Happy Monday!

Welcome to the 5 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday! 🤯If you aren’t subscribed, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing here.

In this week’s issue:

• 🗞️ Amazon's palm-scanning technology powered by generative AI, Microsoft's plan to capture carbon with limestone and concrete, and how contextual AI can build next-generation language models for enterprise

• 🛠️ A deep dive into the architecture of databases, 6 principles to apply from athletes directly in the workplace, and an amazing gallery of OG images for your next website

• 💡 Steal this business idea: Kontext, a data-driven platform that uses contextual AI to build next-generation language models for enterprise applications

Reading time: 5 minutes

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Food for Thought

Sharpen your mindset

Mindset: Success is not something that happens by chance or luck. It is the result of hard work, dedication, and persistence. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to work for them every day. Don't let your dreams remain dreams. Make them your reality.

Example: Estée Lauder, the founder of the famous cosmetics company, was a perfect example of someone who worked for her success. She started her business with just four products and a passion for beauty. She personally sold her products to customers, demonstrating their quality and effectiveness. She also gave away free samples to attract more buyers. She worked tirelessly to expand her business and create new products. Today, Estée Lauder is one of the largest and most respected beauty companies in the world.

Action item: Today, take one step towards your success. Identify one goal that you want to achieve and one action that you can do to get closer to it. It can be something small, like making a phone call, sending an email, or doing some research. The important thing is to do something that moves you forward. Remember, success is not a destination, but a journey. Enjoy the process and work hard for it.

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The Weekly Pulse

Tech, AI, and business news worth your time

🦅 Falcon 180B: A New Open-Source AI Model That Rivals Google's PaLM-2 (4 min)

Brief: Hugging Face AI community releases Falcon 180B, an open-source large language model (LLM) with 180 billion parameters trained on 3.5 trillion tokens. Falcon 180B outperforms previous open-source LLMs and achieves near parity with Google's commercial model PaLM-2 on several natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

Takeaway: Falcon 180B is a remarkable achievement for the open-source AI community, demonstrating the potential of collaborative and distributed efforts to advance the state-of-the-art in AI. Falcon 180B also showcases the power of large language models to handle complex and diverse NLP challenges, opening new possibilities for research and innovation in various domains.

🗣️ Salesforce Announces Slack GPT, Unlocks Power of Conversational AI for Work (2 min)

Brief: Salesforce unveils Slack GPT, a new conversational AI experience integrated into Slack that will help customers work smarter, learn faster, and communicate better by using generative AI app integrations, different language models, and real-time customer data insights from the Customer 360 and Data Cloud.

Takeaway: This announcement shows Salesforce's vision to develop trusted generative AI for business and to make Slack the conversational interface to Customer 360. By bringing AI natively into Slack, Salesforce aims to transform how work gets done and to empower customers and partners to create AI-powered no-code workflows, shared knowledge, and conversations in Slack.

🌐 Google Chrome gets a fresh look with the Material You design (2 min)

Brief: Google is rolling out a new design update for Chrome on the desktop, featuring rounded corners, Material You elements, and a revamped Chrome Web Store. The new look is available in public preview and will be released to all users soon.

Takeaway: The design update is part of Google's effort to make Chrome more modern, consistent, and personalized across different platforms and devices. It also shows Google's commitment to improving its Safe Browsing tools, which will now check sites against a real-time list of malicious sites. Chrome users can expect a more aesthetic and secure browsing experience with the new update.

🌴 Amazon One: How Generative AI Trains Palm-Scanning Technology (4 min)

Brief: Amazon One is a contactless experience that allows customers to use their palm signature for various activities, such as paying at a store or entering a venue. The technology behind Amazon One is based on generative AI, which creates millions of synthetic images of palms to train the AI model that recognizes the unique features of each palm.

Takeaway: Amazon One showcases how generative AI can solve complex problems and create new possibilities for convenience and innovation in retail, entertainment, and access. By using generative AI to train its palm-scanning technology, Amazon demonstrates its leadership and vision in the AI race and its commitment to providing its customers and partners with cutting-edge solutions.

🌎 Microsoft's Carbon Capture Plan Involves Limestone and Concrete (2 min)

Brief: Microsoft partners with Heirloom Carbon, a startup that uses crushed limestone to capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into calcium oxide, a substance that can be used for concrete. The process is powered by renewable energy and aims to help Microsoft achieve its goal of becoming carbon-negative.

Takeaway: This initiative shows Microsoft's commitment to tackling the climate crisis and supporting the carbon capture industry, which is developing various methods to remove and reuse carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By using limestone and concrete, Microsoft could also reduce the need for cement, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

📰 Contextual AI: Building Next-Generation Language Models for Enterprise (4 min)

Brief: Contextual AI, a new startup founded by former Facebook AI Research and Hugging Face leaders, announces its vision to build next-generation language models for enterprise use cases. The startup aims to address the challenges of data privacy, customizability, and compliance that current large language models face in real-world deployments.

Takeaway: This announcement signals the growing demand for AI solutions that work for work, and the potential of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a paradigm that combines large language models with external memory, to create more trustworthy, adaptable, and precise AI systems. Contextual AI could be a game-changer for businesses that want to leverage the power of language models without compromising on their data and quality standards.

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The Rabbit Hole

Tools, trends, and resources curated to get you ahead

DEEP DIVE (database architecture) → A deep dive into the architecture of databases

ARTICLE (sport to work) → 6 principles to apply from athletes directly in the workplace

GITHUB REPO (web framework designed for speed) → A website build tool for the modern web with powerful developer experience and lightweight output.

ARTICLE (data structures) → Text-editor data structures we use every day and explained in simple words

TREND (large-scale engineering) → Lessons learned from consolidating ML models in a large-scale recommendation system

TOOL (design inspiration) → An amazing gallery of OG images for your next website

GITHUB REPO (OS) → A simple, easy-to-use, elegant open-source Personal Cloud system

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What If?

The business idea you should steal

What? A data-driven platform that uses contextual AI to build next-generation language models for enterprise applications. It enables enterprises to leverage natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to enhance their business processes, such as customer service, marketing, governance, risk management, document management, workforce management, and more.

How? The platform would use a large-scale recommendation system to consolidate multiple machine-learning models into a single language model that can handle various tasks and domains. The platform would also use contextual AI to adapt the language model to different situations and scenarios based on the input data and the desired output. The platform could provide a user-friendly interface that allows enterprises to easily integrate the language model into their existing applications and workflows.

Why? The global NLP market size is expected to grow from USD 11.6 billion in 2019 to USD 28.5 billion by 2024. NLP is a key technology that enables enterprises to extract insights from unstructured text data and generate natural language outputs that can improve communication and decision-making. However, most NLP solutions are either generic or domain-specific, which limits their applicability and effectiveness in different contexts and use cases. By using contextual AI and a large-scale recommendation system, the platform can offer a more versatile and customized NLP solution that can cater to various enterprise needs and scenarios.

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Burp-A-Laugh

The most important meal of your day

That’s it for today! ☀️

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Thanks for spending part of your Monday morning with Hungry Minds.
See you in a week — Alex.