The current state of Large Language Models, their costs and performance was discussed following up on Dr. Holger Schmidt, Editorial Editor at German newspaper FAZ, advertising an “AI Overview” article. [Update 2025-01-06]: the FAZ benchmark used results from Artificial Analysis Quality Index. In this benchmark, GPT-4o mini ranks higher than GPT... Read more... 05 Jan 2025 - 2 minute read
WirtschaftsWoche, a German business magazine and key source to decision makers, features German-led (but US-based) AI startup uiAgent. Having prototyped something somewhat similar and with top AI Labs preparing launches (1, 2, 3, and more), their core tech appears unremarkable to me. But their overall narrative is: replacing up to 50% of offi... Read more... 02 Jan 2025 - less than 1 minute read
Simon Willison has surfaced renewed cases where Google Search shows so-called “featured snippets” (🇩🇪 “hervorgehobene Snippets”) that answer the user search flat-out wrong. Simon writes on Bluesky: This is a particularly bad case-study in how badly AI summarization can go when its exposed to the wilds of the internet Read more... 29 Dec 2024 - 1 minute read
With end-of-year roundups and predictions being in season, it’s also worthwhile to consider what hasn’t, despite ceaseless cheerling, been achieved or announced: Read more... 26 Dec 2024 - less than 1 minute read
Recently, a few open-source tools for converting PDFs, Office documents, and other formats into Markdown have drawn attention. Among these are MarkItDown from Microsoft, Docling from IBM Research, PyMuPDF4LLM, and the Jina AI Reader API. They aim to provide text suitable for downstream tasks, including LLM-driven analysis, without requiring manu... Read more... 14 Dec 2024 - 3 minute read