Month: June 2020

Stop Superspreaders

In our study, just 20% of cases, all of them involving social gatherings, accounted for an astonishing 80% of transmissions. Another 10% of cases accounted for the remaining 20% of transmissions — with each of these infected people on average spreading the virus to only 1 other person, maybe 2 people. This mostly occurred within households. No less astonishing was this corollary finding: 70% of the people infected did not pass on the virus to anyone.

Einstein Lost Hypothesis

any potential technology based on low-energy neutron production would be the first exploitation by mankind of the weak force, one of the 4 fundamental forces of nature. “I can’t imagine that there’s a whole force of nature out there, 1 of just a few, that is boring, disinteresting, and not of any use.”

On GPT-3

GPT-3 is scary because it’s a tiny model compared to what’s possible, with a simple uniform architecture trained in the dumbest way possible (prediction of next text token) on a single impoverished modality (random Internet text dumps) on tiny data (fits on a laptop), and yet, the first version already manifests crazy runtime meta-learning—and the scaling curves still are not bending! The samples are also better than ever, whether it’s GPT-3 inventing new dick jokes or writing (mostly working) JavaScript tutorials about rotating arrays. Does it set SOTA on every task? No, of course not. But the question is not whether we can lawyerly find any way in which it might not work, but whether there is any way which it might work.