Links for 2022-05-17
If you still haven't grokked the significance of the latest A(G)I breakthrough: Gato as the Dawn of Early AGI — "As with GPT-3, one scary feature of Gato's success is that its architecture and hyperparameters aren't strongly optimized for what it does. It's basically a (relatively small!) large language model pressed into service as a generalist, and that just works. AGI is here, and it wasn't that hard to engineer. Quoth Gwern, "Scaling just works."" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TwfWTLhQZgy2oFwK3/gato-as-the-dawn-of-early-agi
"Is AI task performance a type of submartingale, like a stock market index that goes up over time, but where each particular movement is intrinsically unpredictable?" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G993PFTwqqdQv4eTg/is-ai-progress-impossible-to-predict
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? — "‘We have dug up maybe 1% of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones … probably 1000s more of them … there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’" https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-an-unknown-extraordinarily-ancient-civilisation-lie-buried-under-eastern-turkey-
Young CSF restores oligodendrogenesis and memory in aged mice via Fgf17. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04722-0
When "50% of their performance earnings will be donated to a charity of their own choice. … women increase their performance by approximately 23% & 27% in the piece rate and tournament payment schemes" http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9518&r=
“Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without [American transport]. Our losses would have been colossal because we would have had no manoeuvrability . . . Without [US food supplies] we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands — the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus.” [Financial Times] https://archive.ph/Qke7R
Searching for Efficient Neural Architectures for On-Device ML on Edge TPUs https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14007
A brain circuit in the thalamus helps us hold information in mind. This circuit, which weakens with age, could offer a target to help prevent age-related decline in spatial memory. https://news.mit.edu/2022/brain-circuit-thalamus-age-memory-0510
Higher Quality Wheat: Increased Yields and Up to 25% More Protein Content https://scitechdaily.com/higher-quality-wheat-increased-yields-and-up-to-25-more-protein-content/
“If cryptocurrency was originally about decentralizing money, Web3 is about decentralizing…everything. Its mission is almost achingly idealistic: to free humanity not only from Big Tech domination but also from exploitative capitalism itself—and to do it purely through code.” [Wired] https://archive.ph/BPvsV
I'm still dumbfounded by how quickly and radically the German attitude towards war and weapons has changed; an attitude I thought to be as fixed as the laws of physics.
The Greens, a formerly anti-war party, is now making double-digit gains at the ballot box despite or because of their unrelenting support of Ukraine, NATO, and the German armed forces.
Representative of this development is the declaration of a far-left punk rocker that he has reconsidered his opinion on military service and would now likely accept being called up 🤯
Meanwhile, people on the fringes of the political right appear to be increasingly discovering that they are actually pacifists and anti-fascists. Far-right politicians appear together with peace doves and regurgitate old anti-war slogans, such as "Build Peace Without Weapons", while far-right influencers are looking for Nordic symbols on Ukrainian uniforms in order to accuse them of Nazism.