AI:
This is pretty amazing stuff: Robot watches how-to videos and becomes an expert surgeon — The team from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities harnessed imitation learning, a technique that allowed the robot to learn from a vast archive of surgical videos, eliminating the need for programming each move. This approach marks a significant step towards autonomous robotic surgeries, potentially reducing medical errors and increasing precision in operations. https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/11/11/surgery-robots-trained-with-videos/
Graph-based AI model maps the future of innovation: An AI method developed by Professor Markus Buehler finds hidden links between science and art to suggest novel materials. https://news.mit.edu/2024/graph-based-ai-model-maps-future-innovation-1112
Can AI review the scientific literature — and figure out what it all means? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03676-9
Nvidia and SoftBank are testing the world's first telecom network that combines AI with 5G. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/ai-ran-goes-live-and-unlocks-a-new-ai-opportunity-for-telcos/
DeepL has introduced 'DeepL Voice,' a tool that offers real-time translations for voices and videos. It supports 12 languages and translates into 33, showing text captions perfect for video calls and live interactions. https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/deepl-voice
Microsoft launched TinyTroupe, an AI agent-powered tool that simulates people with distinct personalities, interests, and goals. These agents can listen, reply back, and live in tiny virtual environments, helping with imagination and business insights. https://github.com/microsoft/TinyTroupe
Salesforce presents BLIP3-KALE: Knowledge Augmented Large-Scale Dense Captions https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07461
Alibaba’s Qwen-2.5-Coder challenges Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o in code generation. https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-coder-family/
AI in Military Applications https://www.unaligned.io/p/ai-in-military-applications
OpenAI to present plans for U.S. AI strategy and an alliance to compete with China https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/13/openai-to-present-plans-for-us-ai-strategy-and-an-alliance-to-compete-with-china.html
“Many key materials for AI manufacture must be imported, and tariffs on those imports will simply act as a sustained squeeze on the tech sector’s profit margins.” https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/tariff-sentences-to-ponder.html [From the comments: “Matthew is leaving out an alternative situation, where in given an incentive to find cobalt, companies will either find it in the US or in other countries that don't have tariffs applied. Domestic manufacturing isn't the only option if tariffs are applied to a specific country.”]
Scaling Laws for Precision https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04330
Toward Optimal Search and Retrieval for RAG https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07396
Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory: “The 10,000 foot view of intelligence, that I think the success of scaling points to, is that all intelligence is is search over Turing machines…There is no special intelligence fluid. It's just a tremendous number of special cases that we learn and we encode into our brains…[AI] was very far away, from like 2005 to 2010. It was somewhere well past like 2050...But once AlexNet and DanNet came out, then it just kept dropping at a rate of like 2 years per year, every year until now.” https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen
Demis Hassabis says quantum systems can be adequately modelled by classical computing systems doing massive training compute, having implications for complexity theory, P=NP and fundamental physics https://youtu.be/UX8uIW9oIZk?si=JUZrJUg8P3kTrlLL&t=1025
When Your AIs Deceive You: Challenges with Partial Observability in RLHF https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DS3TTpCEFKduC8zPy/paper-blogpost-when-your-ais-deceive-you-challenges-with
OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool to Automate Tasks for Users https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-nears-launch-of-ai-agents-to-automate-tasks-for-users [no paywall: https://archive.is/ltqII]
A complete tutorial on how to code Stable Diffusion from scratch, using only PyTorch, with full explanation (maths, txt2img, img2img, in-painting) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBKpAp_6TGI
Is Deep Learning Actually Hitting a Wall?
Friendly reminder that 2 years and 9 months elapsed between the release of GPT-3 and GPT-4. The latter was released 1 year and 8 months ago. That GPT-5 hasn't been released yet shouldn't surprise you.
More:
“Betting against AI scaling continuing to yield big gains is a bad idea. Would recommend that anyone staking their career, reputation, money etc. on such a bet reconsider it.” https://x.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1856809970089721991
“If building AGI requires extremely large base models and exponentially increasing inference compute, then that puts even more pressure on expanding the key inputs into training and running AI models, like data centers, GPU fabs, and power plants…all things considered, I would not bet against AI capabilities continuing to improve, albeit at a slower pace than the blistering one that has marked the dozen years since AlexNet inaugurated the deep learning revolution.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MvgBnWDWYdL2XixA/is-deep-learning-actually-hitting-a-wall-evaluating-ilya
“In a statement, a Google DeepMind spokesperson said the company is “pleased with the progress we’re seeing on Gemini and we’ll share more when we’re ready.” OpenAI declined to comment. Anthropic declined to comment, but referred Bloomberg News to a five-hour podcast featuring Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei that was released Monday.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai [no paywall: https://archive.is/59A4g]
“For a while, gains in AI have translated into gains in modeling the brain. We test if that will continue to be the case with recent advances in scaling. Surprisingly we get mixed results: while increased scale advances model alignment to human behavior, neural alignment saturates” https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05712v1
Technology:
The quest to build bionic limbs that feel like the real thing https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03675-w
Hydrogels Harness Sunlight: A Step Closer to Artificial Photosynthesis https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/whatsnew/press/2024/11/07-1.html
Researchers from IBEC and ICFO demonstrate the ability of atomic sensors to non-destructively monitor, measure and optimize nuclear spin hyperpolarization of some clinically relevant molecules in real-time. https://www.icfo.eu/news/2414/atomic-sensors-unveil-hidden-dynamics-of-molecular-polarization/
Nuclear fusion start-up claims milestone with unconventional reactor https://www.ft.com/content/69ac41e6-36ad-41b7-92f3-25198a338c0f [no paywall: https://archive.is/w706B]
Miscellaneous:
Meta-analysis with a single study https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/11/11/meta-analysis-with-a-single-study/
Politics:
Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/11/tulsi-gabbard-nomination-security/680649/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/yaGu9]
“Tulsi Gabbard tweeted that Japan was America’s enemy because of Pearl Harbor—within hours of Japan giving Ukraine a loan.” https://x.com/hissgoescobra/status/1856801708627710186
Ukraine:
Many videos have emerged recently showing fields littered with Russian corpses. Putin is sparing no sacrifice to put himself in a better negotiating position before Trump takes office. https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1856457610871898180
Footage of how the few survivors of a defeated 🇷🇺Russian mechanised attack, in the Kursk Region, were hunted down and wiped out by 🇺🇦Ukrainian drones. https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1856422857238319143
The crew of the Leopard tank smash a column of Russian armored vehicles to pieces. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1856699381300236663
The Security Service of Ukraine confirmed the liquidation of the Chief of Staff of the missile ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet Valery Trankovsky in Sevastopol. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1856645996484215242
“Russia is advancing, but it’s also spending significant amounts of men and material in the process.” https://x.com/emilkastehelmi/status/1856795815433351345
North Korean M1989 'Koksan' 170 mm self-propelled guns being transported by train in Russia. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1857064906861789265
North Korean troops deployed to Russia have moved to the frontline in Kursk and are now actively engaged in combat against Ukraine, according to South Korea's spy agency. The National Intelligence Service reported their full deployment to battlefields over the past two weeks. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20241113010552315
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" “Matthew is leaving out an alternative situation, where in given an incentive to find cobalt, companies will either find it in the US or in other countries that don't have tariffs applied. Domestic manufacturing isn't the only option if tariffs are applied to a specific country.”"
used to hear this sort of fantasy talk from extreme leftists in the 70s, oh and the right would agree saying sanctions don't work (on South Africa).