Part Of: Links sequence

AI

• Unlike chess, superhuman Go programs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Performance doesn’t always translate into robustness. “Notably, our adversaries do not win by learning to play Go better than KataGo – in fact, our adversaries are easily beaten by human amateurs,” the team wrote in their paper. “Instead, our adversaries win by tricking KataGo into making serious blunders.”
• Automated method to jailbreak LLMs announced, that appear to jailbreak all publicly-available LLMs.  “Instead of relying on manual engineering, our approach automatically produces these adversarial suffixes by a combination of greedy and gradient-based search techniques, and also improves over past automatic prompt generation methods.”
• Deepmind claims its next chatbot Gemini will rival ChatGPT. 

Cognitive Science

Whole-brain connectome of fruit fly. With our current compute, why can’t we create accurate computer simulations of these creatures in a virtual 3D environment? 

Current Events

• A preprint announces the discovery of a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, called LK-99. Revolutionary if true. At time of this writing, replication attempts are underway. Very preliminary data has the betting markets giving 25% credence to a successful replication.
• The Panspermia Sibling Hypothesis of UAPs. Robin Hanson’s grabby aliens model holds that, if Earthly life originated independently, then we should expect the nearest alien species to be 100 million galaxies away, and should not expect to meet them for ~1 billion years. But life could have been seeded from an ancestral exoplanet Eden into our stellar nursery. This panspermia model is comparatively more likely, since it gives the universe ~10 billion years (vs 4.5) to incubate civilization-capable life. So, on the small chance that UAPs are indeed aliens (vs hoax or mistake or terrestrial technology), then we should expect those aliens to come from one of the ~1000 stars born in our Sun’s nursery. 
• Total construction spending in the US. Related to the CHIPS and Science Act.

• The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) may be failing. Related to the North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomaly. 

See you next month!