Links for 2021-12-09
More amazing and somewhat scary progress in artificial intelligence: "Introducing MIA, a Multimodal Interactive Agent that cooperates and communicates with humans in a 3D virtual world called the Playhouse. MIA trains with imitation and self-supervised learning using 2.94 years of human experience. MIA can tidy rooms, answer questions and ask clarifying questions, achieving 70%+ success rates in non-adversarial interactions with humans. After training, MIA can learn about new objects and tasks with only hours of extra demonstration experience." https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/Creating-Interactive-Agents-with-Imitation-Learning
Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher (a SOTA 280B parameter transformer): "Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit." https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/research/language-research/Training%20Gopher.pdf
Scientists Claim Big Advance in Using DNA to Store Data https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59489560
“A soft-spoken, self-effacing young man from Seoul may be the most listened-to living composer on the planet right now…” https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/11/the-moveable-musical-feast-of-jung-jaeil.html
“I had to wrap my head around the fact that close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web.” https://markusstrasser.org/p/bcd8bded-7136-4bb4-8f97-e8a3a7b6d926/
Grasping Robotic Drone Can Land on a Branch Like a Freakin’ Bird https://gizmodo.com/grasping-robotic-drone-can-land-on-a-branch-like-a-frea-1848151578
Quantum Simulators Create a Totally New Phase of Matter: “Today the Cambridge group unveiled their most significant discovery yet: the detection of an elusive state of matter known as a quantum spin liquid, which exists outside the century-old paradigm outlining the ways in which matter can organize. It confirms a nearly 50-year-old theory predicting the exotic state. It also marks a step toward the dream of building a truly useful universal quantum computer.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-simulators-create-a-totally-new-phase-of-matter-20211202/
Guy works impressively hard to upgrade the soldered RAM on his Dell laptop https://gregdavill.github.io/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/
Is this mammoth-ivory pendant Eurasia’s oldest surviving jewellery? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03534-y