Links for 2023-06-28
Demis Hassabis says the company is working on a system called Gemini that will eclipse ChatGPT with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems. https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis-chatgpt/ [https://archive.is/LaQ5V]
“These are astonishing results in weight loss. 24.% weight loss at 48 weeks. Average loss of 58 pounds. Blows out of the water everything else we've seen so far.” https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2301972
Language models are weak learners: “The results illustrate the potential for prompt-based LLMs to function not just as few-shot learners themselves, but as components of larger machine learning pipelines.” https://arxiv.org/abs//2306.14101
An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12001
The Future of Medical Diagnostics: All-Purpose Biosensor Chip With 10,000-Fold Increase in Detection Range https://phys.org/news/2023-06-major-all-purpose-biosensor-chip.html
Why are nuclear power plants so expensive in the US? Inflated discount rates (12.5% instead of 2-3% like in Japan, which would make nuclear energy cheaper than natural gas), insane delays from inefficient construction companies and lack of standardization https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/
“I wish more people knew that nuclear fission energy (in breeder reactors) can power the entire world for about 4 billion years. It's literally just as sustainable as the solar-derived sources like wind/solar/hydro/biofuel (which stop around then too).” https://twitter.com/whatisnuclear/status/1671891328328962056
“Yesterday, the same lawmakers in New York who frequently demand we Believe the Science instead went with Feels Over Reals, passing a bill to ban the release of wastewater from the shuttered Indian Point nuclear plant into the Hudson. Here's what you need to know...” https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671888215752740873
“A self-funding global fleet of 400 million Terraformers, rolled out over the next two decades, will provide all of humanity with permanent unconditional energy abundance for the first time in history, completing the mission of the industrial revolution.” https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/
What is the foundation of me experiencing the present moment being right now and not at some other point in time? “…dividing time into a "future", which has "yet to happen", a "past", which "has happened", and a "present", which "is happening", is a leaky abstraction of the underlying laws about performing inference and decision computations in a physics with locality, the second law of thermodynamics, and a low-entropy state at some t_0 (big bang).” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CFuY9DCAgH4HJyjd7/what-is-the-foundation-of-me-experiencing-the-present-moment?commentId=MKNvFB7CfHqBLcQ74
