Links for 2024-02-26
AI, robotics, and compute:
[This is HUGE: A step towards general world models for AGI] Genie: The first AI world model trained on unlabelled Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. The method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger Internet datasets. Genie has three components: a latent action model that infers a latent action between each pair of frames, a video tokenizer that converts raw video frames into discrete tokens, and a dynamics model that, given a latent action and past frame tokens, predicts the next frame of the video. Model performance improved steadily with increased parameter count and batch size. https://sites.google.com/view/genie-2024/home
“We propose FLD, a self-supervised representation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in high-dimensional trajectories. RL policies informed by FLD show extended generality.” https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2024-fld/home
Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learning https://xingyu-lin.github.io/atm/
OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14008
Microsoft presents LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13753
Mini-robots modeled on insects may be smallest, lightest, fastest ever developed https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2024/01/18/mini-robots-modeled-on-insects-may-be-smallest-lightest-fastest-ever-developed/
3D Chip Tech Is Key to Meta’s AR Goals: Prototype chip gains huge performance boosts from wafer-to-wafer bonding https://spectrum.ieee.org/meta-ar-glasses
Miscellaneous:
Good News: Small Nuclear Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4XahwtJUk
"a certain Geobacillus bacteria species increases the mineralization of CO2 when stored deep underground. Under ideal geologic conditions, crystallizing carbon dioxide takes 7 to 10 years. But this particular bacteria sped up the process to just 10 days" https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a46808088/carbon-sequestration-bacteria/
SARS-CoV-2 infection causes dopaminergic neuron senescence https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(23)00442-3
The most testosterone filled 50 seconds on the internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26n6AU0qIW0
Ukraine:
“The manpower issues in Ukraine are self-inflicted. While the need for reinforcements has been apparent, political and military priorities haven't aligned. Concerns over the massive costs of the mobilization are valid, but answering core problem is unavoidable.” https://x.com/emilkastehelmi/status/1761453249180168647
The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/E2tiJ]
"The most important program for our country is the missile program. But I will say no more about it than the president - we have our long-range weapon, which hit a target 700 km away," said the Minister of Strategic Industries during the "Ukraine. 2024". https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1761698132511838502
In occupied Ukraine, the best way to survive is to stay silent https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/02/24/inside-occupied-ukraine-best-way-survive-stay-silent/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/C88Xk]
Western timidity has only emboldened Putin: The EU paid much more money to Russia for oil and gas in the first year of full-scale war than it has given Ukraine in two. https://www.ft.com/content/ab7ab870-a435-46b2-8188-b04517713f51 [no paywall: https://archive.is/vqPS1]
“Yet another vile war crime by the Russian military. As many as 9 surrendering Ukrainian troops were executed, supposedly on February 24.” https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1761811706173440022 [There have been many such cases recently. Besides being a crime, this is obviously irrational because 1. They cannot be used for prisoner exchanges 2. Signaling that surrender isn't an option endangers Russian soldiers because Ukraine will then fight to the death.]
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, announced that he will propose to member countries of the bloc to create an aid fund for Ukraine for the development of drones and artificial intelligence. https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/borrell-no-sea-intencion-veto-eeuu-consejo-seguridad-onu-empodera-netanyahu_128_10955701.html
Politics:
What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine: “He told the story of two Ukrainians who collected thousands of smartphones, affixed microphones and connected them to a network capable of detecting the unique buzzing sound of approaching unmanned systems. The information then gets relayed to air defense soldiers who can take action. The effort was briefed to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and referred to NATO and U.S. commands to potentially duplicate, Hecker said.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/22/ukraine-war-pentagon-lessons-learned/ [https://archive.is/398TC]
Satellite photos capture China's floating barrier, which restricts indigenous Philippines fishermen's access to Scarborough Shoal & threatens their food security--all while China's industrial & illegal clam harvesters systematically destroy the shoal's fragile ecosystem. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/satellite-images-reveal-floating-barrier-mouth-disputed-atoll-south-china-sea-2024-02-26/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/fdrXA]