Links for 2023-06-20
Using AI to predict political alignment with 61% accuracy. "The right-wing faces, particularly for females, might be perceived as more attractive." Happier faces were also more right-wing. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31796-1 (More: It's written all over your face. How our faces are our biggest privacy vulnerability. https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/its-written-all-over-your-face)
China's ByteDance Has Gobbled Up $1 Billion of Nvidia GPUs for AI This Year https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinas-bytedance-has-gobbled-up-dollar1-billion-of-nvidia-gpus-for-ai-this-year
Salesforce pledges to invest $500M in generative AI startups https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/salesforce-pledges-to-invest-500m-in-generative-ai-startups/
“What if I told you that you can attain human-level sample efficiency without LLMs or a world model, just by scaling up model-free RL? I’m happy to present our new paper, Bigger, Better, Faster: Human-Level Atari with Human-Level Efficiency” https://twitter.com/max_a_schwarzer/status/1670133945613287424
“So, do LLMs "just predict text"? Yes, but perhaps without with the "just" — the text they predict is abstract, and only indirectly written by humans. Humans sit at the base of a pyramid with several layers of AI above, and humans pretending to be AI somewhere in the middle.” https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1668383898315751425
The alternative battery chemistries might finally hit their stride in the next 5-10 years. Iron-air batteries could have 50 GWh of capacity from Form’s factory in West Virginia alone. https://twitter.com/sdmoores/status/1670518451431940096
New Hybrid Material Transforms Light: Revolutionizing Solar Energy, Medical Imaging, and Night Vision Technologies https://news.utexas.edu/2023/06/12/new-material-transforms-light-creating-new-possibilities-for-sensors/
Smart in-memory light sensors perform image recognition https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/21290/k1985_/
A thread of politically inconvenient data that's being censored https://twitter.com/fentasyl/status/1668341317028687872
Are racial disparities in homicide a recent phenomenon? https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/racial-homicide-disparities-since
Newly elected majority-Muslim city council in Michigan bans Pride flags https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned (see also: Birmingham Parents Protest LGBT Education https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAVkEx6bQig)
Portraits of Egyptians from 2000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits
The portraits retained their colors due to the hot, dry Egyptian climate.