142 karma · joined May 23, 2020
This example stands out: Eat a balanced diet focused on fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and healthy (non-saturated) fats. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/index.html
Lots of time can be saved by automating those steps (and many researchers don't enjoy it so their job satisfaction could be increased). Also the resulting output could be improved if the researcher had a well structured summary to use as the foundation of their outline.
Improve search with semantic search (search by concept not keyword) Improve refinement by preprocessing and summarizing Don't print, display clean and concise data. Summarize, cite and display.
This stops short of literature based discovery, you have to bring your own research question.
We've also had some luck finding a gap in existing research. We did a POC where we scraped pubmed and graphed study results by concept. We then used the graphed concepts to explore the conceptual space.
It seems that vitamin D protects against cancer and heart disease. It seems that vitamin D supplementation protects against cancer but not heart disease. Is this because of some previously unknown effect of sun exposure (the primary natural source of vitamin D) or is it just that people with adequate vitamin D go outside a lot more and therefore also get more exercise? Don't know, would love to read the paper if someone studies it ;- )
Our key insight is that the process of citation needs to be handled outside the LLM. They're good for text processing and summarization but as you said, the LLM itself is poor at citation.
We'd be happy to help implement something. You'll certainly want an embedding database. The open models are getting pretty good, but you'll want to stand up a testing framework. I have a reasonably good model running on a desktop machine in my office with a reasonably priced consumer grade nvidia GPU.
We also have some tactics and practices around hallucination prevention that we'd be happy to share. Feel free to reach out: human at summitlabs.ai
I'm currently cleaning up a mess left by some well-meaning but unskilled and improperly managed overseas teams. They spent months and didn't deliver. My team cleaned it up in a few weeks but it wasn't cheap. And consider months of opportunity cost for lost execution time. In a startup with a fixed runway that can mean death.
The IT story is even worse. Poor outcomes, unhappy employees, data breaches. I heard from a neteng friend that when Google purchased Motorola the offshore neteng contractor was so bad Google that classified the Motorola network as actively hostile. The contractor was so deeply entrenched it was impossible to get them out and they were actively serving malware. Any machine that visited the motorola network had to be wiped before being allowed back on the corp network.
So yeah, if that's the next phase we already know how it ends.
Here's a simpler plan: 1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet. 2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing). 3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)
That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.
The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.
The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.
No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.
This is a recipe for disaster. Until we figure that part out, we are correct to hold off building them.
Perhaps a better framing is "We've neglected to figure out an incentive system that allows us to build, safely maintain and safely decommission nuclear projects."
It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete?
I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy.
There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.
That being said most people wait in line and pay for their purchases like civilized folk. I'm happy to pay, but when the line is long I get frustrated that those girls don't have to follow the rules like everyone else does.
People have been vocal about shorting Tesla. Musk probably sees their bets against his company as a personal insult.
GME is massively short sold. By some accounts many multiples of existing shares have been sold. I'm not sure that's legal but it seems like it's being done.
If a bunch of people buy and hold a massively short sold stock the short sellers (who've sold a stock they don't own) have to buy it back to cover their promises. This causes a short squeeze which spikes the price and costs the sort sellers massive amount of money.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/melvin-capital-redd...
Or maybe he just likes the stocks. There's an argument to be made that Gamestop is undervalued. That AMC will emerge from the COVID crisis stronger than ever and that Dogecoin while it seems like a joke is actually a cryptographically and structurally sound cryptocurrency.
Although probably not the latter since he claims he doesn't own stock in any publicly traded company except Tesla.
I think he's just in it for the memes.
If you or I did any of those things we'd have been crucified. The fact that he's still standing is a testament to our dual legal system, one for the wealthy and powerful and one for the normals. Had he just left without stealing the IP he'd be fine. He even could have gotten away with violating his non-solicit agreement. The fact that nobody can prove he used the stolen material doesn't really apply.