We present \llinstruct: An 8B instruction-tuned model that is designed to generate content for English Language Proficiency Assessments (ELPA) and related applications. Our work involves creating a new dataset of 70K instructions and explanations in the ELPA domain and using these to fine-tune Llama-3 8B models (SFT) of different sizes (e.g., SFT-17K, SFT-50K and SFT-70K). Human evaluations are conducted over unseen instructions to compare these SFT models against SOTA models (e.g., Dolly-2, Mistral, Llama-3 base version, and GPT-3.5). The findings show although all three SFT models perform comparably, the model trained on largest instruction dataset -- SFT-70K - leads to the most valid outputs ready for assessments. However, although the SFT models perform better than larger model, e.g., GPT 3.5 on the aspect of explanations of outputs, many outputs still need human interventions to make them actual ready for real world assessments.

I might have inadvertently insulted Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor when I interviewed them about their new AI startup last week. Their new company, Sierra, is developing AI-powered agents to "elevate the customer experience" for big companies. Among its original customers are WeightWatchers, Sonos, SiriusXM, and OluKai (a "Hawaiian-inspired" clothing company). Sierra's eventual market is any company that communicates with its customers, which is a pretty big opportunity. Their plan strikes me as a validation of the widely voiced prediction that 2024 will be the year when the AI models that have bended our minds for the past year will turn into real products.

A film's themes, or its plot, can be misconstrued by a lazy viewer. Only a video game, however, can punish an audience's faults. If a player mistimes a jump, falls to an adversary, or fails to reach the end of a level, a game can deny them access to the rest of the work, halting progress until they pass the test or resign in defeat. The video-game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who's in his late forties, has punished more players than perhaps anyone else. In Dark Souls, the 2011 fantasy game that made him famous, you play as a loin-clothed wretch, racing through sewers and cowering in forests.

A person with a disability is defined as a person having an impairment which can be physical, sensory or mental in nature. According to the United Nations as of the year 2021 the world population stands at a whopping 7.9 billion. Out of 7.9 billion people more than 1 billion people have some form of disability which is approximately 15 percent of the total population of the world. Life is hard enough as it is but for people with disabilities there are additional hardships that they have to face every single day. These hardships vary according to the type of disability.

Right now, nothing is easy. It's hard to imagine things getting better, given where we're at right now--a raging, global pandemic, a violent attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government, and no real end in sight for the hardships we continue to endure. Scattered among the difficulties, though, are bright spots that make it easier to cope. Whether you are a single person craving connection or the parent of a toddler desperate for some alone time (hello, it's me), video games can help--help you find solitude, or just help turn your brain off, keep your hands busy, and stop you from doomscrolling for awhile. The year 2020 brought about many plot twists, but one of the welcome ones was buoyed by the Covid-19 lockdowns: "Casual gamers" entered the mainstream.

Virtual reality promises immersive experiences that sound like sweepstakes prizes. For one group of designers, though, VR shouldn't give you heaven, but hardship. After researching neuroscience studies on "embodiment," the cognitive illusion of being someone else, design collective BeAnother Lab set out to give people a taste of adversity. A performer wears a vest with a first-person camera, which streams their perspective to a user's Oculus Rift, along with a voiceover about their experience. As users interact with what they see in their headset, the performer mimics their movements, and the participants can witness in a very real way what it's like to be the person whose story they're listening to.