Links for 2024-03-02
AI:
Beyond Language Models: Byte Models are Digital World Simulators — Leveraging next byte prediction, models like bGPT can directly learn from vast binary data, effectively simulating the intricate patterns of the digital world. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19155
Google DeepMind came up with two alternatives to the Transformer architecture, Hawk and Griffin. “Hawk-3B exceeds the reported performance of Mamba-3B (Gu and Dao, 2023) on downstream tasks, despite being trained on half as many tokens. Griffin-7B and Griffin-14B match the performance of Llama-2 (Touvron et al., 2023) despite being trained on roughly 7 times fewer tokens.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19427
Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices, and is asking for OpenAI to revert back to open source, and to share all its research for the benefit of humanity. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZvnoW4EiYo9nu3MT/elon-sues-openai
Klarna froze hiring because of AI. Now it says its chatbot does the work of 700 full-time staff https://fortune.com/europe/2024/02/28/klarna-ai-altered-hiring-chatbot-700-full-time-staff-openai/
Tyler Perry puts $800 million studio expansion on hold because of OpenAI’s Sora https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/i-just-dont-see-how-we-survive-tyler-perry-issues-hollywood-warning-over-ai-video-tech/
ByteDance presents MegaScale: Scaling Large Language Model Training to More Than 10,000 GPUs https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15627
New AI model could streamline operations in a robotic warehouse https://news.mit.edu/2024/new-ai-model-could-streamline-operations-robotic-warehouse-0227
The Pentagon is looking for high-quality data to power its AI push. https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2024/02/dods-ai-strategy-leans-high-quality-data/394302/
AI optimism sends Nasdaq to new post-Covid high https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68439120
Miscellaneous:
Startup accelerates progress toward light-speed computing https://news.mit.edu/2024/startup-lightmatter-accelerates-progress-toward-light-speed-computing-0301
Quantum physics makes small leap with microscopic gravity measurement https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/23/quantum-physics-microscopic-gravity-discovery
Gene flow from Neanderthals and Denisovans to “modern” humans, and vice versa https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/26/gene-flow-from-neanderthals-and-denisovans-to-modern-humans-and-vice-versa/
Is long covid turning out to be a much bigger problem than is being acknowledged? https://www.donotpanic.news/p/mass-disabling-event-denial
On moving from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society and vice versa. https://www.ggd.world/p/does-egalitarianism-enable-more-gender
Politics:
Jan Marsalek, the fugitive COO of disgraced company Wirecard, who was behind Germany's biggest financial fraud in history was also a GRU agent for a decade. https://theins.press/en/politics/269612
Ukraine:
“EU countries have come up with "over 50%" of the money needed to buy hundreds of thousands of artillery shells from non-EU countries for Ukraine, Lt. Gen. Karel Řehka, the chief of the Czechia’s general staff, tells me.” https://x.com/paulmcleary/status/1763566455369486549
Ukraine’s Lessons for Future Combat: Unmanned Aerial Systems e Combat: Unmanned Aerial Systems and Deep Strike — “To compensate for electronic warfare, Ukrainian units deploy all unmanned aerial systems, barring first-person view drones, with four-man teams comprised of a driver or scout, drone operator, navigator, and gimbal operator...Experienced UAS operators are the most valuable military occupation specialty to the ZSU, bar combat medics...” [PDF] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3257&context=parameters
The UK government has privately urged Germany to provide long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine. The UK even offered a swap deal that would see Britain supply Ukraine with more of its own Storm Shadow missiles, and Germany then restock the UK with Taurus. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-01/russia-ukraine-war-uk-pushing-germany-to-send-taurus-missiles [no paywall: https://archive.is/eMDOY]
European Parliament calls on the EU to give Ukraine whatever it needs to defeat Russia https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240223IPR18097/parliament-calls-on-the-eu-to-give-ukraine-whatever-it-needs-to-defeat-russia
The outskirts of Avdiivka, littered with Russian losses. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1763565332147417340
“Russian serviceman walks around the body bags of his comrades in Avdiivka and proudly says "This is all ours now!". In the background, cluster munitions are exploding.” https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1763486961715511778
47th shredding Russians with a Bradley in the Avdiivka direction. https://x.com/DefMon3/status/1763636278682165724
Yesterday’s Russian losses are again insane https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1763866838000079262