Links for 2024-06-14
AI:
Google presents Transformers meet Neural Algorithmic Reasoners — Significant gains over Transformer for algorithmic reasoning, both in and out of distribution. NARs are capable of holding perfect generalization even on 6× larger inputs than ones seen in the training set, for highly complex algorithmic tasks with long rollouts https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09308
Through imitation, this humanoid robot learns to fold clothes👕, unload warehouse racks📦, greet other robots🤖, and more! HumanPlus! A full-stack system for humanoids to learn motion and autonomous skills from human data. Open-sourced hardware design and code! https://humanoid-ai.github.io/
“Giving LLMs search (ability to think for a long time) might kick off artificial superintelligence this year, and nobody is paying attention.” https://yellow-apartment-148.notion.site/AI-Search-The-Bitter-er-Lesson-44c11acd27294f4495c3de778cd09c8d
“Here's another pretty incredible example of neural network potentials extrapolating outside their training data in a way I wouldn't expect. We were simulating an electrolyte with an NNP when this happened” https://x.com/TimothyDuignan/status/1801223338909376542
Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal LLMs — "Substantially improves performance on all tasks over strong base models with no sketching, yielding an average gain of 12.7% on math tasks, and 8.6% on vision tasks." https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09403
A US flour firm is using AI weather forecasting to help its farmers decide when to plant and harvest wheat crops, while another is using an AI algorithm to help genetically modify plant varieties in order to make them more resilient. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9xxjx7e2gjo
Samba 3.8B, a simple Mamba+Sliding Window Attention architecture that outperforms Phi3-mini on major benchmarks (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K and HumanEval) by a large margin. And it has an infinite context length with linear complexity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07522
How Amazon blew Alexa’s shot to dominate AI, according to more than a dozen employees who worked on it https://fortune.com/2024/06/12/amazon-insiders-why-new-alexa-llm-generative-ai-conversational-chatbot-missing-in-action/
Former NSA director on the OpenAI board. https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-general/
Trump on AI https://x.com/jam3scampbell/status/1801441008565293199
Energy:
“Nuclear power is expensive largely because nuclear safety is regulated without regard to cost-benefit in a way that isn’t true for the health risks of coal, oil, gas or a million other “useful but potentially hazardous” things.” https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/its-the-regulation-stupid
This Engineer’s Solar Panels Are Breaking Efficiency Records https://spectrum.ieee.org/solar-panels-breaking-efficiency-records
Fertility:
Why Fertility is Collapsing: Shocking Stats with @MoreBirths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOR8pTXb3zI
Robin Hanson: The Global Fertility Collapse: Consequences and Policy Solutions. https://upbeatglobalist.substack.com/p/robin-hanson-part-1
Politics:
The new front in China’s cyber campaign against America — Volt Typhoon: China's cyber-intrusions into US critical national infrastructure, allegedly with a view to wartime sabotage; why the campaign differs from earlier ones; and norms around this sort of "pre-positioning". https://www.economist.com/international/2024/06/13/the-new-front-in-chinas-cyber-campaign-against-america [no paywall: https://archive.is/yUsu4]
Ukraine:
The brutal but cinematic end of a Russian assault https://x.com/YuriiHorskyi/status/1801591172680294877
“By the end of the year we will have a production capacity of 1.7 million shells a year, and by 2025 we should have a capacity of 2.5 million shells a year, a production capacity comparable to that of Russia.” https://x.com/aidefranceukr/status/1801283163903217948
North Korea has sent containers to Russia that could hold nearly 5 million artillery shells and Putin will likely seek even more when he soon visits Pyongyang, South Korea’s defense minister said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-14/kim-sent-russia-millions-of-artillery-shells-south-korea-says [no paywall: https://archive.is/M5Seo]
Thread: «Clear Sky» Operation or Russian Air Defence Systems on fire — “According to some information, the 31st Anti-Aircraft Missile Division of the Russia based in Crimea was destroyed (damaged) by 80%” https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1801360834238591461
“Putin offers a ceasefire in the event of the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, within their administrative borders (most of which Russia does not control and actually withdrew from after a defeat of Russian formations, such as in Kherson), in addition to rejection of NATO accession plans.” https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1801564462454829155