Archive for DeepMind

Nature tidbits

Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2025 by xi'an

From the 12 December issue, lots of AI entries in Nature (soon moving to NAIture??), from the arrival of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and the usual barren call for companies to take responsibility (!) and equally repeated pious wishes for (better) controlling the incoming “human intelligent” AIs, to the two year anniversary of ChatGPT, which came as a significant support to non-native English speakers, if raising concern about the privacy losses in delivering unprotected data to the model,  to the incoming dearth of data to feed AIs (duh? why would new data be necessary for new AI systems?), with the danger that using AI generated data to train new AIs is not good being repeated anew, to the poor performances of LLMs on African languages, and the correlated dearth of funding in Africa, to DeepMind doing better than weather agency supercomputers to predict weather on a 15 day window, including extreme weather events (not much of a surprise, as climate change does not mean that history of past weather patterns cannot be exploited) albeit the probabilistic nature of the forecast seems to derive from the randomness of the starting conditions, hence depends on the choice of that distribution, to the (unsurprising) 50% productivity boost in design in a material science company afforded by seconding (or supplanting!) researchers with AI tools, to the poor design of bar plots (inc. Nature) that induce misunderstandings. A fair degree of double entries when considering the earlier 5 December issue, also read in the plane, with again fossilized poo, AI soon reaching human intelligence level (??),  and the AI computing gap between academy and industry. Beside this AI frenzy, a news article reporting on the EU trying to create an applied research council equivalent to what the ERC succeeded for academic research. (And I will not mention the digestive track article further than pointing out it added bromalite, cololite, and regurgitalite, to my digestive vocabulary!)

Doug’s scared…

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 1, 2023 by xi'an

Following a link from a NYT editorial, I came upon a transcribed interview of Douglas Hofstadter on his fright about the current nature of AI and in particular of the impact of (surprise, surprise!) ChatGPT. When the French translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach came out in 1985, it became an immediate success, I read it, enjoyed it and recommended to my inner circles. To the point of my superior in the Navy (during the year I was drafted in the French Navy) saw the cover (for I was also reading it in the Navy office!), browsed through it and asked me to… reproduce the sculpture (a 3D ambigram) for the logo of his own company (for he moonlighted several days a week at an hologram company he had created). Which proved rather straightforward (but I ignore if the result was ever exploited). While I am now much less reserved about the book, which I feel is quite pretentious and self-congratulary, without delivering a particularly deep message, I can related to my earlier self excitement when faced with a scientific book involving many themes of interest for me, pleasant and easy to read, if sometimes mired in heavily making a point. This is obviously a personal view and others, like the science vulgariser launched a celebration for the 40 years of the book. (Coincidence: I had a chat & a beer with a former high school teacher of his’ in Normandy a week before writing this post.)

“it almost feels that way, as if we, all we humans, unbeknownst to us, are soon going to be eclipsed, and rightly so, because we’re so imperfect and so fallible.”

“it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon”

The tone of the interview is hilariously super catastrophic, foreseeing the replacement of humans by their “successors” within a few years, nothing less. There is no deep argument in the discussion, only that AIs are now playing chess and Go better than humans, can provide apparently reasonable answers to many questions, at a speed surpassing human faculties, including poetry or coding. Which proves such a reducing modelling of what constitutes a human being and the meaning of consciousness. (The last line of the interview “YouTube transcript cleaned up by GPT-4 & checked against audio” is hilarious, whether it is intended to be so or not.)

nAIture

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2023 by xi'an

Plenty of AI related entries in Nature this week (8 June 2023):

matrix multiplication [cover]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2022 by xi'an

Nature tidbits [the Bayesian brain]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2020 by xi'an

In the latest Nature issue, a long cover of Asimov’s contributions to science and rationality. And a five page article on the dopamine reward in the brain seen as a probability distribution, seen as distributional reinforcement learning by researchers from DeepMind, UCL, and Harvard. Going as far as “testing” for this theory with a p-value of 0.008..! Which could be as well a signal of variability between neurons to dopamine rewards (with a p-value of 10⁻¹⁴, whatever that means). Another article about deep learning about protein (3D) structure prediction. And another one about learning neural networks via specially designed devices called memristors. And yet another one on West Africa population genetics based on four individuals from the Stone to Metal age (8000 and 3000 years ago), SNPs, PCA, and admixtures. With no ABC mentioned (I no longer have access to the journal, having missed renewal time for my subscription!). And the literal plague of a locust invasion in Eastern Africa. Making me wonder anew as to why proteins could not be recovered from the swarms of locust to partly compensate for the damages. (Locusts eat their bodyweight in food every day.) And the latest news from NeurIPS about diversity and inclusion. And ethics, as in checking for responsibility and societal consequences of research papers. Reviewing the maths of a submitted paper or the reproducibility of an experiment is already challenging at times, but evaluating the biases in massive proprietary datasets or the long-term societal impact of a classification algorithm may prove beyond the realistic.