Greetings from Terminal 1 at SFO. My flight was just delayed another two hours, which will give me some additional time to ruminate on potential new career paths for the IT professionals who didn't sandbox and test the Crowdstrike patch before deploying it.
In the news: Meta has introduced Llama 3.1, its most advanced open-source AI model to date. Offering significant improvements over its predecessor, Llama 3.1 includes a longer context window (up to 128k), better language support, and advanced tools for data generation and model distillation. Developers will like this a lot, particularly in handling complex tasks and multilingual applications.
Meta has also stepped up its security features with Llama Guard 3, which enhances the model's robustness by detecting and mitigating harmful or inappropriate content generation, as well as Prompt Guard, which adds an additional layer of security by preventing the model from responding to potentially malicious prompts, helping to safeguard against misuse. Meta is also working toward creating a Llama ecosystem, which will include big tech partners like AWS and NVIDIA.
Pro tip: While Llama 3.1 boasts a 128k context window (which is great for adding a ton of data to a prompt), Llama 3.1's free web interface at only offers 2048 tokens, which is roughly equivalent to 1,500-2,000 words. If you want to take advantage of the long context window, you'll have to hit the API.
As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. Just reply to this email. -s
ABOUT SHELLY PALMER
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
