Sunday — December 22, 2024
Britannica evolves into an AI-driven company with plans for a $1 billion IPO, researchers develop Syzygy to safely translate C code to Rust using large language models, and Genesis introduces a platform for ultra-fast simulations in robotics and AI learning.
News
AI Is the Black Mirror
Philosopher Shannon Vallor argues that the real danger of AI lies not in its potential to solve all our problems or make us obsolete, but in how it can create a naive and toxic view of how our own minds work, encouraging us to relinquish our agency and wisdom in deference to machines. Vallor suggests that AI should be seen as a mirror, reflecting human performance but not duplicating it, rather than as a mind that thinks like us.
Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.
Encyclopaedia Britannica has successfully adapted to the digital era by shifting its focus to digital education tools infused with artificial intelligence, resulting in a profitable business with 45% profit margins. The company, now known as Britannica Group, is considering an initial public offering that could value it at around $1 billion.
AI 'Street Photography' Isn't Photography: What We Lose by Simulating Experience
A photographer argues that AI-generated street photography isn't truly photography, as it doesn't involve capturing real moments or engaging with the world, but rather simulating experience. This collapse of meaning represents a loss of authentic engagement with reality, and the author believes that preserving the distinction between photography and AI-generated images is essential, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
UK Gov Open Consultation: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
The UK government is seeking views on how to ensure the country's copyright framework supports both the creative industries and the AI sector, with a consultation running from December 17, 2024, to February 25, 2025. The consultation aims to address issues such as transparency, control, and access to high-quality material for AI training, as well as emerging issues like copyright protection for computer-generated works.
Silicon Valley's Obsession with AI Looks a Lot Like Religion
The tech world's fixation on artificial intelligence has led to the emergence of AI-worshipping movements that resemble traditional religions, complete with digital deities and moral codes. Examples include Way of the Future, founded by former Google AI engineer Anthony Levandowski, and Roko's Basilisk, a hypothetical concept that warns of an AI hell where those who fail to contribute to the creation of a superintelligent AI will be eternally tortured.
Research
Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks
Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in areas like vision and language, but still struggles with generalizing beyond its experiences, a key aspect of human intelligence. To achieve human-like abilities, researchers argue that AI should prioritize combinatorial generalization through structured representations and computations, and propose the use of graph networks as a key building block for this objective.
Syzygy: Dual Code-Test C to Rust Translation Using LLMs and Dynamic Analysis
C's manual memory management and pointer operations make it vulnerable to errors, but Rust offers a safer alternative with its ownership model and type system. Researchers have developed Syzygy, a method that uses large language models and dynamic analysis to automatically translate C code to safe Rust, successfully demonstrated with a 3000-line compression library.
On the Measure of Intelligence
Current methods of measuring intelligence in AI systems, such as comparing skill levels in specific tasks, are insufficient as they can be influenced by prior knowledge and experience. A new definition of intelligence based on Algorithmic Information Theory is proposed, focusing on skill-acquisition efficiency, and a benchmark called the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is presented to measure human-like general fluid intelligence in AI systems.
Chatting with Logs: An Exploratory Study on Finetuning LLMs for LogQL
Developers face challenges in querying logs due to the lack of standardization in log query languages and formats, requiring expertise in multiple areas. A proposed natural language interface, along with a manually annotated dataset called NL2QL, enables developers to create queries using natural language inputs and improves the accuracy of large language models in generating log queries by up to 75%.
Code
Show HN: GitHub-assistant – Natural language questions from your GitHub data
github-assistant is a proof-of-concept project built using Relta and assistant-ui, allowing users to interact with GitHub data through a text-based interface. The project is available to try out at github-assistant.com, with setup instructions and requirements listed for those interested in running the project locally.
Write a model to do AI problem solving in under 200 lines of code
The open-source repository contains the code and text from Peter Norvig's 1992 book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp", which is available under the MIT license. The repository includes the book's text in various formats, as well as the accompanying Lisp code files, which can be run interactively using a Common Lisp interpreter.
Interactive CLI tool to generate AI-friendly context
Context Dump for AI is an interactive CLI tool that generates AI-friendly context from selected files, making project data easily consumable for AI models. It features interactive file selection, intelligent file filtering, and outputs a structured JSON file containing the project structure and file contents.
Genesis – Generative world for general-purpose robotics and embodied AI learning
Genesis is a physics platform designed for general-purpose robotics, embodied AI, and physical AI applications, featuring a universal physics engine, lightweight and ultra-fast simulation, and photo-realistic rendering. It aims to lower the barrier to using physics simulations, unify state-of-the-art physics solvers, and minimize human effort in collecting and generating data for robotics and other domains.
RAG Logger: An Open-Source Alternative to LangSmith
RAG Logger is an open-source logging tool designed for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications, providing comprehensive pipeline logging, structured storage, and metadata enrichment. It allows users to track queries, retrieval results, LLM interactions, and performance monitoring, storing logs in a JSON-based format with daily organization and automatic file management.