Links for 2023-11-21
AI existential risk should make you “shit your pants” — Emmett Shear, Interim CEO of OpenAI https://twitter.com/liron/status/1726473187880468827
Emmett Shear, Interim CEO of OpenAI: “The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.” https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275
“two days ago, sam altman casually mentions that openai recently made a huge breakthrough that pushes “the frontier of discovery forward - the 4th such breakthrough in its 8 year history.” https://twitter.com/blader/status/1725941328251593196
Anticipating the arrival of all-powerful AI, Chief Scientist of OpenAI Ilya Sutskever led his staff to chant “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/ [https://archive.is/tfsWN]
Ilya Sutskever: “I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.” https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968988/openai-employees-resignation-letter-microsoft-sam-altman
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-facts-from-a-weekend
“When trained with 20 million synthetic images, StableRep+ not only achieved superior accuracy but also displayed remarkable efficiency compared to CLIP models trained with a staggering 50 million real images.” https://news.mit.edu/2023/synthetic-imagery-sets-new-bar-ai-training-efficiency-1120
Fine-tuning Language Models for Factuality: Achieves ~50% reduction in factual error rate when generating biographies and answering medical questions at 7B scale https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08401
Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10122
Scaling multimodal understanding to long videos https://blog.research.google/2023/11/scaling-multimodal-understanding-to.html
Bottlenecks of Aging: “This report is the months-long culmination of some of the brightest young leaders in the longevity field coming together to prioritize and detail the field’s top bottlenecks” https://amaranth.foundation/bottlenecks-of-aging
"“We’re actually going to use ultrasonic modulation and demodulation to create pressure and generate sound...this is fundamentally the first time humans are experiencing sound generated in a different way.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/mems-speakers-xmems
Computer vision enables contact-free 3D printing, letting engineers print with high-performance materials they couldn’t use before. https://news.mit.edu/2023/3d-printer-can-watch-itself-fabricate-objects-1115
How mathematics built the modern world: Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mathematics-built-the-modern-world
Goodstein's theorem: "1. Start with a binary number. 2. Interpret it as in a base one higher. 3. Subtract one. 4. Iterate until 0. Two mind-bending statements: 1. The sequence eventually gets to zero. 2. Its proof is independent of the Peano Arithmetics." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodstein%27s_theorem
A friendly reminder that in 2005 Kurzweil predicted that computers would pass the Turing Test by 2029, and set the date for a technological singularity at 2045. That seems pretty realistic at the moment.
Political links:
Javier Milei on Ukraine: "I brought the Ukrainian flag(to Congress), basically because those of us who support the ideas of freedom, cannot tolerate or support an invasion like Russia has done in Ukraine" https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1726394430792270221
Javier Milei on China: “People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, referring to Beijing’s government. “Would you trade with an assassin?” https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentinas-milei-says-hed-reject-assassin-china-leave-mercosur.phtml
Javier Milei on Israel: “Would you really move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Yes, of course. I don’t care if I’ll be criticized by world leaders. I truly believe that’s the right thing to do.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/ahead-of-sundays-election-one-of-argentinas-two-presidential-candidates-talks-torah/
Argentina's president-elect Javier Milei singing about the economic crisis of Argentina dressed as General Ancap, his superhero alter ego. https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1726505051387289896
Russian soldier, neo-Nazi Alexei Milchakov tells how he cut off the hand of a Ukrainian prisoner in 2014 https://twitter.com/den_kazansky/status/1726511571327971608
“A young Russian serviceman, who voluntarily went to the war in Ukraine, and nearly lost all of his vision in Bakhmut, is asking TikTok, YouTube, and Vladimir Putin to help him as his command wants to send him back to fight in Ukraine. He doesn't really mind, just don't have the health for it anymore.” https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1726529166340653065
“58th brigade repels Russian attack on Statomlynivka area. Chinese Desertcross 1000-3 UTV can be seen starting from 0:24. By early 2024 China will supply Russian army with a total of 1590 such vehicles.” https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1726558912227467406
A video of the operation of an aircraft carrier drone. The idea is to fly small FPV drones over a longer range. https://twitter.com/ian_matveev/status/1726574650019196983
Footage of Houthi forces hijacking the ship Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea yesterday. https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1726641686309400988 (A timely reminder that the United States owes its Navy to pirates: "Under the Presidency of George Washington, merchant shipping came under threat while in the Mediterranean by Barbary pirates from four North African States. This led to the Naval Act of 1794, which created a permanent standing U.S. Navy.")