Links for 2021-10-12
NVIDIA and Microsoft releases 530B parameter transformer model providing further evidence for the scaling hypothesis (~ larger neural nets are smarter) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGuMrzhJdENCo8BxX/nvidia-and-microsoft-releases-530b-parameter-transformer
Chinese cloud company Inspur trains "Source 1.0", a 245.7b-parameter GPT-3-like Chinese text model https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/scaling/2021-10-11-xinzhiyuan-inspursource10gpt245b.html
Synthetic data is a BIG deal: “For a long time, AI had two big resources: data and compute. Projects like this show that 'data' is really just 'compute' in a trenchcoat - Microsoft can use computers to generate vast amounts of data, changing the economics of AI development as a whole.” — Jack Clark | “We demonstrate that it is possible to perform [computer vision] in the wild using synthetic data alone [which] can both match real data in accuracy as well as open up new approaches where manual labelling would be impossible…” https://microsoft.github.io/FaceSynthetics/
Scientists selectively breed a line of fruit flies (normally a solitary animal) to be highly sociable. Illustration of the fact that not only are anatomical features like teeth and claws subject to selection, so are minds and behaviour. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/evo.14370
CO2 data from NASA’s OCO-2 satellite finds a consistently high CO2 fertilization effect on US agriculture, explaining 10 to 40 percent of the observed yield trends since 1940 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29320
An Investigation into the Passage of Time — A philosophical inquiry on phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology; 1st Prize in University of Sheffield Philosophy Essay Prize 2018 https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/an-investigation-into-the-passage-of-time/
Cryo–electron microscopy breaks the atomic resolution barrier at last https://www.science.org/news/2020/10/cryo-electron-microscopy-breaks-atomic-resolution-barrier-last
"Men in the highest income group are about 41 percentage points more likely to ever have children than men in the lowest income group. The opposite is true for women—high-income women are more likely to be childless." https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-ideal-husband-a-man-in-possession-of-a-good-income
MIT Alumni Designed Micro-Reactor BURNS Nuclear Waste For Fuel youtube.com/watch?v=QIcwqjvrLZU
This Middle-aged Guy Learns the One Arm Pull up in 390 Days youtube.com/watch?v=78m15IpO4TM
Breakthrough innovations and where to find them https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321001724?dgcid=rss_sd_all