Google Gemini may easily be the most important thing to happen this year: “The statement that may not be obvious is that the sleeping giant, Google has woken up, and they are iterating on a pace that will smash GPT-4 total pre-training FLOPS by 5x before the end of the year. The path is clear to 20x by the end of next year given their current infrastructure buildout. Whether Google has the stomach to put these models out publicly without neutering their creativity or their existing business model is a different discussion.” https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-gemini-eats-the-world-gemini [Note: you need a paid subscription to read the whole post.]
Tesla built a GPU farm for $300 million made up of 10,000 NVIDIA H100s (each one costs around $30k): "Due to real-world video training, we may have the largest training datasets in the world, hot tier cache capacity beyond 200PB - orders of magnitudes more than LLMs." https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1695530250896110019
Open challenges in LLM research https://huyenchip.com/2023/08/16/llm-research-open-challenges.html
“A list of core AI safety problems and how I hope to solve them” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnoc3cKY3gXMrTybs/a-list-of-core-ai-safety-problems-and-how-i-hope-to-solve
StableVideo: Text-driven Consistency-aware Diffusion Video Editing https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09592
Cracking the code that relates brain and behavior in a simple animal https://news.mit.edu/2023/cracking-code-relates-brain-behavior-simple-animal-0823
"In accordance with adoption studies, we found no evidence for cultural transmission: all influence from parents on their children's IQ was explained by the transmission of genes." https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1695184133650104528
Shrinking Economies Don’t Innovate https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
Multiverse-wide superrationality https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EeXSjvyQge5FZPeuL/implications-of-evidential-cooperation-in-large-worlds
Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30218-1
Autonomous swarms of drones are the future of warfare. Who wins will be decided by mass production capabilities and algorithms.
‘Hellscape’: DOD launches massive drone swarm program to counter China https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/08/hellscape-dod-launches-massive-drone-swarm-program-counter-china/389797/
Replicator Is DoD’s Big Play To Build Thousands Of Autonomous Weapons In Just Two Years https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/replicator-is-dods-big-play-to-build-thousands-of-autonomous-weapons-in-just-two-years
Median age across Europe: https://landgeist.com/2023/08/19/median-age-in-europe/
Ukraine links:
OSINT fusion: Cross-checking Russian military bloggers with up-to-date and publicly available images from infra-red sensors on NASA satellites. Ukrainian forces advanced toward Verbove. https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1696229569395659177
“Ukrainian soldiers completely destroyed the unique equipment worth 200 million US dollars, together with the defense complex.” https://twitter.com/GloOouD/status/1696182050070376687
“Russians lost another rare and expensive piece of hardware. This RB-636AM2 "Svet-KU" mobile EW unit was discovered somewhere in the Luhansk Region and destroyed by a GMLRS missile.” https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1696236253102965167
Nice summary