Lifeboat Foundation

DARPA and its U.S. Air Force partner recently completed a free flight test of the Lockheed Martin version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC). The vehicle, after release from a carrier aircraft, was boosted to its Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet engine ignition envelope. From there, it quickly accelerated to and maintained cruise faster than Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) for an extended period of time. The vehicle reached altitudes greater than 65,000 feet and flew for more than 300 nautical miles.

This is the second successful flight in DARPA’s HAWC program. Last September, a different vehicle configuration from another contractor team also reached hypersonic flight.

“This Lockheed Martin HAWC flight test successfully demonstrated a second design that will allow our warfighters to competitively select the right capabilities to dominate the battlefield,” said Andrew “Tippy” Knoedler, HAWC program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “These achievements increase the level of technical maturity for transitioning HAWC to a service program of record.”

Although NFTs are literally just images on the internet, they rack up a lot of emissions. In fact, the average NFT generates 211 kg of CO₂, compared to an avera… See more.

NFTs have exploded in popularity in the past year, with sales increasing by 1,700% between December 2020 and February 2021 alone (Nonfungible.com, 2021).

This uptake in digital art has led some artists around the world to earn millions of pounds just from selling one single image.

Continue reading “Are NFTs Bad for the Environment?” »

Consider life in farm-country Nebraska versus NYC. What opportunities will there be for a potential startup founder or an ambitious young writer?

Shit, even the difference between living in New Jersey and NYC is huge.

The lethargy that many Alzheimer’s patients experience is caused not by a lack of sleep, but rather by the degeneration of a type of neuron that keeps us awake, according to a study that also confirms the tau protein is behind that neurodegeneration.

The study’s findings contradict the common notion that Alzheimer’s patients sleep during the day to make up for a bad night of sleep and point toward potential therapies to help these patients feel more awake.

The data came from study participants who were patients at UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center and volunteered to have their sleep monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and donate their brains after they died.

We study the question of how to decompose Hilbert space into a preferred tensor-product factorization without any pre-existing structure other than a Hamiltonian operator, in particular the case of a bipartite decomposition into “system” and “environment.” Such a decomposition can be defined by looking for subsystems that exhibit quasi-classical behavior. The correct decomposition is one in which pointer states of the system are relatively robust against environmental monitoring (their entanglement with the environment does not continually and dramatically increase) and remain localized around approximately-classical trajectories. We present an in-principle algorithm for finding such a decomposition by minimizing a combination of entanglement growth and internal spreading of the system. Both of these properties are related to locality in different ways.

In recent years, large neural networks trained for language understanding and generation have achieved impressive results across a wide range of tasks. GPT-3 first showed that large language models (LLMs) can be used for few-shot learning and can achieve impressive results without large-scale task-specific data collection or model parameter updating. More recent LLMs, such as GLaM, LaMDA, Gopher, and Megatron-Turing NLG, achieved state-of-the-art few-shot results on many tasks by scaling model size, using sparsely activated modules, and training on larger datasets from more diverse sources. Yet much work remains in understanding the capabilities that emerge with few-shot learning as we push the limits of model scale.

Last year Google Research announced our vision for Pathways, a single model that could generalize across domains and tasks while being highly efficient. An important milestone toward realizing this vision was to develop the new Pathways system to orchestrate distributed computation for accelerators. In “PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways”, we introduce the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), a 540-billion parameter, dense decoder-only Transformer model trained with the Pathways system, which enabled us to efficiently train a single model across multiple TPU v4 Pods. We evaluated PaLM on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks, and found that it achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance across most tasks, by significant margins in many cases.

When I first started looking into quantum computing I had a fairly pessimistic view about its near-term commercial prospects, but I’ve come to think we’re only a few years away from seeing serious returns on the technology.

Continuously evolved double-stranded DNA deaminases increase the efficiency and targeting scope of all-protein base editors.

The pretraining of BERT-type large language models — which can scale up to billions of parameters — is crucial for obtaining state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This pretraining process however is expensive, and has become a bottleneck hindering the industrial application of such large language models.

In the new paper Token Dropping for Efficient BERT Pretraining, a research team from Google, New York University, and the University of Maryland proposes a simple but effective “token dropping” technique that significantly reduces the pretraining cost of transformer models such as BERT, without degrading performance on downstream fine-tuning tasks.

The team summarizes their main contributions as: