Links for 2022-11-17
"Translation between Molecules and Natural Language": Uses self-supervised language modeling + fine-tuning on a dataset of molecule descriptions to: 1) Generate text descriptions of molecules 2) Generate a molecule from a text description! http://blender.cs.illinois.edu/paper/molt5.pdf
Nvidia unveils eDiff-I: novel generative AI for text-to-image synthesis with instant style transfer & "paint-with-words" https://deepimagination.cc/eDiffi/
Deep Brain Simulation of the entorhinal-hippocampal 'memory system' sees a path towards being able to "decode, enhance, incept or delete specific memories". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7347298/
The oldest known sentence in the world has been discovered. And it reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/09/oldest-known-written-sentence-discovered-on-a-head-lice-comb
Taiwan rallies drone makers to prepare military for China threat [Financial Times] https://archive.ph/WFey3
Industrialization of biotech vs. the biologization of industry https://centuryofbio.substack.com/p/atoms-are-local
"Seraphim: A Biblically-Inspired Constructed Language", Babelingua ("for multiple mouth angels using gematria to define phonemes, speaking in syntax trees + singing multilingual 4D-tense praises") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOctKnETWi4
More sociable monkeys have a higher abundance of certain beneficial gut bacteria, and a lower abundance of potentially disease-causing bacteria, new research has found. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-11-11-friendly-monkeys-have-friendly-microbes
Twitter’s Potential Collapse Could Wipe Out Vast Records of Recent Human History https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/
Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs: https://guzey.com/ai/planes-vs-birds/
Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself: “by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
The FTX Saga - Simplified https://jorgevelez.substack.com/p/ftx
"how could we have caught this when serious insitutional investors with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line missed it?" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gLdZEzC3afQn2Fon5/if-professional-investors-missed-this
I'm not sure when I finally realized this. In Jun 2020 I said that the course of history now critically depends on whether GPT-4 and GPT-5 will show diminishing performance returns.[1] But, in retrospect, it should have been obvious in 2019[2] and readily inferable in 2016[3]. Some people with insider knowledge already foresaw what is going to happen in 2014 (Musk)[4] and 2011 (Shane Legg)[5].
[1] https://twitter.com/XiXiDu/status/1271453844665503745
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/
[3] https://twitter.com/XiXiDu/status/1456791976402108417
[4] https://twitter.com/XiXiDu/status/1460976356909535240
[5] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/No5JpRCHzBrWA4jmS/q-and-a-with-shane-legg-on-risks-from-ai