Their own (presumably cherry picked) benchmarks put their models near the 'middle of the market' models (llama3 3b, qwen3 1.7b), not competing with claude, chatgtp, or gemini. These are not models you'd want to directly interact with. but these models can be very useful for things like classification or simple summarization or translation tasks.
These models quite impressive for their size: even an older raspberry pi would be able to handle these.
There's still a lots of use for this kind of model
The average of MMLU Redux,MuSR,GSM8K,Human Eval+,IFEval,BFCLv3 for this model is 70.5 compared to 79.3 for Qwen3, that being said the model is also having a 16x smaller size and is 6x faster on a 4090....so it is a tradeoff that is pretty respectable
I'd be interested in fine tuning code here personally
One thing I think would be very useful here is national archive data: there will be thousands of letters, memos and official documents shared between people alive back then under the care of a museum or government.
One of my dreams is to help digitise and make available the thousands of Second World War-era documents in the National Archives at Kew.
We’re at the point where a simple phone camera and a robust LLM-powered process can digitise ENORMOUS amounts of archive material almost effortlessly [1]. This is going to be enormous for historians eager to dive into the millions of interesting primary sources.
The teachings of the Buddha explicitly encouraged it. Buddhism is the only religion I know of that instructs you to fully abandon it, as once you’ve fully grokked what it has to teach… you won’t need it any more.
IIRC the Buddha said it was like carrying the oar of a boat: once you have used it to get you to your destination (nibbhana), carrying it is needless.
The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap.
The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare.
Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?
I was surprised to see Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein not mentioned here.
They’re the founding forces behind the Insight Meditation Society in MA, which although isn’t the West Coast, is perhaps the most influential force in popular Buddhism in the West.
Kornfield also set up Spirit Rock Meditation Centre in California though, which gets tens of thousands of visitors a year.
Having dived really quite far into Buddhism over the past five years, I’ve found their flavour of Insight Meditation (as per the New Burmese Method based on Mahasi Sayadaw’s teachings) absolutely life changing.
A great read, thank you for sharing.
If anybody is interested in reading further - Goldstein’s podcasts, Mahasi Sayadaw’s writing, Kornfield’s introductory texts and ANYTHING by Bhikku Bodhi are a phenomenal place to start.
Be Here Now network, which started with Ram Dass, still does mostly weekly videos from Goldstein and Kornfield. Search for their names where you listen to your podcasts. Incredibly good to listen to.
Other ones I listen to are in the Thai Forrest Tradition, started from Ajahn Chah and now talks from Abhayagiri, Amaravati. Other one from Mahayana, which has so many talks and probably the best book I've read, Seeing That Frees, is Rob Burbea. He died from cancer in 2020, which is incredibly sad given how young he still was and much he's produced for us.
All of these people give different angles on the teachings of the Buddha. I highly suggest listening and reading from these people and the differing traditions all talking for similar goals of how to look at the world for the acknowledgement of dukkha (pain / suffering) and how to deal with it. You don't need to sit and meditate either to get the benefits.
yea I'd +1 this. It's a real blindspot in the author's writing. I don't think you can write about meditation in the US without mentioning IMS. Headspace and all the other mcmindfulness apps that start with "focus on your breath" are all derived from Insight meditation. I've sat IMS, it's an incredible facility.
I think the MacBook Pro 2015 was probably unrivalled as a laptop for around 6 years, in terms of build quality, specification and… sheer love. I had a work issue machine and absolutely worshipped it, so I was sad not to see that here.
I remember when Apple unveiled the first ever MacBook Air. That was one of Jobs’ all-time greatest presentations, and it was a huge step forwards that still influences the laptops we use today.
Also missing… the white Apple earphones that came with the iPod! They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL for most of the noughties.
I think FaceTime ought to do well here too. That’s done more to bring the 1980s vision of “everybody will video call all the time” into reality than anything else I think (I know Apple weren’t the first, but they made it ubiquitous).
> They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL
That's the trick Apple during the second Jobs tenure was most brilliant at: turning consumer electronics into a fashion accessory. Literally, making the sound of the earphones a secondary consideration, relative to their earring value.
Something tickles me about describing the forced inclusion of Copilot as “entry points” in things like Notepad. It reveals Microsoft’s intentions SO precisely.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
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