Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org

I’m more certain than ever that the first quarter of 2024 will see a grand reckoning for companies that have bet big on #AI. As I said before, I predict a lot of CFOs getting sticker shock at their compute bills, and we will see pivots and downscaling of expectations across the industry. By the middle of the year, there will likely be a general cool-down as users and investors come to grips with what “AI” can realistically do at reasonable cost (hint: not as much as the hype claims). Strategically deploying smaller models will become quite attractive, rather than monolithic solutions.

I also think 2024 is the year of the legal reckoning for the industry. Creators whose work have been used for training (i.e. plagiarized) will likely make big inroads into establishing legal frameworks for compensation, and some models will become poisoned because they were trained with unvetted data. Hopefully this also means that model-makers who have been meticulous about their training data’s providence will reap rewards.

How does electrical current move through water? Here's a little movie of it, made by Mark Petersen. A positively charged proton gets passed from one molecule to another!

This is called the 'Grotthuss mechanism' because Theodor Grotthuss proposed this theory in his paper “Theory of decomposition of liquids by electrical currents” back in 1806. It was quite revolutionary at the time, since ions were not well understood.

Something like this theory is true. But in fact all the pictures I've shown so far are oversimplified! A hydronium ion is too powerfully positive to remain a lone H₃O⁺. It usually attracts a bunch of other water molecules and creates a larger structure!

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If you could watch an individual water molecule, about once in 10 hours it would do this!

As it bounces around, every so often it hits another water molecule hard enough enough for one to steal a hydrogen nucleus - that is, a proton - from the other!

The water molecule with the missing proton is called a hydroxide ion, OH⁻. The one with an extra proton is called a hydronium ion, H₃O⁺.

This process is called the 'autoionization' of water. Thanks to this, roughly one in ten million molecules in a glass of water are actually OH⁻ or H₃O⁺, not the H₂O you expect.

And this explains why water conducts electricity so well. Let's watch.

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"In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs."
Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11817

U.S. #TreasurySecretary #JanetYellen will warn that the use of #AI in #finance could lower transaction costs, but carries "significant risks," according to excerpts from a speech to be delivered on Thursday.
"Specific vulnerabilities may arise from the complexity and opacity of AI models, inadequate risk management frameworks to account for AI risks and interconnections that emerge as many market participants rely on the same data and models," - #Yellen
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/yellen-warn-significant-risks-use-ai-finance-2024-06-05/

RNA has taken center stage, with remarkable versatility, such as >400 drugs approved and many more to come.
My conversation with Tom Cech, Nobel laureate, pioneer of RNA biology, with a new book called THE CATALYST, w/transcript
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/tom-cech-rna-takes-center-stage

Talks are now available at https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-polynomials-part-1 https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-polynomials-part-2

The new progress can be summarized by the following chain of implications (see James' talk for some more detail):

Riemann Hypothesis
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Lindelof Hypothesis
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Density Hypothesis
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Guth-Maynard zero-density estimate <- we are here
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1940 Ingham zero density estimate
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"Trivial" bound from Riemann-von Mangoldt formula