AI:
Apple presents Ferret-UI: “Imagine a multimodal LLM that can understand your iPhone screen📱? Here it is, we present Ferret-UI, that can do precise referring and grounding on your iPhone screen, and advanced reasoning.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05719
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05961
OpenAI and Meta ready new AI models capable of ‘reasoning’: “OpenAI and Meta are on the brink of releasing new artificial intelligence models that they say will be capable of reasoning and planning, critical steps towards achieving superhuman cognition in machines.” https://www.ft.com/content/78834fd4-c4d1-4bab-bc40-a64ad9d65e0d [no paywall: https://archive.is/Oz69t]
Udio is a new AI music generator that might be even better than Suno. https://x.com/udiomusic/status/1778045322654003448
SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space https://henry123-boy.github.io/SpaTracker/
“How many large AI models are out there, who developed them, and for what applications? To answer this question, we present a new dataset tracking every AI model we could find trained with over 10^23 FLOP.” https://epochai.org/blog/tracking-compute-intensive-ai-models
MagicTime: Time-lapse Video Generation Models as Metamorphic Simulators https://pku-yuangroup.github.io/MagicTime/
PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations https://qingqing-zhao.github.io/PhysAvatar
OpenAI’s new version of GPT-4 Turbo overtakes Claude 3 Opus in a coding benchmark https://livecodebench.github.io/leaderboard.html
Compute:
“Introducing the next generation of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), the next in our family of custom-made silicon, designed for Meta’s AI workloads.” https://ai.meta.com/blog/next-generation-meta-training-inference-accelerator-AI-MTIA/
One tiny country drove 15% of Nvidia’s revenue – here’s why it needs so many chips https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/01/this-tiny-country-drove-15percent-of-nvidias-revenue-heres-why-it-needs-so-many-chips.html
Intel’s Gaudi 3 Goes After Nvidia — The company predicts victory over H100 in LLMs https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-gaudi-3
Miscellaneous:
This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born: Noor Siddiqui founded Orchid so people could “have healthy babies.” Now she’s using the company’s gene technology on herself—and talking about it for the first time. https://www.wired.com/story/this-woman-will-decide-which-babies-are-born-noor-siddiqui-orchid/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/VdBMk]
Ukraine:
Battle for Chasiv Yar: Analysis, Implications, Projection https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/battle-for-chasiv-yar
More than two-thirds of the Russian tanks that Ukraine’s military has destroyed in recent months have been taken out using first-person-view (FPV) drones https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/09/drones-russia-tanks-ukraine-war-fpv-artillery/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/EMzhf]
„In the first war to feature small drones prominently, American companies still have no meaningful presence.🇺🇸 drones tend to be expensive, glitchy & hard to repair, said drone company executives,🇺🇦 on the front lines…& former US defense officials. Ukrainian officials have found US-made drones fragile and unable to overcome Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology. At times, they couldn’t take off, complete missions or return home. 🇺🇸 drones often fail to fly at the distances advertised or carry substantial payloads.“ https://www.wsj.com/world/how-american-drones-failed-to-turn-the-tide-in-ukraine-b0ebbac3 [no paywall: https://archive.is/0yyQB]
Japan: ‘…“If Russia is allowed to prevail in Ukraine, “it will send the wrong signal to Asia,” Mr Kishida told The Economist and other reporters in a wood-panelled room at the Kantei, the prime minister’s office, on April 5th…’ https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/04/09/to-keep-the-peace-in-asia-japan-plans-for-war [no paywall: https://archive.is/cwOmY]
US Slams Strikes on Russia Oil Refineries as Risk to Oil Markets https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/us-slams-strikes-on-russia-oil-refineries-as-risk-to-oil-markets [no paywall: https://archive.is/ocrMh]
What a clown show. Apparently, the Biden administration is serious about protecting Russia's oil and gas infrastructure. https://x.com/ColbyBadhwar/status/1778071989749489684
Cameron snubbed as Republican house speaker refuses to discuss Ukraine aid package https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/09/cameron-snubbed-by-republican-house-speaker-as-he-says-hes/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/wtdLI]
“Satelite images show damage to the Borisoglebsk Aviation Training Center / 711th Aviation Repair Plant which Ukraine hit with long-range drones two days ago.” https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1778016832349151310
On Ukraine 5 and 6: I suspect the Ukrainians are holding back the end game in this campaign, direct attacks on pipeline pumping stations and the loading infrastructure for oil tankers at Russian ports. Hit those hard enough - blow up pumping stations, sink oil tankers in the berths - and that would take the majority of Russian oil exports off the market for years. There are only a few targets, but I still wouldn't want to have the task of defending them against waves of drones.
A threat to hold over the gutless Americans. Honestly, f**k the long-term consequences: I hope the Ukrainians burn the Russian oil industry to the ground.