Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

As a self-taught nutrition enthusiast , I have been contributing to the crowdsourced India database of Open Food Facts - "the Wikipedia of food", by adding and editing products. The decentralized open source project has data on more than 3 million products (as of April 2024) from countries around the world. Open Food Facts (OFF) data is released as Open Data: it can be reused freely by anyone, under the Open Database License (ODBL).  I've been cleaning up & compiling the data by food categories to extract insights . There are multiple ways to get the data : CSV or Excel format using the advanced search feature MongoDB daily export - more than 30GB uncompressed! JSONL daily export CSV daily export API As I was interested in select product features and macronutrient details, I decided to use the OFF API. This is how the process for compiling data for each food category currently goes: 1. I construct the following URL with the fields I require to fetch the nutrition dat

In the TED talk, AI Is Turning into Something Totally New , Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman proposes that a more apt metaphor for AI is a new digital species .  I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives. ...waves of history are clearly speeding up, as each one is amplified and accelerated by the last. And if you look back, it's clear that we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever. The journeys of humanity and technology are now deeply intertwined.  ...today, the most advanced AIs consume more than eight trillion words in a single month of training. And all of this is set to continue.  ...just as the internet gave us the browser and the smartphone gave us apps, the cloud-based supercomputer is ushering in a new era of ubiquitous AIs. Everything will soon be represented by a conversational interface. Or, to put it another way, a personal AI. And these AIs will be infinitely knowledgeable, and soon the

This Week I Learned -  * Meta Llama 3 is out. Built on Meta Llama 3 is Meta AI , an intelligent assistant that is capable of complex reasoning, following instructions, visualizing ideas, and solving nuanced problems. *  How IBM trained Granite LLMs  (PDF, last updated April 4th, 2024, 19 pages) *  The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants  (PDF, April 2024, 274 pages) -  General-purpose foundation models are paving the way for increasingly advanced AI assistants. Capable of planning and performing a wide range of actions in line with a person’s aims, they could add immense value to people’s lives and to society, serving as creative partners, research analysts, educational tutors, life planners and more. * watsonx.ai supports Bring Your Own Model capability. *  There's An AI For That is an AI aggregator site (TAAFT) is the leading AI aggregator, with over 2 million monthly active users and the largest database of AI tools . *  Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis – A Case-Based