Links for 2022-09-16
“PaLI, a new jointly-scaled multilingual language-image model that's built on 10B images and tens of billions of alt-texts and OCR annotations, in (wait for it!) over 100 languages. It outperforms the Flamingo model, which is several times larger (80B parameters), on several VQA and image-captioning tasks, and it also sustains performance on challenging language-only and vision-only tasks. Our work illustrates the importance of scale in both the visual and language parts of the model and the interplay between the two. We see that accomplishing vision and language tasks, especially in multiple languages, actually requires large scale models and data, and will potentially benefit from further scaling.” https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/09/pali-scaling-language-image-learning-in.html?m=1
“We built a new model! It’s called Action Transformer (ACT-1) and we taught it to use a bunch of software tools…the user simply types a high-level request and ACT-1 does the rest.” https://www.adept.ai/act
Results from twenty-one US General Social Survey datasets from 1974 through 2018 show that higher intelligence predicts stronger support for free speech. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550619896168
Researchers develop a new method that uses multiple models to create more complex images with better understanding. https://news.mit.edu/2022/ai-system-makes-models-like-dall-e-2-more-creative-0908
A Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation: AudioLM achieves high-quality and long-term consistency, from audio only. Meaningful speech w/o text, consistent piano w/o MIDI. https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiolm/examples/
Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-report-dramatic-rise-in-early-onset-cancers/
The Wizards of Mind Control. How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts. Neurochemical mind control is not just the stuff of science fiction. https://nautil.us/the-wizards-of-mind-control-26900/
Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpNHSiWaXTvDxt6R/coherent-decisions-imply-consistent-utilities
Trust in teachers is plunging amid a culture war in education [Washington Post] https://archive.ph/jTnFG
Interview with Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who may be Italy's first female prime minister. [Washington Post] https://archive.ph/Xo6nF
“…since the start of the war [Giorgia Meloni] has been resolute in her support for sending arms to Ukraine…” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/09/cracks-show-in-meloni-salvini-alliance-over-russia-sanctions-italy
“Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy traces its roots back to a post-fascist party, has spoken out strongly in support of the Western line on Ukraine on a number of occasions.” https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italys-meloni-warns-broader-risks-posed-by-ukraine-conflict-2022-09-04/
There is a city called New York situated near Ukraine's frontline. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York,_Ukraine