Links for 2024-02-07
AI:
Google presents Self-Discover: “SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03620
Nabeel Qureshi on whether there is a Moore’s Law for intelligence: “The shocking implication of what we have seen in this piece so far is that there may be no great, transformative breakthroughs needed to get to the critical inflection point. We already have the ingredients. As Ilya Sutskever likes to say, “the machine just wants to learn” – data, compute, and the right algorithms result in intelligence of a particular kind, and more of those inputs results in more intelligence as an output!” https://digitalspirits.substack.com/p/moores-law-for-intelligence
ReGAL: Refactoring Programs to Discover Generalizable Abstractions https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16467
Google presents Transfer Learning for Text Diffusion Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17181
SERL: A Software Suite for Sample-Efficient Robotic Reinforcement Learning — “RL takes so long to train, especially from pixels, right? Turns out that 15-30 minutes of *real world* training gets near-perfect policies with pixels for pretty hard tasks.” https://serl-robot.github.io/
One step closer to articulated simulations learned completely from data https://www.garfield.studio/
Large Language Models in Five Formulas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCXDr-UOb9A
Neuroscience:
Google Research is making exciting advances on understanding how our own brains work and how we think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB_ZmAM3tv8
Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.15.575721v1
What does the roadmap to whole brain emulation (running a brain on a computer) look like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNp6eLwuTvc
Miscellaneous:
Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/
Ukraine:
“Video of the “work” of air defense in Crimea. In the video, the British-French-made “Storm Shadow/SCALP” flies unhindered over the Russian S-300/S-400 air defense missile launchers. Russians follow it with their gaze and swear words. This missile is heading towards the Belbek airfield and will later hit the command post of the 38th Fighter Aviation Regiment. 01/31/2024.” https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1754896191202963506
"Ukraine can reduce its requirements for artillery ammunition by significantly increasing production of strike drones, both first-person-view drones for use in close battle and long-range strike drones to target Russian critical infrastructure." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2024.2309068
Russian thoughts about Ukraine's FPV advantage in combat https://x.com/sambendett/status/1754895290904047878
“Along with money and weapons, fresh soldiers are essential for Ukraine to keep fighting. The army asked for 500k to be called up, but has been wrangling for weeks with the president & parliament over the numbers + means of raising them. We've been in Ukraine investigating” https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1754982493332156802
John McCain in 2014: “I will say to my friends who were objecting to this – and there are a number of them on my side – you can call yourself Republicans; that’s fine because that’s your voter registration,” McCain said. “Don’t call yourself Reagan Republicans. Ronald Reagan would never – would never – let this kind of aggression go unresponded to by the American people.” https://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/john-mccain-ronald-reagan-urkraine-aid-bill-104658 (video: https://twitter.com/hissgoescobra/status/1754715020515012786)
John McCain, 2015: "There's nothing that provokes Vladimir Putin more than weakness." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLAzeHnNgR8
With America cutting off all aid to Ukraine last year, Russia is finally making some progress in taking the city of Avdiivka (pre-war population: 31,392). They've been trying to take it since 2014 and launched a serious offensive on October 10, 2023.
In 4 months of offensive operations in Avdiivka, Russia is visually confirmed to have lost more than 600 vehicles, more than 200 tanks, and almost 350 APC/IFVs.[1]
There are many videos and photos of Russian corpses littering the area.
These are the superpowers of Russia: 1. Its ability to manipulate useful idiots in the West to do its bidding and cut off aid to Ukraine. 2. Its ability and willingness to suffer enormous losses.
[1] Details of each loss with coordinates: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VIyACYHfnJi8cUMWjXAXDhS419l9IHcIhGJaK1RWMFQ/