Links for 2024-07-14

AI:

1. OpenAI is working on new reasoning technology under the code name ‘Strawberry’ (formerly known as Q*) to perform long-horizon tasks. Planning ahead will enable it to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform “deep research.” In an internal all-hands meeting, OpenAI showed a demo of a research project that it claimed had new human-like reasoning skills. https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-working-new-reasoning-technology-under-code-name-strawberry-2024-07-12/ [archived version: https://archive.is/cnCrI]

2. "Standard deep learning (is) slow and power-hungry..we introduce..an analog electronic network (which) learns tasks unachievable in linear systems, (is) robust to damage, retrainable in seconds, & performs.. in microseconds..dissipating only picojoules" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319718121

3. The Making of Devin [AI software agent] by Cognition AI: Scott Wu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7NWjoD_OuY

4. “Many AI researchers believe that deep learning alone is not enough; there must be more than naive scaling to get to human level AGI. If you’re in this plurality, I have some questions” https://evjang.com/2024/07/11/arc.html

5. OpenDiLoCo, an open-source implementation and scaling of DeepMind’s Distributed Low-Communication (DiLoCo) method, enabling globally distributed AI model training. https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/opendiloco

6. MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08083

7. SEED-Story: Multimodal Long Story Generation with Large Language Model https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08683

8. “Fast, robust, reactive, direct-from-sensor grasp-anything policies. RL really works, and it’s going to transform the entire robotics economy.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02274

9. Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It — “Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w30170

10. AI system achieves 96% accuracy in determining sex from dental X-rays https://www.psypost.org/ai-system-achieves-96-accuracy-in-determining-sex-from-dental-x-rays/

11. Helsing, a startup developing AI software for defense, raises €450 million to expand its presence in European nations bordering Russia https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-11/defense-startup-helsing-nets-5-billion-valuation-plans-eastern-flank-expansion [no paywall: https://archive.is/Ns43P]

12. Scaling Law in Neural Data: Non-Invasive Speech Decoding with 175 Hours of EEG Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07595

13. A.I. Helped Spot a Copper Bonanza. It Could Transform More Than Mining. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/climate/kobold-zambia-copper-ai-mining.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/smmDA]

14. How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein-science-but-didnt-end-it-20240626/

15. “We introduced GPT-4, the first version, some 15 months ago. Since then, the cost of a token/ word on the model has been reduced by 85-90%. There’s no reason why that trend will not continue,” https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-anticipates-decrease-in-ai-model-costs-amid-adoption-surge/ [archived version: https://archive.is/j0nQb]

16. GPT-2 can be trained for $672 on one 8xH100 GPU node for 24 hours. https://x.com/Jsevillamol/status/1812168535118061794

17. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF): A full highly accurate radiance field - where you can choose to see a 3D scene from any point of view (effectively a 5D representation) - compresses the scene to roughly the size of any single training picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRlN-cYFxTk

18. “Superhuman” Go AIs still have trouble defending against these simple exploits https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/superhuman-go-ais-still-have-trouble-defending-against-these-simple-exploits/

AI safety:

1. Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously https://yoshuabengio.org/2024/07/09/reasoning-through-arguments-against-taking-ai-safety-seriously/

2. Towards Guaranteed Safe AI (Paper Intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUfAvzjd8o

3. On the Limitations of Compute Thresholds as a Governance Strategy https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05694v1

4. Observational Scaling Laws and the Predictability of Language Model Performance — 1) LLM capabilities are a function of few variables 2) Using those dimensions, you can predict much better large phase change in capabilities 3) Post-training interventions effect size are also predictable https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10938

Catastrophic and existential risks:

1. Food without agriculture: Food from CO2, biomass and hydrocarbons to secure humanity's food supply against global catastrophe https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224424002851

2. “I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here.” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iKLLSYHvnhgcpoBxH/the-precipice-revisited

Technology:

1. “This is a real-time video of extremely precise deposition of 1 nanoliter to 1 microliter droplets inside of 96 well plates. Equivalent to developing photolithography but for life sciences. Absolutely incredible tech tree unlock. We live in an age of miracles.” https://x.com/Andercot/status/1811919450599497909 (Company website: https://www.m2-automation.com/en/)

2. This Enormous Computer Chip Beat the World’s Top Supercomputer at Molecular Modeling https://singularityhub.com/2024/07/09/this-enormous-computer-chip-beat-the-worlds-top-supercomputer-at-molecular-modeling/

3. A High-Energy Proton Beam Could Finally Connect Us to Proxima Centauri https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61548076/proton-beam-propulsion-proxima-centauri/

4. Animation of the path that an incoming light ray traces through the GRAVITY instrument. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc2oMnTB08E

Politics:

1. Ice: The Penultimate Frontier — “I argue here that preventing a large iceberg from melting is absurdly cheap per unit area compared to just about any other way of making new land, and it's kind of crazy to spend money on space exploration and colonization before colonizing the oceans with floating ice-islands.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gthjxPDywrMTs3p2j/ice-the-penultimate-frontier

2. Prime Minister Meloni’s government is planning to reintroduce nuclear energy 35 years after Italy shut down its last reactor. Italy plans to allow investments in small reactors as part of a bid to lower the country’s carbon emissions. https://www.ft.com/content/a726934b-ba97-4e2c-b60d-e24a227a416f [no paywall: https://archive.is/05ZP4]

https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1811851769233723724

Trump assassination attempt:

“Given the location of the two sniper teams and the shooter, it appears that only the southern team was not completely obstructed by a tree.” https://x.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1812446084385427965

Read more in this GeoConfirmed with all relevant information: https://x.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1812436750066729047

Ukraine:

1. A brief overview of Russia's offensive in the Kharkiv region. Dozens of destroyed Russian pieces of equipment. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1812085506731106495

2. K2 batallion within the 54th mechanized brigade destroyed two Russian MT-LB including assault forces. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1811877972053209241

3. Guards at Russian oil depots, equipped with anti-drone rifles, are struggling to counter attacks by Ukrainian kamikaze drones. https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1812402191891681553

4. US and Germany foiled Russian plot to assassinate CEO of arms manufacturer sending weapons to Ukraine https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/us-germany-foiled-russian-assassination-plot/index.html

5. The Russian government has launched a “whole-of-government” effort to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and favors Republican candidate Donald Trump in the race, senior U.S. intelligence officials say. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/russia-seeks-to-boost-trump-in-2024-election-u-s-intelligence-officials-say-312bb12a [no paywall: https://archive.is/ARn04]

6. “Russia has shown the launch of their largest bomb, the FAB-3000, against Ukraine. This high-explosive aerial bomb weighs over 3 tons, with a warhead of up to 1400 kilograms. According to media reports, its blast radius is 46 meters, with fragments dispersing up to 260 meters” https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1812390557622108275

7. Compilation of Ukrainian aviation strikes on Russian positions. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1812483674996101491

8. “The Russians have captured Urozhaine. They have wasted huge resources in doing so.” https://x.com/DefMon3/status/1812441851418255526