Links for 2024-02-19
AI:
“Transformers can learn string rewrites, if trained on a large and diverse set of rewrite rules. The number of rules matters, not the number of examples per rule. String rewrites form the basis of Markov algorithms. If transformers can learn them, they can learn any calculation.” — François Charton https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10891
In Search of Needles in a 10M Haystack: Recurrent Memory Finds What LLMs Miss: Fine-tuning GPT-2 with recurrent memory augmentations enables it to handle tasks involving up to 10M timesteps https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10790
“Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06457
“Lumos is an end-to-end system for on-device multimodal text-understanding! No more need to send images to cloud for processing. It has a core Scene Text Recognition (STR) whose output is fed to a MLLM.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08017
ChemLLM: A Chemical Large Language Model https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06852
Grand-master Level Chess without Search: Modeling Choices and their Implications https://gist.github.com/yoavg/8b98bbd70eb187cf1852b3485b8cda4f
Miscellaneous:
New tools for programming biology: Continuous mutagenesis, RNA writing, and more https://centuryofbio.com/p/new-tools-for-programming-biology
Peter Miller has won his debate with Rootclaim (the judges concluded it is much more likely Covid-19 was natural in origin). https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/
How should we treat missing data? https://youtu.be/Oeq6GChHOzc
Politics:
How Silicon Valley learned to love America, drones, and glory https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/17/silicon-valley-military-tech-defense-contractors/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/Wp8p7]
“Charles Lindbergh speaking in 1940: “I’ve been forced to the conclusion that we can’t win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send” If Lindberg would’ve been listened to, there would’ve been a Nazi Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1759176752612393095
Ukraine:
"In the coming weeks, Ukraine will be one of the first to receive new kamikaze drones. This also presents an opportunity for combat testing of this new generation of equipment," French Defense Minister Sebastian Lecorne said. https://www.lejdd.fr/international/sebastien-lecornu-ministre-des-armees-au-jdd-la-russie-adopte-un-comportement-de-plus-en-plus-agressif-notre-encontre-142208
“If Republicans continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the White House could turn to an ally to provide Kyiv with ATACM missiles capable of striking Russian-held Crimea.” https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/biden-administration-leaning-supplying-ukraine-long-range-missiles-rcna139394
“Two years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 74% of Americans view the war there as important to U.S. national interests – with 43% describing it as very important.” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/16/how-americans-view-the-conflicts-between-russia-and-ukraine-israel-and-hamas-and-china-and-taiwan/
Have even more Russian fighter jets been shot down? https://x.com/Tendar/status/1759542468217803045
Mariinka now, the one liberated to ashes by Russia. https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1759308825734119752
“Ukrainian soldiers, now mostly with only small caliber ammo, no air cover, waiting for promised F-16's that never arrive, artillery shells that never arrive, defending against a coalition of Russia, Iran and North Korea.” https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1759295756488348036