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Welcome to your weekly briefing on Data & AI: industry updates, career resources, portfolio-building opportunities, and community events - all curated for aspiring Data, ML & AI professionals.

This week’s updates in the Data & AI world:

• Industry: Meta releases Llama 3.3 a new best open-source model.

• Build skills: The only book you must read on AI engineering before 2025.

• Events: Register for the event with a Data Science Hiring Manager from Grammarly!

• Community updates: Join the Break Into Data PRO community!

Read time: 3 minutes

Weekly Digest with Break Into Data (BID)

Data & AI industry

Meta Wraps Up 2024 with the Release of Llama 3.3

Meta has launched Llama 3.3, a new 70-billion parameter open-source AI model that promises to outcompete some of the commercial models. The details:• Llama 3.3 delivers performance comparable to the larger 405-billion parameter Llama 3.1 model, while being significantly more efficient.

Key changes:

• 70 billion parameters and 128,000 token context window

• Support for eight languages including English, Spanish, and Hindi

• Optimized for coding tasks, multilingual processing, and general reasoning

• Performance-wise, it has achieved a 92.1% score on IFEval

• Outperforms models like Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o on industry benchmarks

Why it matters: Llama 3.3 represents Meta's strong push to democratize AI by creating powerful, accessible models, that can compete with the commercial foundational models from Google and OpenAI. With over 650 million downloads of Llama models to date, Meta is positioning itself as a key player in open-source AI development!

Build Data & AI skills

Official print release of “AI Engineering” book by Chip Huyen. The only book you must read on AI before 2025.

The most awaited book of the year in ML and AI in 2024, “AI Engineering” written by Chip Huyen is finally out for print release and full access on O’Reilly’s platform.

It is the best book to help you navigate the AI engineering landscape including the math behind foundation models and transformer architecture, evaluation frameworks, and application use cases like RAG, Agentic frameworks and so much more!

You'll learn:

• How to develope an AI application, the challenges at each step, and approaches to address them

• What AI engineering is and how it differs from traditional machine learning engineering

• Explore various model adaptation techniques, including prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, agents, and dataset engineering, and understand how and why they work

• Examine the bottlenecks for latency and cost when serving foundation models and learn how to overcome them

• Choose the right model, dataset, evaluation benchmarks, and metrics for your needs

Check out the announcement post here 

Break Into Data events

Uncover the secrets behind the Data Science Hiring process: With Sravya Madipalli - Join us on Dec 7th, at 12 pm PT.

If you’re an aspiring data scientist dreaming of breaking into big tech, this is the event you can’t afford to miss!

​​Sravya Madipalli, a data leader with over a decade of experience at Grammarly, Microsoft, and Nextdoor, is here to share her insider knowledge from screening 300+ candidates and building data teams in some of the most competitive companies.

✅ Behind-the-Scenes Access: Learn what really happens during the hiring process and how hiring managers think.
✅ Data Career Roadmap: Understand the skills and experiences top tech companies value the most.
✅ Proven Tactics: From Sravya’s direct experience hiring 9-10 candidates per cycle—what successful candidates did right and what they do wrong.

Register for the event here: Link 

Break Into Data community

We are officially launching the BID PRO community!

Propel your career forward with the right network and guidance.

If you want to meet more knowledge-hungry, ambitious, and supportive people in Data & AI, then join a Break Into Data PRO community: Link 

You will have access to :

• Exclusive content: Curated career-related content to break into Data Science, Data Analytics, Data Engineering, Machine Learning and AI engineering fields.

• Accountability calls: You will learn to set goals and achieve them alongside your peers while meeting regularly to keep each other accountable.

• Build your network: Network with other highly motivated professionals who work at Big Tech, and or Startups, or are building their own venture!

• Never build new skills alone: Team up with professionals to work on portfolio projects, and participate in coding challenges.

• Access to workshops: Join career-related workshops with our Mentors, Coaches, and Experts from the industry and academia.
  
  It’s time to take your career seriously!

  The first 20 signups will get a free career coaching call($200 value). Hurry and lock in the lowest prices for a lifetime! Here.
  

Break Into Data community

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