Links for 2023-01-21
For many important algorithms, there's little room for additional improvements: “More than three-quarters of the analyzed algorithms are asymptotically optimal or close to it—in other words, they are nearly the best and fastest they possibly can be, especially for large problem sizes." https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/140013/Liu-emiliu-meng-eecs-2021-thesis.pdf
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on GPT-4: “people are begging to be disappointed and they will be” https://www.theverge.com/23560328/openai-gpt-4-rumor-release-date-sam-altman-interview
Matthew Barnett bets Bryan Caplan $500 that AI can get an 'A' on his econ exams in January 2029 (6 years from now) https://betonit.substack.com/p/ai-bet
“A brand new IDE build from the ground up with LLMs. Watch us use Cursor to ship new features blazingly fast.” https://twitter.com/amanrsanger/status/1615539968772050946
Deep-learning-designed diffractive processor computes hundreds of transformations in parallel https://spie.org/news/deep-learning-designed-diffractive-processor-computes-hundreds-of-transformations-in-parallel?SSO=1
“I’ve just tried Redefine Meat’s plant-based lamb and beef. They are, to my palate, indistinguishable from the originals. Taste and texture bang on: I’d challenge anyone to pick them out in a blind tasting. Change is coming, faster than I thought possible.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1616079429184421888.html
US cancer death rate drops by 30% since 1991 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64255719
Exxon scientists predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy,’ Harvard researchers say https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/
"According to a meta-analysis on data from 24 genetically informative studies, up to 50% of the total variance in aggressive behavior is explained by genetic influences." [published in 2015] https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2015/december/the-genetics-of-violent-behavior#
How does neural activity relate to perception? Perceptography combines clever machine learning with optogenetics to generate the pictures that are likely to be experienced during neural stimulation. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.24.513337v2
Bulgaria to the rescue: How the EU’s poorest country secretly saved Ukraine — Bulgaria secretly provided up to 1/3 of Ukraine’s ammo in the early days of the war and up to 40% of diesel. https://www.politico.eu/article/bulgaria-volodymyr-zelenskyy-kiril-petkov-poorest-country-eu-ukraine/
Russian spies have twice tried to poison Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev [published in 2021] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/europe/arms-merchant-russia-assassination-squad.html