Links for 2024-06-17

AI:

1. Nat Friedman interviewed the Sora creators: "Their view is that it is a world simulator...their view is also that Sora today is a GPT-1 scale, not a lot of data, not a lot of compute, and so we should expect absolutely dramatic improvement in the future as they simply scale it up and thirdly that there’s just a lot more video data than there is text data on the Internet…" https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/nat-friedman-discusses-sora-and-image-wisdom.html

2. Can language models be used as world simulators? Not really. BUT: LLMs are *rapidly* getting better at predicting states from actions (GPT-3.5 (~30-40%) ➡️ GPT-4 (~70%+) ) and predicting environment changes (GPT-3.5 (~0-13%) ➡️ GPT-4 (~20-50%)). https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06485

3. DenseAV is an algorithm capable of discovering the meaning of language and locations of sounds just by watching unlabeled videos. DenseAV is completely unsupervised and never sees text during its training. https://mhamilton.net/denseav

4. “Neural networks can "grok" abstract math structures like permutation groups. We found the networks decompose the groups into cosets - special subsets - and use this structure to implement the group multiplication. This is a novel and highly parallelizable algorithm!” https://openreview.net/forum?id=hcQfTsVnBo

5. Can ChatGPT help researchers understand how the human brain handles language? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2410196121

6. A Multimodal Generative AI Copilot for Human Pathology [PDF] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07618-3_reference.pdf

7. Study demonstrates how AI can develop more personalised cancer treatment strategies https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-06-17-study-demonstrates-how-ai-can-develop-more-personalised-cancer-treatment-strategies

8. Clifford-Steerable Convolutional Neural Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14730

9. An AI Bot Is (Sort of) Running for Mayor in Wyoming — ‘I realized that this entity is way smarter than me, and more importantly, way better than some of the outward-facing public servants I see,’ he says. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-bot-running-for-mayor-wyoming/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/U2LyC]

I've posted these papers here before, but just in case you missed it: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1802128370861232374 — Of course, much more progress is being made on other fronts as well. There is no sign of a new AI winter. On the contrary, progress is accelerating.

Gaming:

1. Dr Irving Finkel explains the Royal Game of Ur, a 4,600-year-old playable board game. Mentions of the game disappeared in the Middle Ages, but a variation, called Aasha, was played by the Jewish people of Kochi, in India. The Jews of Kochi had migrated from ancient Babylonia and brought a version of the game with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

2. “Kasparov versus the World was a game of chess played in 1999 over the Internet. It was a consultation game, in which a World Team of thousands decided each move for the black pieces by plurality vote, while Garry Kasparov conducted the white pieces by himself. More than 50,000 people from over 75 countries participated in the game.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

Politics:

1. What Natalists Should Learn from LGBT — "The LGBT explosion teaches us that high doses of sheer enthusiastic social approval are strong enough to move mountains. Money matters, but a full-blown fertility cult culture — complete with Parent Pride Parades — plausibly could work as well or better." https://www.betonit.ai/p/lessons-of-the-lgbt-explosion

2. New study shows the mean IQ of US college students has been dropping by 0.2 points per year since the mid-20th century. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378173544_Meta-analysis_On_average_undergraduate_students'_intelligence_is_merely_average

3. Rejecting GMOs hinders human progress and keeps the poor hungry. https://www.theupwing.com/rejecting-gmos-hinders-human-progress-and-keeps-the-poor-hungry/

4. Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

5. “1. Microsoft handed over the Windows source code, and the source code for other software, to entities with connections to the Chinese government bodies. 2. Microsoft established a center in China specifically with the goal of helping the government access its source code. 3. Microsoft set up a cloud partnership for Azure with a company that admitted in an SEC filing that the Chinese government might intervene in its operations at any moment.” https://x.com/geoffrey_cain/status/1801295816247673189

Ukraine:

1. "This year we will be able to procure and continuously deliver quite a lot of ammunition -- Czech-supplied through different channels -- more than a million of shells to Ukraine so far," Lipavsky said on June 13 in an interview with RFE/RL. https://www.rferl.org/a/ammunition-flowing-ukraine-czech-initiative-lipavsky/32993011.html

2. In the Novomykhailivka area, Russian forces attempted to storm Ukrainian positions with a mechanized column but faced significant losses. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1802618263047643635