Links for 2023-12-18
Why birds are smart: “Corvids and parrots with brains of 5–20 g show cognitive properties similar to those of great apes like chimpanzees with brains of about 400 g…many associative pallial neurons, a pallial area that overtakes functions of the mammalian prefrontal cortex, dense dopaminergic innervation of associative pallial areas, and flexible neural fundaments of working memory…” https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(23)00281-4
Agility is using large language models to communicate with its humanoid robots https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/agility-is-using-large-language-models-to-communicate-with-its-humanoid-robots/
PlayFusion: Skill Acquisition via Diffusion from Language-Annotated Play https://play-fusion.github.io/
Gaussian-SLAM can reconstruct a renderable 3D scene from a RGBD stream. https://vladimiryugay.github.io/gaussian_slam/
Phi-2: a 2.7 billion-parameter language model that demonstrates outstanding reasoning and language understanding capabilities, showcasing state-of-the-art performance among base language models with less than 13 billion parameters. On complex benchmarks Phi-2 matches or outperforms models up to 25x larger, thanks to new innovations in model scaling and training data curation. https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2
Microsoft Research announces TinyGSM: achieving >80% on GSM8k with small language models https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09241
“…the researchers used the most advanced neural recording technology available, called Neuropixels probes, which allowed them to ‘listen in’ on hundreds of individual neurons throughout the cortex which was previously not possible. Over the last five years Neuropixels probes have revolutionized neuroscientific studies in animals, but have only now been adapted for humans.” https://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/news/intricate-machinery-human-speech
SpaceX's latest valuation ranks above the market value of top U.S. defense contractors – including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – as well as the most valuable U.S. telecom companies – such as Verizon and AT&T. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/spacex-value-climbs-to-180-billion-higher-than-boeing-verizon.html