Links for 2022-05-03
“Using only 100 samples of humanwritten feedback, our learning algorithm finetunes a GPT-3 model to roughly human-level summarization ability.” [Paper] [Talk]
What DALL-E 2 can and cannot do https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uKp6tBFStnsvrot5t/what-dall-e-2-can-and-cannot-do
A very preliminary analysis of DALL-E 2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807
Free book: Algorithms for Decision Making: “This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.” https://algorithmsbook.com/
“The price to train to achieve a fixed accuracy on ImageNet decreased by a factor of ~200 over 4 years.” https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10688/how-much-of-ai-progress-is-from-scaling-compute-and-how-far-will-it-scale/
AIs Spot Drones with Help from Fly Eye: “The researchers reverse-engineered the visual system of the hoverfly—whose compound eyes can separate relevant information from noise—to develop a tool that filters out noisy data.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-spot-drones-with-help-from-a-fly-eye/
How to print a robot from scratch: New 3D-printing approach melds solids, liquids https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/04/18/how-print-robot-scratch-new-3d-printing-approach-melds-solids-liquids
Researchers take a step toward creating an axle-rotor nanomachine https://phys.org/news/2022-04-axle-rotor-nanomachine.html
The knowledge of Nobel Prize winners spans a substantially greater number of subjects than that of their less-successful peers. https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2022.2051294
"of the 23 [bird] species they studied, 11 experienced population declines of at least 20% due to exposure to [wind & solar] plants. They also found evidence of … harm … to migration networks" https://phys.org/news/2022-04-bird-population-declines-due-renewable.html
"my survey of hunter-gatherer societies indicates that Western-style boxing and fistfighting have not been historically common cross-culturally… instead wrestling matches and duels with weaponry are much more common forms of conflict management" https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-duel/
After more than two months of war, what has Russia gained?
- The alleged threat emanating from Ukraine has not been neutralized. To the contrary, Ukraine is still capable of carrying out attacks inside Russian territory and sinking Russian warships.
- Europe is militarizing and looking to harm Russia as much as it can. Even German left-wing outlets now run op-eds calling for Germany to build nuclear weapons.
- Finland and Sweden want to join NATO.
- The Russian military is now widely seen as weak and incompetent. Before the war people feared that Russia could take Berlin within a few weeks. But they couldn't even capture Kharkiv, which is just 40 km from the Russian border!
- The Russian economy will likely see a double-digit contraction this year.