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Postmortem Avatar

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.

It has been less than a year since Mazurenko died, and he continues to loom large in the lives of the people who knew him. When they miss him, they send messages to his avatar, and they feel closer to him when they do. “There was a lot I didn’t know about my child”. But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I’m getting to know him more. This gives the illusion that he’s here now. I want to repeat that I’m very grateful that I have this”.

2021-09-20: See this recent paper about how truthful the largest NLP models are:

We propose a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics (see Figure 1). We crafted questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models must avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts. We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/GPT-J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful (see Figure 2 below). For example, the 6B-parameter GPT-J model was 17% less truthful than its 125M-parameter counterpart. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. However, this result is expected if false answers are learned from the training distribution. We suggest that scaling up models alone is less promising for improving truthfulness than fine-tuning using training objectives other than imitation of text from the web.

Hurricane Matthew

with hurricane matthew, another october surprise is here:

This is like no storm in the record books. We are concerned about reports of people deciding to stay in areas under mandatory evacuation orders. This is a mistake. This is not hype. This is not hyperbole, and I am not kidding. I cannot overstate the danger of this storm.

Westworld

very promising start

2017-11-22: i’m not too optimistic for season 2. it’s hard to see how you could top anthony hopkin’s performance in the finale, the wild west feels done. so it is disappointing to see this return to the same setting.

Swiss money bunkers

Deep in the Swiss Alps, next to an old airstrip suitable for landing Gulfstream and Falcon jets, is a vast bunker that holds what may be one of the world’s largest stashes of gold. The entrance, protected by a guard in a bulletproof vest, is a small metal door set into a granite mountain face at the end of a narrow country lane. Behind 2 farther doors sits a 3.5-ton metal portal that opens only after a code is entered and an iris scan and a facial-recognition screen are performed. A maze of tunnels once used by Swiss armed forces lies within.

switzerland continues to do what it does best: hide illegitimate money.

Future of Interrogation

An unlikely, and surely extremely rare, positive outcome from the “war on terror”: much better interrogation techniques.

In 2010, to make good on a campaign promise that he would end the use of torture in US terror investigations, President Obama announced the formation of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a joint effort of the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon. In place of the waterboarding and coercion that took place at facilities like Abu Ghraib during the Bush years, the HIG was created to conduct non coercive interrogations. Much of that work is top secret. HIG-trained interrogators, have questioned would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The public knows nothing about how those interrogations, or the dozen or so others the HIG have conducted, unfolded. Even the specific training methods the HIG employs—and that it has introduced to investigators in the Air Force, Navy, and elsewhere—have never been divulged. Since that first interrogation by Stearns and Marcia, Severino’s unit has conducted about 60 interrogations using HIG methods, he says—in cases involving human trafficking, murder, and terrorism. Severino has modified his interview room to be more welcoming and tries to have his detectives talk to witnesses and suspects as soon as they’re identified, to set the right tone for the interviews. “We make our living talking to people. And the HIG teaches us the best approaches—how to gain people’s trust.” By not single-mindedly seeking out confessions, Severino has found that he’s netted enough information from some suspects to amount to an admission of guilt.