibilities and expectations for the position in AWS.

Joke

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1him4ls/gottagofast/#lightbox – Faster than light…