AI:
We will see more technological change, I argue, in the next 2–10 years than we have in the last 50 years. Artificial intelligence is going to change our ways of life, our ways of work, and our ways of war. It could usher in scientific progress at a pace never seen before.
— President of the United States Joe Biden
A few days ago, the UN Secretary-General said that artificial intelligence will be the central element of change in the world in the near future. Now the President of the United States is saying something very similar.
It is astonishing that this issue has now reached the highest echelons of power. This makes an AI arms race much more likely.
And it looks like more people are getting AI-pilled now. Ivanka Trump has shared Leopold Aschenbrenner’s essay. It's spreading like wildfire.
More:
How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design: “We envision a future in which AI methods automate the entire chip design process, dramatically accelerating the design cycle and unlocking new frontiers in performance through superhuman algorithms and end-to-end co-optimization of hardware, software, and machine learning models…” https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-computer-chip-design/
“Do models need to reason in words to benefit from chain-of-thought tokens? In our experiments, the answer is no! Models can perform on par with CoT using repeated '...' filler tokens.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758
“Two weeks ago, OpenAI released the o1 family of models along with a graph showing scaling laws for inference time compute. Using only the public o1-mini API, I tried to reconstruct the graph as closely as possible. The original is on the left, my attempt is on the right.” https://github.com/hughbzhang/o1_inference_scaling_laws
“Meet Molmo: a family of open, state-of-the-art multimodal AI models. Our best model outperforms proprietary systems, using 1000x less data. Molmo doesn't just understand multimodal data—it acts on it, enabling rich interactions in both the physical and virtual worlds.” https://molmo.allenai.org/
Mark Zuckerberg says he is betting that the limit of scaling AI systems "is not going to happen any time soon", as Llama 4 will train on 100,000+ GPUs and Llama 5 even more than that https://youtu.be/oX7OduG1YmI?si=zN5LJx6BULXYF40O&t=2652
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says in 3-5 years, AI may equal the sum of human intelligence which will change "everything, everywhere, all at once" in "unimaginable" ways https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHEsWh3X20
OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-remove-non-profit-control-give-sam-altman-equity-sources-say-2024-09-25/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/jEwT0]
OpenAI Pitched White House on Unprecedented Data Center Buildout https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pitched-white-house-on-unprecedented-data-center-buildout [no paywall: https://archive.is/LV2dx]
Why Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim of Harmonic Think AI Is About to Change Math—and Why It Matters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvAxuCIBb-c
James Cameron says he has joined Stability AI's board of directors because the next big leap forward in film and television visual effects will be at the nexus of gen AI and CGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8INJQQ96YU
185 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/gen-ai-business-use-cases/
“We (Goodfire) just put our research preview live - you can play with Llama 3 and use sparse autoencoders to read & write from its internal activations.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bFDTmCbavr52bFNaG/linkpost-play-with-saes-on-llama-3
Technology:
Mark Zuckerberg unveils Meta's Orion augmented reality glasses, with holographic displays and AI, which can be controlled by a wrist-based neural interface https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/
Biden will sign a bill giving new chip plants an exclusion from the federal environmental review they were required by law to conduct under the CHIPS act. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/24/congress-forces-biden-to-choose-between-chips-and-climate-00180809
The time is ripe to reverse engineer an entire nervous system: simulating behavior from neural interactions https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06578
Kamala Harris on technology and the economy: https://www.youtube.com/live/XokApnr_Cak?si=TZbo7JSMDUmERNis&t=1944
Think of Alexander Hamilton having the foresight to build the manufacturing capabilities of our new nation. Think of Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad. Think of Eisenhower and the interstate highway system. Kennedy committing America to win the space race and spurring innovation across our society. From our earliest days, America's economic strength has been tied to our industrial strength. And the same is true today. So I will recommit the nation to global leadership in the sectors that will define the next century. We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace. Remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies. Expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing. So the next generation of breakthroughs from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.
Genetics:
Overwhelming evidence of recent evolution in West Eurasians https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/overwhelming-evidence-of-recent-evolution
European polygenic scores predict Chinese provincial differences too https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/european-polygenic-scores-predict
Amy Wax Versus the “Midwit Gynocrats" (published Dec 28, 2023) https://www.richardhanania.com/p/amy-wax-versus-the-midwit-gynocrats
Miscellaneous:
Substantial extension of the lifetime of the terrestrial biosphere https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10714
“A new study employed eye-tracking methods to uncover intriguing differences in how men and women evaluate online dating profiles… Overall, men tend to focus on physical attractiveness, while women consider both attractiveness and resource potential.” https://www.psypost.org/eye-tracking-study-sheds-light-on-sex-differences-in-evaluations-of-online-dating-profiles/
Ukraine:
Trump:
It seems increasingly likely that Trump will abandon support for Ukraine, giving Putin exactly what he wants—much like Obama and Merkel before him. Just as before, such appeasement will only encourage Putin to attack another country in a few years.
China will draw the following conclusions:
Force can be used to prevent countries from joining Western alliances.
Democracies are inherently weak, as their policies shift with elections.
Nuclear threats can be used to achieve any foreign policy objective.
This will likely encourage China to escalate its aggressive actions against the Philippines, Japan, and other neighbors. And it will increase the chances of an invasion of Taiwan.
The core issue is that allowing adversaries to dictate alliances through military force sets a dangerous precedent, encouraging further violations of national interests.
Additionally, consider these points:
Russia supports Iran against Israel.
Russia backs North Korea against South Korea.
Russia props up Venezuela.
Weakening Russia by supporting Ukraine benefits all these regions, while also sending a clear signal: future acts of aggression will come at a steep cost, discouraging further conflicts.
Nuclear threats:
The credibility of Russia's nuclear threats shouldn't be the determining factor here. What matters most is the precedent set by allowing nations to achieve foreign policy objectives through nuclear blackmail. This opens the door to more frequent threats and widespread nuclear proliferation, increasing the long-term risk of nuclear conflict.
Consider two hypothetical scenarios:
Imagine North Korea detonates a salted nuclear bomb on Vanuatu to demonstrate its capabilities, then threatens non-aligned, non-nuclear countries with the same fate unless they sever all ties with the United States. Would the U.S. have an interest in providing a credible deterrent?
Now, suppose the U.S. threatened to launch a nuclear strike against any country that applied for BRICS membership. Wouldn't it be in the interest of current BRICS members to extend protection under their nuclear umbrella to nations considering joining their bloc?
The answer to both scenarios seems clear: normalizing threats of nuclear strikes outside the framework of mutually assured destruction (MAD) would be dangerously irrational.
More:
At the UN, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski delivers a stunning takedown of russia's lies and its kidnapping of Ukrainian children. https://x.com/frontlinekit/status/1838820183106064838
“Russia has established a weapons programme in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war against Ukraine, according to two sources from a European intelligence agency and documents reviewed by Reuters” https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-has-secret-war-drones-project-china-intel-sources-say-2024-09-25/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/Dn32h]
Pentagon has recommended giving white phosphorus shells to Ukraine, but White House keeps saying no https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/pentagon-wants-white-phosphorus-shells-ukraine-white-house-says-no-rcna172504
A column of Russian vehicles stopped on the side of the road. Seizing the opportunity, Ukrainian pilots reminded them of basic military logistics: never stop a convoy mid-route and always spread out your equipment. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1838963650075169105
In the Pokrovsk area, a Russian assault group attempted to use a disabled Bradley fighting vehicle as cover from drones. However, the drones still managed to strike them, even under the vehicle, after chasing them across the field. The Strike Drone Company of Ukraine's 47th Brigade prevented five Russian soldiers from holding their position. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1838826822026297424
Destruction of the Russian Zoopark-1M counter-battery radar system. By the 45th Brigade of Ukraine. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1838991718479184334
The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia-ukraine-war-study-analytic-failure