Links for 2023-12-09
The Gemini multimodal demo video turned out to be so misleading that it could be called a fake. Will update accordingly and be more skeptical about Google products in the future. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/google-admits-it-fudged-a-gemini-ai-demo-video-which-critics-say-misled-viewers/ (see also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ofYejKKiSFYH2gLBb/gemini-1-0)
“We’re excited to announce H-GAP, a generalist model for humanoid control. Trained on large MoCap-derived data, it can generate diverse, natural motions & transfer skills to new tasks without fine-tuning!” https://yingchenxu.com/hgap/
Unnatural Error Correction: GPT-4 Can Almost Perfectly Handle Unnatural Scrambled Text https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18805
HyperDreamer: Hyper-Realistic 3D Content Generation and Editing from a Single Image https://ys-imtech.github.io/HyperDreamer/
NVIDIAResearch paper, XCube, generates highly-detailed 3D scenes with resolutions of up to 1024³ in under 30 seconds. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/xcube/
Atomic Industries closes $17M seed to exascale America’s industrial base https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/atomic-industries-closes-17m-seed-to-exascale-americas-industrial-base/
Brain Implant Sparks Remarkable Recovery in Patients With Severe Brain Injury https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02833-w
Ultrasound enables less-invasive brain-machine interfaces https://neuroscience.caltech.edu/news/ultrasound-enables-less-invasive-brainmachine-interfaces
What if your mouth bacteria that eat left-over sugar to produce acid that ruins your teeth would just produce ethanol instead? "A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes the bacteria that cause tooth decay" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq
Political links:
Russian report: “When firing at a mini-UAV of the Akila type with cannon weapons at a distance of 3 km, in order to achieve a value of the conditional probability of hitting a target equal to 0.5, it is necessary to expend from 4 to 13 thousand shells,” says Makarenko. That’s roughly THREE TONS of munition. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/12/06/russian-report-explains-why-air-defenses-cannot-shoot-down-drones/
Europe Must Urgently Prepare to Deter Russia Without Large-Scale US Support https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/europe-must-urgently-prepare-deter-russia-without-large-scale-us-support
Krynky forest, an overview of recently destroyed Russian equipment near the forest. https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1733218806518985020
A majority of Republicans voted against the 1941 Lend-Lease Act to aid Britain in battling the Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Lend-Lease_proposal
“In this thread, I will present overwhelming evidence demonstrating the significant correlation between immigration and criminality” https://twitter.com/CompositeGuy_/status/1731305590050160827
Immigrants with less than a bachelor's degree are a net cost to society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R07fRXNMoIc