Links for 2022-02-03
This is IMPORTANT 🔊: AlphaCode: a system that can compete at average human level in competitive coding competitions by solving new problems that require a combination of critical thinking, logic, algorithms, coding, and natural language understanding. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Competitive-programming-with-AlphaCode [From the paper: “Advanced AI risks. Longer term, code generation could lead to advanced AI risks. Coding capabilities could lead to systems that can recursively write and improve themselves, rapidly leading to more and more advanced systems.” https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/AlphaCode/competition_level_code_generation_with_alphacode.pdf]
This might be even MORE IMPORTANT 🔊: We trained a neural network that solved two problems from the International Math Olympiad. These problems require real creativity and insight. — “Each time we find a new proof, we use it as new training data, which improves the neural network and enables it to iteratively find solutions to harder and harder statements.” https://openai.com/blog/formal-math/
Impossibility results for unbounded utilities: “Some people think that they have unbounded utility functions. This isn't necessarily crazy, but it presents serious challenges to conventional decision theory. I think it probably leads to abandoning probability itself as a representation of uncertainty (or at least any hope of basing decision theory on such probabilities). This may seem like a drastic response, but we are talking about some pretty drastic inconsistencies.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hbmsW2k9DxED5Z4eJ/impossibility-results-for-unbounded-utilities
How AI can identify people even in anonymized datasets https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-identify-anonymous-data-phone-neural-network
DNA, RNA Reading Just Got Thousands of Times Faster https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/01/molecular-electronic-nanotechnology-on-a-semiconductor-chip.html
AI Reduces Timescale of Early Drug Development to Weeks https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09647
Struggles with the Continuum: “Our assumption that spacetime is a continuum leads to many challenges in mathematical physics. Singularities, divergent integrals and the like threaten many of our favorite theories, from Newtonian gravity to classical electrodynamics, quantum electrodynamics and the Standard Model. In general relativity, singularities are intimately connected to some of the theory's most dramatic successful predictions. We survey these problems and the large amount of work that has gone into dealing with them.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01421
What Kai-Fu Lee-backed AInnovation tells us about China’s smart manufacturing https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/25/ainnovation-kai-fu-lee-china-ai-industrial-automation/
High-Speed Ionic Synaptic Memory: Simulating Brain Synapses in Computers With 2D Materials https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202109970
The Adverse Selection of Crypto Regulation: “…the SEC regulates serious, long-term players like Coinbase and Facebook out of business while the shady, fly-by-night operators run around unscathed until they rug pull.” https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/the-adverse-selection-of-crypto-regulation.html
“Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6500-6200 BCE.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
“Atlantropa was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea devised to contain several hydroelectric dams in key points of the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus, to cause a sea level drop and create new land to settle.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Booke review: Immune: A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eMTifnJFa6uJQDemc/immune-in-a-nutshell