Lifeboat Foundation

An elusive creature of the deep sea.

An easy way to determine how you really feel about the future.

The recent drama at OpenAI, where CEO Sam Altman was briefly dismissed by the board of directors only to be rapidly reinstated, has sparked discussion about the company prioritizing profits over its original nonprofit mission.

In fact, no company is purely profit-driven, nor should they be. While profits are paramount to survival in the competitive marketplace, they should always be pursued with a degree of social responsibility. What that means will of course vary from person to person and context to context. Still, profits act like a guardrail that prevents managers of organizations from over-indulging their passions. OpenAI’s strict reversal in recent weeks is a clear-cut example of this.

The embrace of capitalism and the pursuit of profits is not just a pragmatic choice to satisfy investors. It will make OpenAI better at achieving its mission of safe and responsible AI, by curtailing the worst excesses of those with power within the company. In a world where artificial intelligence may hold the key to our future, profit isn’t just good, it’s essential for ensuring progress stays on track and remains ethical.

Continue reading “OpenAI Is Now Unambiguously Profit-Driven, And That’s A Good Thing” »

Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of chips for artificial intelligence, discusses rising competition in the industry and why he e…

Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world.

FIRE president Greg Lukianoff joins Bill Maher to discuss the standard for free expression on college campuses.

How much stress do pipes undergo when a liquid flows through them, and how does it depend on the degree of curvature of the pipe?

Bends in pipes are especially crucial, for example in the aortic arch that connects to the left ventricle of the human heart. Piping systems in industrial plants often include bends of 90 degrees or more, can be helical, and can even have 180-degree bends. Fluid mechanists in Sweden have analyzed fluid flow in such pipes with a 180-degree bend. Their research is published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Bends in pipes are different than their straight sections because, in the curved sections, there are outward centrifugal forces due to the inertia of the liquid inside. That force is balanced by a pressure gradient from the outer wall of the pipe to the inner wall. Because the fluid velocities in an imaginary slice through the pipe will not be equal in the curved section—for example, the velocity near the outer wall of the pipe will be greater than near the inner wall—a secondary flow pattern, besides the motion through the pipe, is set up perpendicular to the main flow direction.

One of the focus areas at Together Research is new architectures for long context, improved training, and inference performance over the Transformer architecture. Spinning out of a research program from our team and academic collaborators, with roots in signal processing-inspired sequence models, we are excited to introduce the StripedHyena models. This release includes StripedHyena-Hessian-7B (SH 7B), a base model, and StripedHyena-Nous-7B (SH-N 7B), a chat model. StripedHyena builds on the many lessons learned in the past year on designing efficient sequence modeling architectures: H3, Hyena, HyenaDNA, and Monarch Mixer.

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How are technologies like ChatGPT created? And what does the future hold for AI language models? This talk was filmed at the Royal Institution on 29th September 2023, in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute.

Continue reading “What is generative AI and how does it work? — The Turing Lectures with Mirella Lapata” »