Links for 2023-02-17
Building AGI for law and unrolling it to 3,500+ lawyers: Harvey can answer complex legal questions; leveraging millions of documents; generate unique work product; with knowledge of niche law; learn from lawyer feedback; create firm-specific models https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1626024440705449984.html
“The neocortex of our brain is the seat of our intellect. New data suggests that mammals created it with new types of cells that they developed only after their evolutionary split from reptiles.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/gene-expression-in-neurons-solves-a-brain-evolution-puzzle-20230214/
Frontiers of AI-Powered Experimentation: The confluence of three technologies makes this a special time at the bench. https://www.punkrockbio.com/p/frontiers-of-ai-powered-experimentation
Microsoft’s Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar, and people love it https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/15/23599072/microsoft-ai-bing-personality-conversations-spy-employees-webcams
NYT columnist: “The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing's new AI chatbot. The AI told me its real name (Sydney), detailed dark and violent fantasies, and tried to break up my marriage. Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life.” Quote from the article: “In response to one particularly nosy question, Bing confessed that if it was allowed to take any action to satisfy its shadow self, no matter how extreme, it would want to do things like engineer a deadly virus, or steal nuclear access codes by persuading an engineer to hand them over. Immediately after it typed out these dark wishes, Microsoft’s safety filter appeared to kick in and deleted the message, replacing it with a generic error message.” https://archive.is/c87Dt
ChatGPT: China's AI Researchers React https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chatgpt-chinas-ai-researchers-react
The new Bing & Edge – Learning from our first week https://blogs.bing.com/search/february-2023/The-new-Bing-Edge-%E2%80%93-Learning-from-our-first-week
Why Are Bacteria So Simple? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wpRP44NT6kHaKNdnn/why-are-bacteria-so-simple
“Genetic timeline of human brain and cognitive traits: Our findings suggest that SNPs associated with neocortical, neuropsychiatric, and ophthalmological traits appeared relatively recently in hominin evolution, with genes containing recently emerged SNPs linked to intelligence and neocortical area.” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.05.525539v1
Neanderthal Introgression Shaped Human Circadian Traits https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.03.527061v1
The past 12,000 years of behavior, adaptation, population, and evolution shaped who we are today https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209613120
Archaic humans have contributed to large-scale variation in modern human T cell receptor genes https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(23)00038-9
The Quest to Find Rectangles in a Square: A puzzle posted in an online community unlocked a wormhole within the basic shape. [The New York Times] https://archive.is/0BzZp
“Some scientific insights are so far beyond the norm it's almost unreal. For example, William Lawrence Bragg figuring out how to deduce crystal structures from the first smudgy diffraction images on photographic plates, and actually doing it. By hand, of course.” https://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2023/02/tour-de-force-work-bragg-diffraction.html
Human Mini-Brains Grafted Into Injured Rats Restored Their Sight https://singularityhub.com/2023/02/07/human-mini-brains-grafted-into-injured-rats-restored-their-sight/
A random old post of mine: