Links for 2024-06-09

AI:

1. “For the first time morphological evolution is joined with massively parallel differentiable simulation bringing new scale to the world of virtual creatures (and robots). With a few more days or GPUs we could evolve 1B+ virtual creatures and teach them to walk. Along the way evolution would discover increasingly differentiable body plans: those that make gradient-based policy learning easier.” https://sites.google.com/view/eldir

2. WorldCoder, a Model-Based LLM Agent: Building World Models by Writing Code and Interacting with the Environment — “…our method with the optimism objective learned the correct world model from scratch with no more than 100 actions due to its better sample efficiency in exploration.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12275

3. Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics show off first project: an open source robot that does chores https://venturebeat.com/ai/hugging-face-and-pollen-robotics-show-off-first-project-an-open-source-robot-that-does-chores/

4. NotebookLM, from Google: “NotebookLM is your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google's most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro.” https://notebooklm.google/

5. AI Used to Predict Potential New Antibiotics in Groundbreaking Study https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/05/ai-antibiotic-resistance

6. Transformers need glasses! Information over-squashing in language tasks https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04267

7. Process-Driven Autoformalization in Lean 4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01940

8. Does this new Chinese video generation model beat OpenAI’s Sora? https://x.com/AngryTomtweets/status/1798777783952527818

9. Apple Made Once-Unlikely Deal With Sam Altman to Catch Up in AI https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-05/why-is-apple-aapl-teaming-up-with-openai-both-companies-need-each-other [no paywall: https://archive.is/zTqIT]

Technology:

1. The Age of the Drone Police Is Here https://www.wired.com/story/the-age-of-the-drone-police-is-here/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/2dkrB]

2. The transformative potential of computerised brain implants https://www.ft.com/content/f4cd1130-6adc-4dbd-b74b-9813ae008166 [no paywall: https://archive.is/ZriX0]

3. Months-long tracking of neuronal ensembles spanning multiple brain areas with Ultra-Flexible Tentacle Electrodes (UFTEs) https://rdcu.be/dJ6Um

Miscellaneous:

1. Five years later, with double the demographic data, naked mole-rat mortality rates continue to defy Gompertzian laws by not increasing with age https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-024-01201-4

2. Are Older People Aware of Their Cognitive Decline? Misperception and Financial Decision-Making https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/are-older-people-aware-of-their-cognitive-decline-misperception-and-financial-decision-making.html

3. National IQs and Socioeconomic Development: “Combining the various datasets reduced the estimated standard error of national IQs from 5.41 to 2.58, and a strong correlation between socioeconomic development and national IQs was observed (r = .88).” https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/bx86g

Ukraine:

1. Russian Air Force adjacent milblogger Fighterbomber confirms that Ukranian drones successfully hit and damaged a Russian Air Force Su-57 yesterday at Akhtubinsk airfield. https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1799701998499254504

2. “At around 4:00 AM, the assault on Hlyboke started. BTR's pounded the village, trapping Russian infantry in burning houses or targeting them with drone-dropped bombs as they fled into the forests.” https://x.com/arnauddedecker/status/1799726962333888883

3. 59th Brigade of Ukraine repels Russian AFV column attack on Krasnohorivka. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1799743415967777212

4. Chasiv Yar: After the RU progress being halted for a while, they have now started gaining progress. https://x.com/DefMon3/status/1799739467433127968