Links for 2024-06-04

AI:

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang announced the company’s next generation of artificial intelligence chips, “Rubin,” the successor to its “Blackwell” chips, and said it is “on a one-year rhythm” for new releases. https://www.ft.com/content/be7e7937-7c1f-442e-b0ed-ec630406af0f [no paywall: https://archive.is/7uLVE]

1. Intelligent Go-Explore: A human-like ability to instinctively identify how interesting or promising any new state is; creating more generally capable agents with impressive exploration capabilities. https://www.conglu.co.uk/intelligentgoexplore/

2. “We learn *diffusion* models for code generation that learn to directly *edit* syntax trees of programs. The result is a system that can incrementally write code, see the execution output, and debug it.” https://tree-diffusion.github.io/

3. Jim Fan, Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Lead of AI Agents Initiative, gave a keynote at the GenAI Summit 2024, discussing the latest AI at Nvidia. He describes the new world of virtual agents, humanoid bots, ultra-fast simulation, and training. https://otter.ai/u/jiS4w1EMfBVHseq1QgGDfj4SeuE

4. The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis — Gemini 1.5 Pro far outperforms other models, including GPT4o https://video-mme.github.io/home_page.html

5. Teaching LLMs to Express Confidence https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20974

Technology:

1. Team fabricates tandem solar cell with power conversion efficiency greater than 20 percent https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1045538

2. Fusion Tech Finds Geothermal Energy Application: "a millimeter-wave source targeted through a roughly 20-centimeter waveguide could blast a basketball-size hole into rock at a rate of 20 meters per hour. At that rate, 25.5 days of continuous drilling would create the world’s deepest hole." https://spectrum.ieee.org/geothermal-energy-gyrotron-quaise

3. Startup Brings New Hope to the Pursuit of Reviving Frozen Bodies https://www.cradle.xyz/ (Popular press: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-03/cryogenic-freezing-finds-new-hope-from-cradle-healthcare [no paywall: https://archive.is/tyFQn])

4. US regulators said Amazon delivery drones could fly out of their operators’ sight, removing a major barrier to their widespread use. https://apnews.com/article/amazon-drone-delivery-faa-texas-41e663b3fcc25f5190b982c0963f646d

5. Meet MagLOV: an engineered protein that responds STRONGLY to magnetic fields. https://x.com/AndrewGYork/status/1797408565742776348

6. “This mechanism to buy inventions from the future is called an 'advance market commitment'. Basically, you say you'll buy something if companies or scientists can invent it and produce enough for you. It's part of a broad range of 'market-shaping mechanisms’” https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-start-an-advance-market-commitment/

7. Russia develops its first chipmaking tool — outdated by 30 years from day one https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/russia-develops-its-first-lithography-tool-outdated-by-30-years-from-day-one

Math:

From: "Is Mathematics a single science or a set of arts?" by Vladimir Arnold. Yes, that Arnold. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/Polymath.pdf

1. “I believe mathematical formalism has been a major (if the not the major) driver of scientific progress. Unfortunately, it is not discussed nor applied nearly enough. Here is a post that attempts to explain what it is and how it works” https://cognition.cafe/p/formalism

2. “There has been a remarkable breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis (though still very far from fully resolving this conjecture) by Guth and Maynard making the first substantial improvement to a classical 1940 bound of Ingham regarding the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function (and more generally, controlling the large values of various Dirichlet series)” https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/112557248794707738

3. Welcome to Matrix World. The-Art-of-Linear-Algebra. https://github.com/kenjihiranabe/The-Art-of-Linear-Algebra/blob/main/README.md

Miscellaneous:

1. Imagine being there the day the Mediterranean started filling up: “Ninety percent of the Mediterranean Basin flooding occurred abruptly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two year…Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at times greater than ten metres per day…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood

Politics:

1. Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points — “Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/TUW19]

2. Voters DO NOT reward politicians for doing the things they say they want: “Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424000519

3. Thanks to its gang crackdown, El Salvador closed out 2023 as one of the safest countries in the Americas. https://elsalvadorinfo.net/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/

4. “The trans movement have been able to dominate us not only because they are high in Dark Triad traits but also because they have elevated IQ. They have the perfect comnination to attain power.” https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/high-iq-trans-and-nonbinary-confirmed