Links for 2023-02-01
In case you missed one of the latest and most important breakthroughs in AI, @jackclarkSF provides a handy summary here: “DeepMind figures out pre-training for RL agents: Adapt to novel environments in roughly the same timescale as humans...The ‘big deal’ part of this result is that these pretrained RL agents now display the same sort of rapid adaption as language models.” https://jack-clark.net/2023/01/30/import-ai-316-scaling-laws-for-rl-stable-diffusion-for-160k-yolov8/
Sample Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning via Local Planning: “Notably, with our framework, we can achieve super-human performance on the notoriously hard Atari game, Montezuma's Revenge, with a simple (distributional) double DQN.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12579
"The inside story of ChatGPT: How OpenAI founder Sam Altman built the world’s hottest technology with billions from Microsoft" (OA didn't think anyone would care about ChatGPT) https://fortune.com/longform/chatgpt-openai-sam-altman-microsoft/
Dendrites: Why Biological Neurons Are Deep Neural Networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtQPrH-gC4
“Introducing Charm ✨, a Google Sheets add-on that automates mundane work in spreadsheets.” https://charm.shubhro.com/
InfiniCity: Infinite-Scale City Synthesis https://hubert0527.github.io/infinicity/
HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes https://caoang327.github.io/HexPlane/
StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis https://sites.google.com/view/stylegan-t/
“Nobody Has My Condition But Me: Medical researchers find my genetic mutation endlessly fascinating. But being unique isn’t a plus when you’re a patient.” [The New Yorker] https://archive.is/hXnEw
$39/ton of CO2 for direct capture from flue gas using carbon-absorbing solvents. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-scientists-unveil-carbon-capture-date.html
"Men’s physical strength predicts their quickness to anger and their likelihood of applying aggressive tactics to achieve their goals...Physical size at age 3 predicts aggressiveness and disagreeableness at age 11" https://www.professormarkvanvugt.com/images/files/Handbook_of_Evolutionary_Psychologymvv2014rev.pdf
"The number of northern Europeans with IQs greater than 140 should be 4 per thousand while 23 per thousand Ashkenazim should exceed the same threshold, a six fold difference." https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Bryan Caplan: Mainstream Media is Worse Than Silence https://betonit.substack.com/p/mainstream-media-is-worse-than-silence
The Carthaginians and their allies, led by Hannibal, surrounded and practically annihilated a larger Roman and Italian army under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. It is regarded as one of the greatest tactical feats in military history and one of the worst defeats in Roman history.