Links for 2022-01-14
Future ML Systems Will Be Qualitatively Different: "when predicting the future of ML, we should not simply expect existing empirical trends to continue. Instead, we will often observe qualitatively new, "emergent" behavior...even for a single model, we might encounter qualitative phase transitions as we train for longer." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZaPhGg2hmmPwByHc/future-ml-systems-will-be-qualitatively-different
It's time to educate normal people to stop trusting video evidence because it's now only a question of time until someone tries to use this technology to destabilize a society. Once this happens, it will be too late because people will think that the authorities are trying to cover up the incident. — New AI: Next Level Video Editing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCq0x01Jmi0
Eric Jang on Robots Learning at Google and Generalization via Language https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/eric-jang-on-robots-learning-at-google
Diversity in Religiosity Undermines Conventional Personal Morality Across the Globe: Evidence From 90 Nations, 300,000+ Individuals https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jssr.12756
The neuronal mechanism behind motivation: "Simply by looking at the amygdala, Julien and Yael were able to get a detailed picture of the reward that the mouse expected, and what it needed to do to get it. The amygdala makes predictions—if I do this, I will get that—and it's adapting these predictions according to changes. There is no other brain structure that can so precisely predict what is going to happen." https://phys.org/news/2022-01-neuronal-mechanism.html
Paper on how to hide a neural net inside another neural net (“TrojanNet”). The hidden net can be extracted using a private key. It’s NP-hard to detect that this net is hidden. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10078
Banks are using RL to optimize timing of purchases across the day (to avoid moving markets). Interview with Kathryn Hume, VP at Royal Bank of Canada, who moved into ML after a Comp Lit PhD (on Descartes + Leibniz). https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/gradient-dissent/reports/Kathryn-Hume-Financial-Models-ML-and-17th-Century-Philosophy--VmlldzoxMjg0ODM4
Petra's remarkable thermal bore cuts through undrillable rock. Petra's "Swifty" robot heats and pulverizes the hardest rock on Earth, without touching it. https://newatlas.com/technology/petra-thermal-drill-robot/
web3: “If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time…A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.” https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Gene therapies close in on a cure for sickle-cell disease https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02138-w