Miscellaneous #10

Mammatus Clouds Over Saskatchewan:

Craig Lindsay, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s kind of disheartening to hear supposedly #AI researchers going “Yeah, I know #LLM‘s are trained to predict the next word, but I kinda think may be they are intelligent agents..” You kind of begin to understand why alchemy survived so damn long..

Subbarao Kambhampati

A lot of AI folks are not only not impressed by Meta’s Galactica, but are saying it’s downright dangerous:

Galactica: What Dangerous AI Looks Like: A cautionary tale on AI hype

How MetaAI’s Galactica just jumped the shark by Gary Marcus.

Galactica is what they call a large language model (LLM)…

Fundamental point that ~all people who see LLMs as “AI” seem to be missing: The *only* knowledge that an LLM can truthfully be said to have is information about the distribution of word forms.

Emily M. Bender

Why dangerous? Galactica generates text that’s grammatical and feels real. This text will slip into real scientific submissions. It will be realistic but wrong or biased. It will be hard to detect. It will influence how people think.

Michael Black

The problem of #galactica is not statistical nonsense or limitations of #LLM. It is a fundamental wrong conception of scientific research. Is not about putting citations on a paper. Is reading, reflecting on what others have done. This is upside-down science. A farce @Meta

Virginia Dignum

Artificial Intelligence-Aided Colonoscopy Does Not Increase Cancer Detection

Food delivery robots ready to roll into historic Cambridge streets

Lyft and Motional to offer driverless taxi rides in Los Angeles

The Wrong Americans Are Buying Electric Cars

An EV is only a decarbonizer to the extent that it offsets both gas-powered driving and the emissions needed to make it, a process that leaves a far larger carbon footprint than that for a gas-powered car. The only way for the machine to cover its carbon, so to speak, is in miles.


Amazon CTO publishes the 1998 Distributed Computing Manifesto: “a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon’s ecommerce platform.”

Lab-grown meat is OK for human consumption, FDA says

Bright African Fruit has the Natural World’s Most Intense Color

“Freshwater Killer Whales”: Beaching Behavior of an Alien Fish to Hunt Land Birds (also here’s a video of a catfish catching a pigeon)

Is glass liquid or solid?


Florida man attempts to break into Space Force base to warn of alien-dragon space war

A small sinkhole, left alone for months, just ate the Hinton WV Police Department.