111–120 of 218 posts
We truly live in a golden age of physical and mathematical discovery. To get here required many thousands of years of technological development. The developers of the transformer, as a group, should win some sort of significant prize; it has had more impact in a short time than anything I've seen before. Will we find better architectures in the near future?
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It's all about incentives. $1 million is a lot of money. The vast majority of hard problems don't have much brainpower dedicated to them, because the bang/buck ratio doesn't work out. Machine learning, math, and adjacent fields already have many careers that pay very well, so getting top-notch experts to dedicate their attention to what might be a futile endeavor is difficult. And this isn't only about the monetary v…
Not to be argumentative, but $1M isn’t very much money, certainly not for a project of this scope. It’s a testament to the creativity, competence, and dedication of those involved they’ve gotten this far with such little funding. Hopefully their early success will attract more resources to this very worthy project.
And yes, $1 million is very substantial for an individual. And the cool thing about offering it as a prize (from the point of view of the organizers, that is) is they only have to pay one person or team, although potentially thousands ultimately contribute to the solution, directly or indirectly.
The methods are incredible, but it seems like the text is ordinary and nothing to write home about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
The methods are incredible, but it seems like the text is ordinary and nothing to write home about
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What a refreshingly clear and thought-out plan. This project honestly gives me a lot of hope.
Yes. Now it can be done, but costs too much. Once they get a scanning unit near the scrolls, it will be much cheaper. The data reduction will probably get cheaper, too.
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So many things that look insane are becoming a reality. You look at those scrolls burnt to a crisp and the idea of reading them is nonsense. The fact I have a computer writing flowery alt text descriptions of my photos with unnerving accuracy is something I would not have predicted for another 20 years. But, here we are...
Right? Imagine trying to explain some of it to one of the ancients - so, you have this quartz sand, see?...
State-of-the-art machine learning architectures aren't actually that complex. Diffusion models and transformers can be explained to a bright high schooler. I'm sure Archimedes and Euclid would have no problem understanding them.
What they might have a problem understanding (or even imagining) is the mind-boggling amount of computation required to make those systems do anything useful. Getting Llama to produce a single token of text takes more calculations than all of humanity did by hand during all of Classical Antiquity.
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Right? Imagine trying to explain some of it to one of the ancients - so, you have this quartz sand, see?...
That would be like explaining a baking recipe by starting with protons and electrons. State-of-the-art machine learning architectures aren't actually that complex. Diffusion models and transformers can be explained to a bright high schooler. I'm sure Archimedes and Euclid would have no problem understanding them. What they might have a problem understanding (or even imagining) is the mind-boggling amount of computati…
Imagine all the stuff... transistors, Turing/Von Neumann machines, lithography, theoretical computer science, OS and compilers, the Internet... and lastly there's modern day machine learning that builds on top of all the above.
The base level stuff isn't exactly protons and electrons, but given the nanometer scale of our chips, it's not that far away from the truth, and we (humanity) has somehow built amazing stuff on top of that.
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Not to be argumentative, but $1M isn’t very much money, certainly not for a project of this scope. It’s a testament to the creativity, competence, and dedication of those involved they’ve gotten this far with such little funding. Hopefully their early success will attract more resources to this very worthy project.
What do you mean by "of this scope"? The winning solution was produced by students and interns who coordinated over the Internet, in less than a year. The problem isn't scope, the problem is attracting lots of bright individuals to work on such a task (for free). And offering a substantial monetary incentive to the winner is probably the best way to do that. And yes, $1 million is very substantial for an individual.…