Links for 2023-11-19
“We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling…With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06114
How to 5x your typing speed and be in a flow state while you type? GPT is surprisingly good at correcting minor typos, so you can write really really fast, ignore mistakes and keep going, and it comes out just fine. https://twitter.com/_Borriss_/status/1725208054185046071
“Microsoft owns a 49% stake in OpenAI, having invested billions of dollars in the maker of ChatGPT. But the tech titan is also an investor in Inflection AI, which has a chatbot called Pi and is seen as a rival to OpenAI. …Last week, Reuters reported that Google plans to invest hundreds of millions in Character.AI, which builds personalized bots. In late October, Google said it had agreed to sink up to $2 billion into Anthropic, a key rival to OpenAI. What’s happening here?” https://qz.com/why-tech-giants-are-hedging-their-bets-on-openai-1851018105
“Google is having a hard time catching up with OpenAI. Google’s competitor to ChatGPT will not be ready until early 2024, after previously telling some cloud customers it would get to use Gemini AI in November of this year, sources told The Information Thursday. …Google’s Gemini was reportedly set to debut in 2023 with image and voice recognition capabilities. The chatbot would have been competitive with OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Anthropic’s Claude 2.” https://gizmodo.com/google-s-chatgpt-competitor-will-have-to-wait-1851030761
GPT-2030 and Catastrophic Drives: Four Vignettes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/acPYHjC9euGZRzaj6/gpt-2030-and-catastrophic-drives-four-vignettes
U.S. Bets on Small Nuclear Reactors to Help Fix a Huge Climate Problem https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/12/climate/nuclear-reactors-clean-energy.html [https://archive.is/2e2nd]
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy Awards $3.9 Million for Advanced Reactor Experiment Designs — The microreactor’s low mass and volume makes it easily transportable to remote locations or for off-planet bases, satellites, and electric propulsion engines. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-awards-39-million-advanced-reactor-experiment-designs
Wyoming discovery could be America’s first new source of rare-earth elements since 1952 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/the-2-million-coal-mine-that-might-hold-a-37-billion-treasure-181dbdcf [https://archive.is/S4Yrb]
On political prediction markets. "Modern scholarship finds that these early markets were remarkably accurate, with more predictive power than any other readily available source." https://www.ft.com/content/9108f393-6a45-41a3-bd76-20581b19288e [https://archive.is/VEeTJ]
When CAN'T Math Be Generalized? | The Limits of Analytic Continuation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krtf-v19TJg
“Ukrainians are also starting to use “mass effect” drone operations: several drones, sometimes with diverse capabilities like electro-optical, infrared, communications links, & kinetic capabilities, are flown in concert.” https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/the-future-of-drones-in-ukraine-a-report-from-the-diu-brave1-warsaw-conference/
The hyperreal numbers, an extension of the real numbers to infinitesimals and infinities, are logically consistent if and only if the reals are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
The vast majority of real numbers can't be described. But it is impossible to give a single example. https://blog.ram.rachum.com/post/54747783932/indescribable-numbers-the-theorem-that-made-me
I still don't understand why Amazon hasn't been one of the first players to embrace LLMs, given their existing infrastructure of more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices.
People love talking to ChatGPT. It would have been a huge win for Amazon.