Links for 2021-09-26
The removal of airborne SARS-CoV-2 and other microbial bioaerosols by air filtration on COVID-19 surge units (see image above) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.16.21263684v1.full.pdf
Thomas Moynihan on the History of Existential Risk — "For most of history value was assumed indestructible" https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/thomas
AI Risk Research in China — "Chinese think tanks and academia are very concerned about AI risks […] he wrote about the possibility that AI could threaten human security without fully surpassing human intelligence in 2002." chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-156-ai-risk-research-in-china
“Less than a year after Deepmind's breakthrough in protein folding, several research groups have reproduced the performance of AlphaFold and are even publishing models that improve over it” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.15.460468v1
Primer: Searching for Efficient Transformers for Language Modeling — Architecture search finds Primer, which improves the original T5 architecture on C4 auto-regressive LM, reducing the training cost by 4X at a 500M parameter size. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08668
Modern Evolution Strategies for Creativity: Fitting Concrete Images and Abstract Concepts — “In this work, we revisit the use of evolutionary algorithms for computational creativity. We find that modern evolution strategies (ES) algorithms, when tasked with the placement of shapes, offer large improvements in both quality and efficiency compared to traditional genetic algorithms, and even comparable to gradient-based methods. We demonstrate that ES is also well suited at optimizing the placement of shapes to fit the CLIP model, and can produce diverse, distinct geometric abstractions that are aligned with human interpretation of language.” https://es-clip.github.io/
EU wants ‘Chips Act’ to rival US — Commission president says bloc needs to ‘be bold again’ with upcoming industrial policy plan on semiconductors. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-wants-chips-act-president-says/amp/
The science and engineering behind sensitized brain-controlled bionic hands (paywall) https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/physrev.00034.2020