Links for 2023-04-05
Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models: https://cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/eightthings.pdf
LLMs predictably get more capable with increasing investment, even without targeted innovation.
Many important LLM behaviors emerge unpredictably as a byproduct of increasing investment.
LLMs often appear to learn and use representations of the outside world.
There are no reliable techniques for steering the behavior of LLMs.
Experts are not yet able to interpret the inner workings of LLMs.
Human performance on a task isn’t an upper bound on LLM performance.
LLMs need not express the values of their creators nor the values encoded in web text.
Brief interactions with LLMs are often misleading
“There have been an incredible number of gene-editing advances (including in delivery) over the last three days. Here are 7 of them...” https://twitter.com/NikoMcCarty/status/1641811586431213568
"Eliezer Yudkowsky: “So the actual scary part to me is that GPT4 understands what it means to say, "Compress this in a way where *you* can decompress it."…("Stochastic parrot" my fucking ass.)” https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1643428537821720578 (for updates on this see e.g. this tweet and others by the same author: https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1643415357615640577)
SudoLang: A Powerful Pseudocode Programming Language for LLMs https://medium.com/javascript-scene/sudolang-a-powerful-pseudocode-programming-language-for-llms-d64d42aa719b
Build an entire data workflow with just a one-sentence prompt https://twitter.com/EinblickAI/status/1641518278668582912
“What is the chance your vote decides the whole election? I've found an elegant proof that unless the election is a forgone conclusion, the chance can't be much lower than 1 in the number of voters.” http://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote
Why Starting A Rocket Engine Is So Hard! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I
difflogic - A Library for Differentiable Logic Gate Networks https://github.com/Felix-Petersen/difflogic
Closed-form parametric equations for plain-knit yarns and the twisted fibers running around them. Also includes C code to generate curves, and displacement/alpha maps for making tiled patterns. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/Other/YarnCurve.pdf
“The normalization scheme that DeepMind researchers came up with for their "linear recurrent unit" (LRU) is a nice example of how it is possible to predictably engineer circuits in artificial neural networks, when you know what you're doing.” https://twitter.com/CFGeek/status/1640445451387412481
Floating Nuclear Power Buoyant on New Prospects https://www.powermag.com/floating-nuclear-power-buoyant-on-new-prospects/
“China spent $240 billion bailing out 22 developing countries between 2008 and 2021, with the amount soaring in recent years as more have struggled to repay loans spent building ‘Belt & Road’ infrastructure” [Reuters] https://archive.is/dpRuE
"Russia’s economy is in the tank and the reason many of us have thought differently is that Putin literally makes up the numbers." https://www.econlib.org/jeff-sonnenfelds-bombshell-about-the-russian-economy/
Satellite images: A web of trenches shows Russia fears losing Crimea https://web.archive.org/web/20230405012231/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ukraine-russia-crimea-battle-trenches/
How the UAE paid a Swiss firm to destroy an oil-trading firm using negative PR, in part by editing Wikipedia articles about it [The New Yorker] https://archive.is/v3L8t
Now that formerly neutral Finland joined NATO, let us remember once again that this would not have been possible without the strategic genius of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
His achievements are manifold:
1. No more talk about cutting defense spending among European nations. On the contrary, everyone is talking about modernization and increased funding.
2. The Western military industry has received a massive boost. Poland's $10 billion order for HIMARS rocket launchers and ammunition is just the beginning, as Russia is increasingly unable to meet its arms delivery commitments.
3. Ukraine is more united than ever and its self-identity has been massively strengthened. The alleged threat posed by Ukraine has not been neutralized. On the contrary, Ukraine is now capable of launching frequent attacks inside Russian territory.
4. Russia has been severely weakened. Russia has lost most of its considerable soft power over Western nations and access to Western markets. The image of Russia as a superpower has been completely shattered. And without Western technology and with China as its main export market, Russia's future will be that of a Chinese vassal state. A decidedly worse prospect for its national identity than before.