Links for 2023-04-08
Here an agent plans and executes 5 different API calls to complete a user request: https://python.langchain.com/en/latest/modules/agents/toolkits/examples/openapi.html#st-example-hierarchical-planning-agent
Better Language Models of Code through Self-Improvement — “The results show that our framework significantly improves PLMCs' performance in code-related sequence generation tasks, such as code summarization and code generation in the CodeXGLUE benchmark.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01228
Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI — Anthropic plans to train a powerful model with billions in new funding https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/anthropics-5b-4-year-plan-to-take-on-openai/
MATHEMATICS AND THE FORMAL TURN: “Since the early twentieth century, it has been understood that mathematical definitions and proofs can be represented in formal systems systems with precise grammars and rules of use. Building on such foundations, computational proof assistants now make it possible to encode mathematical knowledge in digital form. This article enumerates some of the ways that these and related technologies can help us do mathematics.” https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/avigad/Papers/formal_turn.pdf
“Great Awokening is a global phenomenon. No evidence it started in US media. Analysis of 98 million news articles across 36 countries quantifies. Exception: state-controlled media from China/Russia/Iran using wokeness terminology to criticize/mock the West” https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/gag
"Ending an Ugly Chapter in Chip Design: Study tries to settle a bitter disagreement over Google’s chip design AI" (independent replication of RL chip design work shows competitive with other approaches despite omitting pretraining) https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-controversy
SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication https://twitter.com/davisblalock/status/1641222279509196801
Moderate drinking is still good for you: "How to lie with statistics advanced edition...This meta-study claims to overturn the long established pattern that moderate drinkers have lower mortality than abstainers. After adjusting for confounders there was "no significant reduction in mortality". Very misleading..." https://twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1643993363623084038
Don’t Take Batteries to the Moon or Mars, 3D Print Them When you Get There: 3D printing batteries using local materials https://www.universetoday.com/160703/dont-take-batteries-to-the-moon-or-mars-3d-print-them-when-you-get-there/
"Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics." https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/
“In a renewed attempt at a grand unified theory of brain function, physicists now argue that brains optimize performance by staying near — though not exactly at — the critical point between two phases.” [published in 2018] https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-may-teeter-near-their-tipping-point-20180614/
Adding 0.075% by weight of graphene to polyacrylonitrile carbon fibres can increase their strength by 225% and Young modulus by 184%. Strangely, the effect reverses if we add more than 0.1% graphene, by making the fibres weaker... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz4191
John von Neumann asks, “Can we survive technology?” https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf (Quotes: 1. “I should like to mention, as an example of this, the phase of computing machines. It is probably true that since 1945 the over-all capacity of these machines has nearly doubled every year. This is astounding because over a period of ten years it means a thousandfold increase.” 2. “The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.”)
ANT DEATH SPIRAL: Ants in many species find their way round by following pheromone trails left by nestmates. Occasionally, though, the trails accidentally loop, and the ants end up walking in a circle till they die of exhaustion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
“Today, we stood up to China.” - Kevin McCarthy on his meeting with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. https://twitter.com/HouseGOP/status/1644078557897936901
See also:
Looped Transformers as Programmable Computers: “We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop…Our work highlights the versatility of the attention mechanism, and demonstrates that even shallow transformers can execute full-fledged, general-purpose programs.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13196
When an "imaging artifact" turns out to be one of the wildest things we've ever observed in the universe.
A supermassive black hole.
Ejected from its galaxy.
Compressed gas in its wake.
AND FORMED A 200,000 LIGHT-YEAR LONG STRING OF STARS.