November 2023 News
November 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
November 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, October 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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Altman was fired from Y Combinator presidency by Paul Graham over ‘self-serving approach’; Altman tried to fire an OA board member & acquire a majority; OA execs told Sutskever real reason wasn’t a paper, like claimed, but to ‘uplevel’ company ‘independence’ from Effective Altruism; on Altman’s board manipulation and Microsoft’s perspective; then Sam Altman & Greg Brockman were fired from OpenAI
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Google announces a demo run of training an LLM across 50,944 TPU-v5e chips (in 199 TPU-v5e pods)
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“OpenAI training supercomputers in Arizona…[planned]…75,000 GPUs”
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“Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission”, et al 2023
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“Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models”, et al 2023 (less-sample-efficient/small models can train multiple epoches with Chinchilla-variant scaling laws)
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“Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation”, et al 2023; “Role play with large language models”, et al 2023
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“Zero-Shot Goal-Directed Dialogue via RL on Imagined Conversations”, et al 2023 (offline RL: IQL for training LLMs to plan by simulating humans)
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“I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models”, et al 2023 {Alibaba} (open-sourced 1280x720px video generation diffusion model better than Phenaki)
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“Growth and Form in a Toy Model of Superposition”, Liam Carroll & Edmund Lau on et al 2023 : Bayesian phase transitions during NN training
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“A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft: Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it” (GPT-4)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
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“Actionable Genotypes and Their Association with Life Span in Iceland”, et al 2023 (deCODE found 2,306 people with key cancer variants; they were not informed due to ‘ethics’, & live 3 years less than controls)
Recent Evolution:
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“A non-adaptive explanation for macroevolutionary patterns in the evolution of complex multicellularity”, 2023 (implication: multicellularity is probably not intrinsically hard and so not a Great Filter)
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
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How did a schizophrenia drug as effective but dangerous as clozapine get FDA-approved?
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“A Novel Classroom Exercise for Teaching the Philosophy of Science”, 2014
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“The Price of Gravity: Private Patronage and the Transformation of Gravitational Physics after World War II”, 2018 (the quest to destroy man’s oldest foe: gravity)
Politics/Religion
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“The normalization of deviance in healthcare delivery”, Banja 201014ya; “Seven signs of ethical collapse” in successful innovative corporations
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“Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet”, 2023 (text analysis shows how WP became increasingly narrow & orthodox, excluding more sources and gradually expelling minority editors)
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Deanonymizing Professor Ben Lerner’s paid Wikipedia manipulation
Psychology/Biology
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FDA approves tirzepatide for weight loss (not just diabetes); “Semaglutide and Cardiovascular Outcomes in Obesity without Diabetes”, et al 2023; “Tirzepatide for the Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Obesity”, et al 2024
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“Open-label placebo treatment does not enhance cognitive abilities in healthy volunteers”, et al 2023
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“Vultures as an overlooked model in cognitive ecology”, van et al 2021 (vultures are big-brained & engage in complex behavior like coordinated hunting & mutualistic behavior)
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“On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems”, Baluška & Michael 2016 (single-cell computation & decision-making); “Can a Cell Make Decisions?” (on et al 2019 finally replicating 1906); “Seeing the Beautiful Intelligence of Microbes” (antibiotics seem to be critical to quorum-sensing/biofilms—is that why they work so well as poisons?); “The secret social lives of viruses”, “Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life” (viral quorum-sensing for decisions about infections & cooperation) ; “Cheating leads to the evolution of multipartite viruses”, et al 2023;
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“Where do our atoms come from?”, Finn Moorhouse
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“The effect of a hiding box on stress levels and body weight in Dutch shelter cats: a randomized controlled trial”, van der et al 2019
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“A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking”, et al 2015
Technology
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“The First Online Writer: Lessons from Justin Hall on rendering your unfiltered consciousness into hypertext” (context collapse & the fate of early homepages)
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Monospace kerning: Duospace, Contextual Repositioning, Smart Kerning, Texture Healing
Economics
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“A Digital Pornutopia, Part 2: The Internet is for Porn”, Jimmy Maher (how Internet porn became commercialized)
Philosophy
Fiction
Miscellaneous
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Trope: apocalyptic logs (the world is always ending; it just hasn’t for you—yet)