Links for 2022-12-10
Denisovan introgression has shaped the immune system of present-day Papuans https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010470
What do evolutionary researchers believe about human psychology? Among other things: "About three-quarters of participants (N=581) believed that there are population differences from dissimilar ancestral ecologies/environments" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513822000836
There has been a ton of progress in surgery: “Alton Barron is an orthopedic surgeon specializing in the shoulder, elbow, and hand. In this episode, Alton breaks down the anatomy of the upper extremities and discusses the most common injuries associated with this area of the body. He explains in detail how he examines the shoulder, elbow, and hand to find the source of the pain and lays out the non-surgical and surgical treatment options as well as the factors that determine whether surgery is appropriate. Additionally, Alton describes the surgical procedures that, when done appropriately, can lead to tremendous reduction of pain and improvement in function.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtGwx2VAH_E
Novel 3D Printing Method to Fabricate Metal-Plastic Composite Structures https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/news/76849
We Will See a Completely New Type of Computer, Says AI Pioneer Hinton — “Geoffrey Hinton envisions a "mortal" neuromorphic computer combining hardware and software. Speaking at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, Hinton said mortal computation means "the knowledge that the system has learned and the hardware, are inseparable." Hinton said such computers could be grown, forgoing costly chip fabrication, and he imagines they will be "used for putting something like GPT-3 in your toaster for $1, so running on a few watts, you can have a conversation with your toaster." He suggested a forward-forward neural network model, eliminating the backpropagation common to most neural networks, might suit mortal computation hardware.” https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-will-see-a-completely-new-type-of-computer-says-ai-pioneer-geoff-hinton-mortal-computation/
Statements a language model considers true can be identified with an unsupervised probe: "We show (http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827) that we can identify whether text is true or false directly from a model’s *unlabeled activations*....We find that on a diverse set of tasks (NLI, sentiment classification, cloze tasks, etc.), our method can recover correct answers from model activations with high accuracy (even outperforming zero-shot prompting) despite not using any labels or model outputs." https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1600892261633785856.html
Setting up ChatGPT to emulate a team of ten assistants who iteratively consult and debate to find answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT3/comments/zepj4h/setting_up_chatgpt_to_emulate_a_team_of_ten/
“Inner Monologue (by analogy to human inner-monologue) is a family of prompt engineering tricks for large language models which make them solve problems in a ‘step by step’ verbalized way; it is particularly effective on multi-step tasks with ‘one right answer’ such as math word & programming problems.” https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/nn/transformer/gpt/inner-monologue/index
“Seems like LLMs can more or less fact check themselves with prompt chaining. Here's an example of GPT-3 refuting its own hallucinated answer to "what type of mammal lays the biggest eggs?"” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1600263683195928576.html
Why life on Titan is such an important question. https://avi-loeb.medium.com/life-on-titan-may-signal-early-life-in-the-universe-c1135d5f28bb
“I wrote an essay about whether the epistemology of consciousness can save moral realism and redeem experience machines. My answer: no.” https://joecarlsmith.substack.com/p/against-metaethical-hedonism
"vast majority of STEM Ph.D. programs have stopped requiring GRE scores … in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked U.S. universities. Only 3% currently require …compared with 84% 4 years ago. … test 'unfairly privileges … white men'" https://www.science.org/content/article/gre-exit-gains-momentum-ph-d-programs-drop-exam-requirement-amid-pandemic