Eiad Yafi, PhD.

Assistant Professor, AI, Data Governance, Digital Advisor, Board Member, Data Science, .
#Vision #Future #Ethics

[Senate Foreign Relations Committee @SFRCdems]

"Glad to see the committee adopt my amendment to remove Syria from INEA’s list of bad actors—like Iran, Russia and North Korea. Syria must continue to move away from its past associations and in the direction of democracy, stability and security." -@SenatorShaheen

[Ambassador Tom Barrack @USAMBTurkiye]

Only a week after President Trump’s announcement to lift sanctions, we have already unlocked billions of dollars of international investment for Syria. The $7 billion U.S.-Türkiye-Qatar energy deal in Damascus today is the first major example of regional partnerships and co-operation to carve a new path. Thanks to @POTUS, Syria is OPEN FOR BUSINESS, and thanks to Qatar and Türkiye, the old boundaries and borders are collapsing. Commerce not chaos!

[قتيبة ياسين @k7ybnd99]

بلادك بتستاهل تعد للمليون

[نحو الحرية @hureyaksa]

انهارت وبكت بكاءً مريراً في جلسة الأمم المتحدة وهي تتحدث عن آلام ومعاناة أهل غزة، الدكتورة تانيا الحاج تخاطب العالم:

"نحن لسنا مجهولون، نحن أناس خلقنا الله.. لا يستطيع أهل غزة أن يتحدثوا عن أنفسهم ويدافعوا عن غزة هنا لأن النظام الذي نعيش فيه حاليًا لا يعترف بحقهم في الحياة"..

[Charles Lister @Charles_Lister]

NEW -- the Christian Church in #Latakia rebuffs rumors of instability, saying a meeting with the interim gov't GSS "reassured."

"Do not get carried away with rumors," it warns.

[Kinda El-Khatib @elkhatib_kinda]

من بعد تحرك الغرف الرقمية ل اعلام حزب الله والاعلام الاسدي المخلوع ، بنشر تغريدات كاذبة استخدموها لصور وفيديوهات بحجة ان الامن العام السوري "يبيد الأقليات " العلوية

هذه سلسة تغريدات توثق كذبهم ، اتمنى نشرها وتعميمها لاسقاط مظلومية الكذب والتضليل الإعلامي لنظام البراميل وحزب الكابتغون .

واتمنى من الجميع مشاركتنا ايضا كل خبر نشروه اثبت انه كاذب

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Completely agree with @BASSAMVA. If those pictures were accurate, the journalist should have cited the source and verified their authenticity, time and context of capture.

[Bassam Barabandi بسام بربندي @BASSAMVA]

This comparison is not accepted by respected journalist who work at the #USG for several reasons:

1. The picture from #Aleppo does not represent #Syrian society as a whole.
2. The authenticity of the picture itself has not been verified.
3. Conversely, the picture of the #PKK collage is not accurate and does not reflect the reality on the ground, particularly regarding the documented violations against women and girls by the PKK, as reported by all #UN agencies.

These points underscore the importance of accurate representation in understanding critical issues. Using ideology to propagate misinformation is unacceptable for journalists working at institutions funded by the USG.

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Yes to fair competition- when prioritising public benefits over
monopolistic practices
#virginaustralia #QatarAirways

[ACCC @acccgovau]

We’re proposing to allow Virgin Australia and Qatar Airways to enter an integrated alliance and commence services between Doha and Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne for 5 years. Interested parties can make submissions by 7 March 2025. https://t.co/VIUErIjTF1

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight: (i) China is catching up to the U.S. in generative AI, with implications for the AI supply chain. (ii) Open weight models are commoditizing the foundation-model layer, which creates opportunities for application builders. (iii) Scaling up isn’t the only path to AI progress. Despite the massive focus on and hype around processing power, algorithmic innovations are rapidly pushing down training costs.

About a week ago, DeepSeek, a company based in China, released DeepSeek-R1, a remarkable model whose performance on benchmarks is comparable to OpenAI’s o1. Further, it was released as an open weight model with a permissive MIT license. At Davos last week, I got a lot of questions about it from non-technical business leaders. And on Monday, the stock market saw a “DeepSeek selloff”: The share prices of Nvidia and a number of other U.S. tech companies plunged. (As of the time of writing, some have recovered somewhat.)

Here’s what I think DeepSeek has caused many people to realize:

China is catching up to the U.S. in generative AI. When ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, the U.S. was significantly ahead of China in generative AI. Impressions change slowly, and so even recently I heard friends in both the U.S. and China say they thought China was behind. But in reality, this gap has rapidly eroded over the past two years. With models from China such as Qwen (which my teams have used for months), Kimi, InternVL, and DeepSeek, China had clearly been closing the gap, and in areas such as video generation there were already moments where China seemed to be in the lead.

I’m thrilled that DeepSeek-R1 was released as an open weight model, with a technical report that shares many details. In contrast, a number of U.S. companies have pushed for regulation to stifle open source by hyping up hypothetical AI dangers such as human extinction. It is now clear that open source/open weight models are a key part of the AI supply chain: Many companies will use them. If the U.S. continues to stymie open source, China will come to dominate this part of the supply chain and many businesses will end up using models that reflect China’s values much more than America’s.

Open weight models are commoditizing the foundation-model layer. As I wrote previously, LLM token prices have been falling rapidly, and open weights have contributed to this trend and given developers more choice. OpenAI’s o1 costs $60 per million output tokens; DeepSeek R1 costs $2.19. This nearly 30x difference brought the trend of falling prices to the attention of many people.

The business of training foundation models and selling API access is tough. Many companies in this area are still looking for a path to recouping the massive cost of model training. Sequoia’s article “AI’s $600B Question” lays out the challenge well (but, to be clear, I think the foundation model companies are doing great work, and I hope they succeed). In contrast, building applications on top of foundation models presents many great business opportunities. Now that others have spent billions training such models, you can access these models for mere dollars to build customer service chatbots, email summarizers, AI doctors, legal document assistants, and much more.

Scaling up isn’t the only path to AI progress. There’s been a lot of hype around scaling up models as a way to drive progress. To be fair, I was an early proponent of scaling up models. A number of companies raised billions of dollars by generating buzz around the narrative that, with more capital, they could (i) scale up and (ii) predictably drive improvements. Consequently, there has been a huge focus on scaling up, as opposed to a more nuanced view that gives due attention to the many different ways we can make progress. Driven in part by the U.S. AI chip embargo, the DeepSeek team had to innovate on many optimizations to run on less-capable H800 GPUs rather than H100s, leading ultimately to a model trained (omitting research costs) for under $6M of compute.

It remains to be seen if this will actually reduce demand for compute. Sometimes making each unit of a good cheaper can result in more dollars in total going to buy that good. I think the demand for intelligence and compute has practically no ceiling over the long term, so I remain bullish that humanity will use more intelligence even as it gets cheaper.

I saw many different interpretations of DeepSeek’s progress here in X, as if it was a Rorschach test that allowed many people to project their own meaning onto it. I think DeepSeek-R1 has geopolitical implications that are yet to be worked out. And it’s also great for AI application builders. My team has already been brainstorming ideas that are newly possible only because we have easy access to an open advanced reasoning model. This continues to be a great time to build!

[Original text: https://t.co/yiOHeGJgLZ ]

[Veronica @verobellin]

"Syrians liberated themselves" - this is a truth that European countries and the West find incredibly difficult to reconcile with. EU now sees sanctions as ransom tool to keep relevance. It was never about what's good 4 Syrians, always been about them and control they can have.

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Therefore, Syrians should beware of what these people are preparing to make the revolution fail, many of whom are close to us, and I have no doubt that what they are preparing for, or wishing for, is dangerous, great, and vile.

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Syria has often been used as a model of devastation, to scare rulers into thinking their people would not revolt or demand reform. Today, Syria has become a model of people’s victory, a success story for revolutions, and an inspiration for others.
#Syria

[لقاء مكي @liqaa_maki]

كثيرا ما استعملت سوريا، نموذجا للخراب، يخوّف بها الحكام شعوبهم من الثورة أو المطالبة بالإصلاح. اليوم صارت سوريا نموذج لانتصار الشعوب، وتحولت لقصة نجاح للثورات، وملهم لسواها، وكل شعب يقول لنفسه: إذا كان السوريون قد قدروا، فلماذا لا نقدر نحن أيضا؟ هذاهو السؤال المخيف لأنظمة راهنت على بشار ليبقى نموذجا لغلبة الاستبداد، وغلبة هذه الأنظمة، ولذلك فلتحذر سوريا مما يعد له هؤلاء كي تفشل الثورة، وكثير منهم من الأقربين، ولا شك عندي أن ما يعدون له، أو يتمنونه خطير وكبير ولئيم.

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Every people says to themselves: If the Syrians were able to do it, why can’t we do it too? This is the frightening question for regimes that bet on Bashar to remain a model of the prevalence of tyranny and the prevalence of these regimes.

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Interesting and important discussions today at CBA Sustainability Conference #momentum #commbankmomentum #Commbank #Sustainability #NetZero

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

https://t.co/GEjSy1WR9v
#Quantum #Google #Innovation #creativity

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

As of 1st January 2024, OpenAI has surpassed $1.6 billion up from $1.3 billion last October due to its ChatGPT robust growth.
#chatgpt #ai #GenerativeAI #growth

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

@slouching_mags Congrats Maggie

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

Interesting talk by @evawolfangel at #chi2023 #hamburg
#reCHInnecting #sigchi

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

@kheimerl Congratulations Kurtis!

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

@ZanePritkovs I hope it was an easy and quick jump

[Eiad Yafi, PhD. @EiadYafi]

First major Ms Teams outage! What do companies have in place to ensure the continuity of businesses?
#Teams #outage