Links for 2022-12-16
The next decades might be wild: “Due to technology, it is the norm, not the exception, that people who are born 10 years apart can have very different childhoods.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qRtD4WqKRYEtT5pi3/the-next-decades-might-be-wild
Locomotion modeling evolves with brain-inspired neural networks: “A team of scientists at EPFL have built a new neural network system that can help understand how animals adapt their movement to changes in their own body and to create more powerful artificial intelligence systems.” https://actu.epfl.ch/news/locomotion-modeling-evolves-with-brain-inspired--2/
OpenAI Whisper blew everyone's mind with its translation and transcription. But one thing was missing "Speaker Diarization" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVW746z8y_I
Natural abstractions and AlphaZero https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/obht9QqMDMNLwhPQS/asot-natural-abstractions-and-alphazero
This machine learning app can narrate videos for you. The LaViLa model from Meta AI takes in a video and will generate text descriptions of what it thinks is happening. https://huggingface.co/spaces/nateraw/lavila
An exciting step forward in the search for efficient, low-cost materials for renewable energy technologies using machine learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16486
Mubert Text-to-Music First Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJu0iXn-T_U
Reapplication of diffusion images to generate music and soundscapes. Fine-tuned stable diffusion on spectrograms -> music generation, style transfer, and interpolation. https://www.riffusion.com/about (test it here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/fffiloni/spectrogram-to-music)
“We broke the world record in ancient DNA today! 2-million-year-old DNA from plants and animals were retrieved from geological deposits and show that North Greenland was once home to an open boreal/arctic community incl. mastodon.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05453-y
The European tech industry has apparently lost about $400 billion in value. Those surveyed said that the causes were higher interest rates, inflation risk and an unfriendly regulatory environment holding back entrepreneurs. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/06/atomico-report-european-startups-on-track-to-raise-85b-this-year-down-from-100b-in-2021/
"The 3-dimensional geometry of cortical surface is highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4786069/
It only took a few hundred years for large brain-based complex trait differences (including behavioral differences) between dog breeds to take hold. (via @PaoloShirasi) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31575369/
Everyone intuitively realizes that taking artificial intelligence seriously would trump all other issues like climate change, “the woke mind virus”, social justice, “groomers”, animal rights, population collapse, Ukraine, starting a family, you name it…
But nobody desires this. Nobody wants to autistically focus on this one issue. Everyone would sooner question their grasp of “rationality” than give five dollars to mitigate risks from AI.
This was one reason I wasted years trying to debunk risks from AI. It was too threatening to everything else I cared about.
Now I accept the risk. But I still refuse to give it the attention it deserves to keep my sanity.
P.S. I should mention that even if you believe that AI isn't a risk, it's still by far the most important issue. You just replace rogue aliens with altruistic aliens that are bringing a cure for every disease and energy too cheap to meter.
If you were wondering what's happening on the eastern front: After 4 months and 2 weeks of fighting in Bakhmut, Russia may or may not capture the ruins of a Champagne factory.