Links for 2023-10-31
CodeFusion: A Pre-trained Diffusion Model for Code Generation — 75M parameter diffusion-based model beats a 20B GPT-3.5-Turbo. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17680 (This Microsoft paper also claims ChatGPT 3.5 has ~20 billion parameters.)
Scientists Accidentally Created Material for Superfast Computer Chips https://www.inverse.com/science/new-semiconductor-material-rhenium-fast-computer-chips
SALMONN: A model that can be regarded as a step towards AI with generic hearing abilities (speech, audio, music). Transcription; background vs. foreground sound; sound "comprehension"... https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13289
AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/24/ai-risk-climate-crisis-google-deepmind-chief-demis-hassabis-regulation
New open letter from Hinton, Bengio, and others: Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress https://managing-ai-risks.com/
President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g5XLHKyApAFXi3fso/president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and (The full executive order, which was released after this post, touches on many AI-related issues that EAs consider important, including bio-risks, industry-wide safety standards, and AI red-teaming, and regulating really, really large models: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/)
Will releasing the weights of large language models grant widespread access to pandemic agents? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytGsHbG7r3W3nJxPT/will-releasing-the-weights-of-large-language-models-grant
AI Pause Will Likely Backfire https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-pause-will-likely-backfire-by-nora/
Yann LeCun: "Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei are the ones doing massive corporate lobbying at the moment. They are the ones who are attempting to perform a regulatory capture of the AI industry." https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1718670073391378694
Programmatic backdoors: DNNs can use SGD to run arbitrary stateful computation https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QNQuWB3hS5FrGp5yZ/programmatic-backdoors-dnns-can-use-sgd-to-run-arbitrary
LIGO surpasses the quantum limit https://news.mit.edu/2023/ligo-surpasses-quantum-limit-1023
The €3 Trillion Cost of Saying No: How the EU Risks Falling Behind in the Bioeconomy Revolution https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/foregone-benefits-of-gene-editing-in-the-european-union
Yes, from the perspective of June 1, 2023, it is a failure. But from the perspective of February 24, 2022, Ukraine has been much more successful than almost anyone expected at that time.
The Russians are currently attacking Odessa from Crimea. I think the city will be taken soon too.
— Erich Vad, March 1, 2022, former German general and advisor to Angela Merkel
Now the outlook isn't so rosy. Mainly because the West doesn't produce enough ammunition. With enough ammunition, Russia would have no chance at all to conquer more territory (see their disastrous Avdiivka offensive).
Since both sides generally avoid setting benchmarks and making falsifiable predictions, we are left to guess what they themselves expected. Here is a rare exception:
“Tokmak is the minimum goal. The overall objective is to get to our state borders.”
— General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, September 22, 2023
Will they reach Tokmak this year? Doubtful.
One measure of success for Russia is when they are able to take full control of the four Ukrainian oblasts they have officially annexed.
But of course, since no timeframe has been given, they can always claim that everything is going according to plan.
From NATO's point of view, of course, Russia has already lost. The costs to them far outweigh the benefits:
NATO enlargement (Finland/Sweden).
Loss of Russian soft power over Western politicians.
Loss of Western markets.
Significant degradation of Russia's military power in the eyes of its enemies.
Massive strengthening of Ukrainian national identity.
Instead of security for the people of Donbass, Moscow is often targeted with drones.
Strengthening of the Western arms industry.
Even if they can eventually take all of Ukraine, stopping the CIA-backed partisans and suppressing mass protests will be an extremely costly security nightmare for decades to come. Remember, the Afghanistan war has cost ~$273 million ($273,000,000) per DAY for 20 years of taxpayers' money ($2 trillion).