July 2023 News
July 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
July 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, June 2023 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Links
AI
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“‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China”; “ChinAI #56: The Sour Past of ‘China Chips’”, Jeffrey Ding (previous failures of the CCP to create self-sufficient world-class semiconductor industry); “China’s Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say”/“China Says Chatbots Must Toe the Party Line: The Communist Party outlined draft rules that would set guardrails on the rapidly growing industry of services like ChatGPT”; “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess: Regulating AI Will Not Set America Back in the Technology Race”, et al 2023; Scale has been lobbying about the China AI threat for years at >$1m/year for military R&D; “The AGI Race Between the US and China Doesn’t Exist”, Eva Behrens
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“Anthropic, creator of Claude 2, is trying to be a safety-first AI company” (safety philosophy on scaling models to research)
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“Scaling laws for language encoding models in fMRI”, et al 2023
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“Stability AI launches SDXL 0.9: A Leap Forward in AI Image Generation”; “SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis”, et al 2023 (proves crop conditioning works)
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“Teaching Arithmetic to Small Transformers”, et al 2023 (tokenization, emergence, inner-monologue)
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“Pretraining task diversity and the emergence of non-Bayesian in-context learning for regression”, et al 2023 ( blessings of scale induce emergence of meta-learning: “We empirically demonstrate a task diversity threshold for the emergence of ICL.”); “How Many Pretraining Tasks Are Needed for In-Context Learning of Linear Regression?”, et al 2023
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“Solving math word problems with process-based & outcome-based feedback”, et al 2022
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
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“Evolution of a minimal cell”, Moger-et al 2023
Statistics/Meta-Science
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“Best Practices: Formal Proofs, the Fine Print and Side Effects”, Murray & van 2018
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
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Weight loss:
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Retatrutide: “Triple-Hormone-Receptor Agonist Retatrutide for Obesity—A Phase 2 Trial”, et al 2023; “Retatrutide, a GIP, GLP-1 and glucagon receptor agonist, for people with type 2 diabetes: a randomised, double-blind, placebo and active-controlled, parallel-group, phase 2 trial conducted in the USA”, et al 2023
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Tirzepatide: “Tirzepatide once weekly for the treatment of obesity in people with type 2 diabetes (SURMOUNT-2): a double-blind, randomised, multicentre, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial”, et al 2023 (12% weight loss)
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“Sleep Deprivation [Wake Therapy] Sometimes Relieves Depression. A New Study May Show Why”
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“Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney” (theory of mind, tulpas, inner-monologue)
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“How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World: The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them”; “A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending” (what drives gifted people to the top of their professions? monomania & childhood emotional trauma, it seems)
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“Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia”, 2023
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“Escaping High School: A guide for 14-year-olds and 14-year-olds at heart” (advice for bright but slacking teenagers)
Technology
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“From design patterns to category theory”, Mark Seemann
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“A DNA origami rotary ratchet motor”, et al 2022
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Open loop planning: a sequence of blind inputs that beats Pokémon FireRed 99% of the time (video)
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
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The Secret of Kells
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Spider-Verse 2: Across the Spider-Verse
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The Last Unicorn
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Gunsmith Cats + extras/documentary
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: