Month: January 2017

Outrageously Large Neural Networks

We finally realize the promise of conditional computation, achieving greater than 1000x improvements in model capacity with only minor losses in computational efficiency on modern GPU clusters. We introduce a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts layer (MoE), consisting of up to 1000s of feed-forward sub-networks. We present model architectures in which a MoE with up to 137B parameters is applied convolutionally between stacked LSTM layers. On large language modeling and machine translation benchmarks, these models achieve significantly better results than state-of-the-art at lower computational cost.

Battery production scaling

3 massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15% of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

2017-08-08: 120 GWh by 2021

Factories planned by Chinese companies could have the battery capacity to produce more than 120 GWh by 2021 – enough to supply 1.5M Tesla Model S vehicles. This will be over 3x initial the battery cell capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory at 35 GWh

2020-08-10: European battery factories are situated in the wrong countries

Out of the 14 projects scheduled in Europe, 10 rely on CO2-intensive electricity production with locations in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. France, which produces 88% CO2-free electricity thanks to its 58 nuclear reactors, has only 1 gigafactory in the pipeline.

10000x more sensitive Exolife test

The test uses a liquid-based technique known as capillary electrophoresis to separate a mixture of organic molecules into its components. It was designed specifically to analyze for amino acids, the structural building blocks of all life on Earth. The method is 10000x more sensitive than current methods employed by spacecraft like NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover.

The heap of trash in Rome

Monte Testaccio is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of fragments of broken amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire. It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 20k m2 at its base and with a volume of 580k cubic m, containing the remains of an estimated 53m amphorae. It has a circumference of nearly 1km and stands 35m high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times.

South Korea War Games

This seems to be something of a regular occurrence now. In the recent past, several foreign countries have celebrated how stunningly real video game graphics have become by using them to pretend they are really great at war. The Egyptians did it to pretend that Russia was fighting ISIS, the Iranians did it to pretend that their forces could shoot people from a really long way away, and the North Koreans did it to pretend that they could deliver a nuclear ICBM to our soil. Well, perhaps there is some synergy to be found over Korea’s DMZ, because the South Koreans recently released footage detailing how super-awesome their new fighter jet program is, and that footage included several clips from both Battlefield 3 and Ace Combat.

this should be more widely adopted, so we can replace super-expensive pretend programs like F35 with the much cheaper just pretending.

Superhuman Visual Problemsolving

A Northwestern University team has developed a new visual problem-solving computational model that surpasses 75% of adults on a standard intelligence test. It is built on CogSketch. It can solve visual problems and understand sketches to give immediate, interactive feedback. CogSketch also incorporates a computational model of analogy, based on Northwestern psychology professor Dedre Gentner’s structure-mapping engine.

Degradable Drones

DARPA’s ICARUS program is developing autonomous air-delivery vehicles capable of delivering intact a 1.3 kg payload with 10 meters accuracy with respect to a GPS-programmed location. Within hours of payload delivery, the vehicle, which should be no more than 3 meters in its longest dimension, must physically vanish.