AI:
NYT piece on automating finance jobs using AI: “Some of Wall Street’s major banks are asking the same question, as they test A.I. tools that can largely replace their armies of analysts by performing in seconds the work that now takes hours, or a whole weekend.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/investment-banking-jobs-artificial-intelligence.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/JaNrU]
Microsoft’s AI Copilot Is Starting to Automate the Coding Industry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-17/microsoft-s-ai-copilot-is-starting-to-automate-the-coding-industry [no paywall: https://archive.is/IT8iI] (See also: AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08299)
“Daniel and I were so impressed, we are investing $100M in the company today. The team is intensely smart and hard-working. Building an AI programmer is both self-evidently valuable and intrinsically self-improving.” https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1758143612561568047
US Air Force confirms first successful AI dogfight https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/18/24133870/us-air-force-ai-dogfight-test-x-62a
ChatGPT-4 beats humans in test of social intelligence: “ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders.” https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1353022
Gary Marcus is betting $10M that we won't have AI smarter than humans by 2025. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/10-million-says-we-wont-see-human
“Some people think that A.I.s can't become more "intelligent" than humans because they are trained on human input and so are fundamentally limited to having a human level of understanding. This is wrong for a lot of reasons...” https://x.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1781702814500016486
“AI winter? No. Even if GPT-5 plateaus. Robotics hasn’t even started to scale yet.” https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1781726400854269977
“The parametric Chinchilla scaling law appears to have been poorly fit, undermining any analysis that relied on its exact fitted values. We fit the same scaling law to a reconstruction of their data, getting different and IMO better results…We reconstructed the data by extracting the SVG from the paper, parsing out the point locations & colors, mapping the coordinates to model size & FLOP, and mapping the colors to loss values. This let us closely approximate their original dataset from just the figure.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10102 (“You can reproduce all our work” https://x.com/tamaybes/status/1780639283558150436)
Sam Altman: "[gpt-5] is gonna steamroll you" https://x.com/RubenHssd/status/1780195938155262420
“Why Law Students Should Embrace ChatGPT” https://law.vanderbilt.edu/why-law-students-should-embrace-chatgpt/
How do LLMs like ChatGPT work? Explained by Deep-Fake Ryan Gosling using Synclabs and ElevenLabs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU_MFS_ACrU
Miscellaneous:
An array of new, lightweight, flexible perovskite solar cells that are only 2.5 microns thick can power a commercial CX10 mini-quadcopter...
The cells feature a 20.1% conversion efficiency and a power output of 44W/g. https://newatlas.com/drones/solar-cells-drone-recharge-sunlight/
Pretty good short SF series on YouTube: A Thousand Suns [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6]
Famous free book: Calculus Made Easy https://calculusmadeeasy.org/
The Bone-Marrow-Transplant Revolution: Finding a matched donor has always been the major challenge. A drug has solved that problem. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/04/bone-marrow-transplant-mismatched-donor/678100/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/Ed45S]
Politics:
The Wikipedia fundraising scam https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/the-wikipedia-fundraising-scam
“Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n [no paywall: https://archive.is/bD893]
"If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with those, and if not, we will fight with stones in our hands…I am not exaggerating when I say that the Yishuv in Palestine will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end. You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will." — Golda Meir https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/21/speech-that-made-possible-a-jewish-state-jan-2-1948/
Ukraine:
“Russian recon drones manage to penetrate Ukrainian airspace much deeper recently... A MiG-29, S-300 launcher and Pelikan 79K6 radar were damaged/destroyed at Aviators'ke air base near Dnipro.” https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1781758104763273246
“Eastern Ukraine, a Ukrainian drone films a HIMARS strike on a Russian S-300VM/S-400 radar point, with several M30A1 GMLRS-AW rockets airbursting feet above the Russian radar and supporting vans.” https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1781766878685249723
“Ukrainian missile strike in the Sevastopol Harbour. Presumably during this attack was damaged or destroyed Russian salvage ship"Kommuna" the world's oldest active duty naval vessel.” https://x.com/StettingerN/status/1781968816659906865
Those Chinese golf carts that Russia is now using for frontal assaults don't have the best protection. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1782009112500302300
Ukrainian heavy “Shershen” FPV drone that can carry 6kg of explosives or several smaller drones. https://x.com/sambendett/status/1781784563208917333
Since Jan 2024 Russia has used against Ukraine 1,2K missiles, 1,5K Shahed UAVs and 8,5K makeshift glide bombs. https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/protistoyati-bombarduvannyam-lishe-horobristyu-nespravedlivo-90413
Russia state TV boasted of irreparably destroying Ukraine's critical infrastructure, as a consequence of Kyiv not receiving U.S. aid to replenish its air defense for months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9KRVTACCqI
Battling Under a Canopy of Drones: The commander of one of Ukraine’s most skilled units sent his men on a dangerous mission that required them to outmaneuver a swarm of aerial threats. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/15/battling-under-a-canopy-of-drones [no paywall: https://archive.is/arthK]
"Our analysis suggests that Russia’s aggressive rhetoric about nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine has thus far been primarily intended to shape Western decision-making, rather than a genuine expression of intent to use such weapons." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13518046.2023.2297586
“Elise Stefanik voted No on aid to Ukraine today. Here’s her statement from two years ago.” https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1781760917983666500
>ChatGPT-4 beats humans in test of social intelligence: “ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders.”
Not really. Check the paper. The test is some random scale from an unpublished 1998 Phd thesis from Iraq, written by the first author. Not even clear what this scale measures, and no detailed metrics are given, or examples. Presumably, AIs just read this or related content in their training, so they are just memorizing these results.
This is an Arabic copy of an old English language test, from the 1940s. https://ehive.com/collections/5889/objects/534738/social-intelligence-test-george-washington-university-series Looks like a kind of unusual IQ test.