Links for 2023-03-20
Flexible natural language queries in 3D https://www.lerf.io/
ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models. Achieves a substantial improvement over few-shot prompting and automatic CoT on unseen tasks in the BigBench and MMLU benchmarks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09014
UK to invest £900m in supercomputer in bid to build own ‘BritGPT’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/15/uk-to-invest-900m-in-supercomputer-in-bid-to-build-own-britgpt
“I created a proof-of-concept integration of ChatGPT into Unity Editor. You can edit your Unity projects using natural language prompts.” https://twitter.com/_kzr/status/1637421440646651905
You can take human brain cells, put them in a rat, and these cells will integrate into the rat’s brain. https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(23)00004-8
Australian fire nourishes ocean phytoplankton bloom: Calculations of carbon released during the fire versus carbon absorbed by the oceanic phytoplankton bloom suggest that they were nearly equal. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721058538
“In 1881, astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed something curious. The first pages in books of logarithms were dirty on the edge, while the pages became progressively cleaner in later pages. He inferred from this that people more often looked up the logarithms of numbers with small leading digits than with large leading digits.” https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2023/03/09/alien-benfords-law/
Resilient bug-sized robots keep flying even after wing damage https://news.mit.edu/2023/resilient-bug-sized-robots-wing-damage-0315
By using the blood of a young mice in a old mice, we appear to be able to at least partially rejuvenate the brain of the old mice. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00373-6
Sea levels were about 1.5 meters higher 6000 years ago. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385110123000199
Stone flakes made by modern monkeys trigger big questions about early humans https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/10/1161652099/monkey-stone-flakes-early-humans-tools
The remarkable, yet not extraordinary, human brain as a scaled-up primate brain and its associated cost https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1201895109
“People claimed the human brain was special relative to other primates in the size of the temporal lobes, involved in functions such as language. Newer data once again shows that no, the human brain is just a scaled up primate brain…Done before with prefrontal cortex maturation too, we thought it was substantially different compared to chimpanzees, once you get the true developmental equivalents over lifespan, it doesn't seem to be…” https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/1637397907455221760 (for more evidence for the scaling hypothesis scroll down here: https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/links-for-2023-01-10 (E.g.: A recent meta-analysis showed that bigger brain size is robustly related to higher intelligence: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211621))