Links for 2023-07-30
Scaling Up and Distilling Down: Language-Guided Robot Skill Acquisition https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~huy/scalingup/
Mother of all LLM jailbreaks: Automatically constructing adversarial prompts using OSS model (Vicuna) weights that work against ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and Llama 2 https://llm-attacks.org/
Coleman Hughes has a conversation with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and Scott Aaronson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQSiS8hpZA (transcript and discussion: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7431)
“Have you ever wanted to inference a baby Llama 2 model in pure C? No? Well, now you can!” https://github.com/karpathy/llama2.c
Prosthetic arms with control over every finger https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-07-surgical-enable-unprecedented-finger-bionic.html
A short dasatinib and quercetin treatment is sufficient to reinstate potent adult neuroregenesis in the aged killifish https://www.nature.com/articles/s41536-023-00304-4
Researchers claim to be able to reprogram the cells in our eyes to repair retinal degenerence. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120
Mushrooms magnify memory by boosting nerve growth? https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2023/02/mushrooms-magnify-memory-boosting-nerve-growth-0
"We presented participants with deepfake videos of fictitious movie remakes (such as Will Smith staring as Neo in The Matrix). We observed an average false memory rate of 49%, with many participants remembering the fake remake as better than the original." https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287503
Are temperatures this summer hotter than scientists expected? Climate models project rapid future warming – and have generally captured the extremes of Summer 2023 https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/are-temperatures-this-summer-hotter
Did Rome fall due to dysgenics? https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/fall-of-the-roman-empire-polygenic
Honesty, Intelligence, and Race https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/new-paper-out-honesty-intelligence
“Let me show you 10 writers who lived like action heroes” https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1682423448579219456
“The American people would be shocked if they knew how many Chinese, Iranian, and Russian citizens work in or in close proximity to our national nuclear labs. When we tried to put an end to it 6 years ago, DOE’s university partners strongly protested. Why?” https://twitter.com/EzraACohen/status/1684734778099052546
Ukraine links:
Moscow is now being attacked on a weekly basis (no doubt it will soon be daily). Putin has not only managed to get two countries to join NATO, but he has also massively compromised the safety of his people. https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1685538124728803328
Counter-offensive equipment loss numbers as of 28 July 2023: 276 UA losses vs. 261 RU losses https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oxj79cNh5GR27RBwHirHiQ9VMr5A_g7cGZ1B57zu0jk/edit?usp=sharing (by https://twitter.com/naalsio26/status/1685048471991058432)
“This is Ukraine-developed and manufactured unmanned surface vessel (USV) MAGURA V5. It can carry up to 320 kg of explosives at 80 km per hour and have a range of 800 km from the launch side.” https://twitter.com/AlexKokcharov/status/1685290857929256962
“Brutal images from north of Bakhmut. Russian casualties here are really very high.” https://twitter.com/Teoyaomiquu/status/1685315797168656384
“The 77th brigade fired beautifully at Russian infantry in Bakhmut” https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1685312617009577984
Ukrainian FPV loitering munition strike targeting a Russian SUV on the E40 north of Bakhmut. https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1685312248145686529
“Ukrainian Forces 🇺🇦 are near Russia’s 1st Line of Major Trench Fortifications in Zaporizhzhia Oblast...If Ukraine breaks through it then they would be less than 9km away from Russia’s 2nd and final line of major trench fortifications until the Sea of Azov and the City of Melitopol” https://twitter.com/ukraine_map/status/1685301645716946944
The US Department of Defense will purchase a batch of 400-500 Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The deal is intended to provide Ukraine with dedicated terminals/services to conduct operations without fearing Musk turning off the signal. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/28/business/starlink.html [https://archive.is/SJwWf]
Many of the most promising applications of ChatGPT involve generating text that is not meant for human consumption.
They go in the other direction: they take things from the messy, human, textual world, and translate them into the simpler terms of ordinary computer programs.
Imagine you’re interacting with a system – a company, a website, a phone tree, whatever.
You say or type something.
Behind the scenes, unbeknownst to you, the system asks ChatGPT 13 different questions about the thing you just said/typed. This happens almost instantaneously and costs almost nothing.
No human being will ever see any of the words that ChatGPT wrote in response to this question. They get parsed by simple, old-fashioned computer code, and then they get discarded.
Each of ChatGPT’s answers ends in a simple “yes” or “no,” or a selection from a similar set of discrete options. The system uses all of this structured, “machine-readable” (in the old-fashioned sense) information to decide what to do next, in its interaction with you.