Links for 2021-12-12
Deepmind Says Its New Language Model Can Beat Others 25 Times Its Size — “DeepMind’s main [new] result is an AI with a twist: it’s enhanced with an external memory in the form of a vast database containing passages of text, which it uses as a kind of cheat sheet when generating new sentences. Called RETRO (for ‘Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer’), the AI matches the performance of neural networks 25 times its size, cutting the time and cost needed to train very large models.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/08/1041557/deepmind-language-model-beat-others-25-times-size-gpt-3-megatron/ [bypass paywall: https://archive.md/07PNH]
Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs: Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their liver. What else might be possible? [The New Yorker] https://archive.md/baUnO
Moore's Law, AI, and the pace of progress https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aNAFrGbzXddQBMDqh/moore-s-law-ai-and-the-pace-of-progress
Nanotronics launches new high-throughput optical inspection tool; now scanning 10X faster than the last version! https://businesswire.com/news/home/20211207005810/en/Nanotronics-Introduces-nSpec%C2%AE-TURBO-for-High-Volume-Industrial-Inspection
"[P]artisans will often favor a given policy when informed that it was endorsed by their party but reject the same policy if informed that it was endorsed by the opposing party." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167221997619
Exciting work towards making neural video compression a reality: running a neural video decoder on a mobile phone in real time. youtube.com/watch?v=WUnlSHenr08
“The greater male variability hypothesis should be known as the law of greater male variability. The finding has demonstrated an enormous amount of robustness. In the polderman 2015 meta-analysis of millions of twin pairs and thousands of traits, the resemblence of DZ twins to each other is lower among male pairs than among any other pairings except for opposite sex ones.” https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285
“Hey Mars settlement fans: I modeled the economics of starting a city on Mars, including the use of Mars resources to build over a few decades, and including income to offset costs. The model indicates much cheaper than @elonmusk estimated here” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1468772477333557248.html
Male and Female Athletic Performance: Worlds Apart https://quillette.com/2021/12/11/male-and-female-athletic-performance/