Tag: rss_source

“At the moment, we don’t have any real insight into how LLMs accomplish feats like this. Some people argue that examples like this demonstrate that the models are starting to truly understand the meanings of the words in their training set. Others insist that language models are “stochastic parrots” that merely repeat increasingly complex word sequences without truly understanding them.

This debate points to a deep philosophical tension that may be impossible to resolve. Nonetheless, we think it is important to focus on the empirical performance of models like GPT-3. If a language model is able to consistently get the right answer for a particular type of question, and if researchers are confident that they have controlled for confounds (e.g., ensuring that the language model was not exposed to those questions during training), then that is an interesting and important result whether or not it understands language in exactly the same sense that people do”

https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

“Two days before the first of its centenary events, the New York Times reported that Simon & Schuster—this great American company, this remarkable piece of cultural history, this repository of some of the world’s most popular books as well as its finest literature, including sixty-one Pulitzer prizewinners and eighteen National Book Award winners—had been sized up as AI fodder.

The large language models that drive new artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT are trained on mountains of text. The higher the mountains, the better the training. Trouble is, there’s a shortage of readily available text not covered by copyright. According to the Times, Facebook owner Meta, which is competing with Google, OpenAI, and a lot of other firms to develop large language models, last year seriously considered buying S&S not because it admired its business or its books, but simply to feed its AI machine”

https://shush.substack.com/p/crashing-the-s-and-s-party

“In the UK, British Sugar dominates around two-thirds of all the country’s sugar production. Operating within a highly regulated and controlled market, pricing structures leave little room for profit margins, emphasizing the importance of operational efficiencies. At some point those processes were so streamlined there was no room to squeeze profits.

Then someone suggested that all the hot air from the sugar making process be collected and pumped into a neighboring greenhouse.

And that’s how in 02006, British Sugar’s flagship beet factory in West Norfolk became the country’s tomato capital!”

https://optional.is/newsletter/02024Q2/

“Till 2012, India accounted for only 2% of the world’s mobile data traffic. Then came the dramatic fall in prices, triggered by the launch of Mukesh Ambani’s Jio 4G mobile network. With a tantalizing offer of 4GB free data per day, along with cheap handsets, Ambani ensured that Indians were consuming 1 billion GB of data every month within six months of Jio’s launch, compared to 200 million GB earlier. Today, Indians use more data than the U.S. and China combined. And India accounts for more than 21% of the world’s mobile data traffic”

https://restofworld.org/2024/narendra-modi-youtube-influencer/

“it’s not so much a question of needing to be a professor to know the answer – you needed to be a professor to know that it was the right answer, to be sufficiently confident to maintain it in a situation where the stakes were unimaginably high, and to be sure that objections from admirals whose experience and intuition went the other way were wrong”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/jesuitical-economics

“Regulators and prosecutors will continue their slow game of whack-a-mole while more people are taken for all they’re worth by thieves who use the same old playbooks. As Bankman-Fried becomes a more and more distant memory, the industry will try to convince people that it’s cleaned itself up since its chaotic Wild West days. Without intervention, it may succeed, and the cycle will begin anew.

But I will be here, shining a light on it to the best of my abilities.”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-54/

“China ships over $100 billion worth of goods to Africa, of which countries like South Africa, Congo, and Zambia account for the biggest portion. In 2022, online retail in South Africa crossed 50 billion rand ($2.6 billion), fueling the popularity of drop-shipping. But there are concerns about Chinese counterfeits — which currently account for up to 10% of the South African economy, according to the Consumer Goods Council — and growing worries over Chinese brands making South Africa their dumping ground”

https://restofworld.org/2024/dropshipping-south-africa/

“It is always stressful because there are endless last-minute, last changes. Like: Did you remember todo that thing I never told you about until just now? Which means shuffling things around to accommodate for changes.

None are impossible, just unexpected, untimely and under-appreciated”

https://optional.is/required/2024/04/05/week-684-686/

In my head, I still hear you. When things go well, you gently mock the swelling of my ego. When things go wrong, I feel how you would have held my hand. I flirt, and hear your comments on my choices. I smile at the joy you’d have taken from a news story, remember how you always had the inside track, imagine what you’d say about some drama among our friends.

I almost grab a newspaper so we can do the crossword. For half a second I wonder what you might need from the shops. On the edge of sleep, the world where you’re still here feels so close I can almost smell your perfume. 

And several times a day, when I know no one will hear, I say your name. I’ve no idea why.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/295-days-gone

“Spiro had initially hoped to monetize the old bikes it collected from riders by retrofitting them with EV technology — but that hasn’t worked out. Around 40% of the bikes Spiro collects are converted to scrap metal and sold for less than $20 per unit, Samain said. Rest of Worldvisited four of the company’s branches in Togo and Benin, and saw hundreds of abandoned bikes waiting to be scrapped.

Any bike owner can go to a Spiro exchange center, request a swap, get their credentials verified, and pick up a new EV within a week. Riders then pay a daily fee of 3,200 CFA francs ($5.32) for up to seven battery swaps, and each additional swap costs 500 CFA francs (83 cents). The daily fee also covers insurance and maintenance, and riders can take the bikes for check-ups anytime for free. After 150,000 kilometers, a rider takes full ownership of the bike and is not required to pay the daily swap fee”

https://restofworld.org/2024/spiro-ebikes-africa/