Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 11 Posts
  • 974 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Do you have cat?English
    9·
    4 days ago

    I had a Spanish teacher who required students to use only Spanish in class, including when called upon. However, she was okay with the response no se (“I don’t know.”) After hearing several other students say that a zillion times as a universally-acceptable response, I will never, ever forget that sentence.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Silica GelEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    Sounds like it’d most-likely just pass through the system.

    https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/what-to-know-silica-gel

    Is Silica Gel Toxic?

    Silica gel is non-toxic but it is a choking hazard for young children.

    However, in some rare instances, manufacturers coat silica gel in cobalt chloride, a toxic compound. Eating cobalt chloride-coated silica gel will likely cause nausea and vomiting. Cobalt chloride is a moisture indicator that is dark blue when dry and pink when saturated with water. Cobalt chloride-coated silica gel isn’t usually used for consumer products.

    What Happens if You Eat Silica Gel?

    Children can mistake silica gel for food or candy and eat either the silica gel or the entire packet. Adults sometimes mistake silica gel packets for the salt or sugar packets commonly found in takeout food.

    Accidentally eating desiccant silica gel shouldn’t make you or your child sick because it’s chemically inert, which means that it won’t break down in the body and cause poisoning. Most of the time, silica gel will pass through your body without any harmful effects.‌

    But this doesn’t mean that eating silica gel is entirely without risk. Desiccant silica gel is a choking hazard. Also, if eaten in large quantities, desiccant silica gel may cause intestinal obstruction. This is why manufacturers often label the packets with “Do not eat” or “Throw away after using”.

    In rare cases, other toxic components (e.g., cobalt chloride and strong alkali) are present in the silica gel packets. Therefore, it is important to check for any symptoms (e.g., vomiting and stomach pains) after the silica gel has been eaten.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta’s star AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave for own startupEnglish
    145·
    6 days ago

    Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported.

    World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone.

    Sounds reasonable.

    That being said, I am willing to believe that an LLM could be part of an AGI. It might well be an efficient way to incorporate a lot of knowledge about the world. Wikipedia helps provide me with a lot of knowledge, for example, though I don’t have a direct brain link to it. It’s just that I don’t expect an AGI to be an LLM.

    EDIT: Also, IIRC from past reading, Meta has separate groups aimed at near-term commercial products (and I can very much believe that there might be plenty of room for LLMs here) and aimed advanced AI. It’s not clear to me from the article whether he just wants more focus on advanced AI or whether he disagrees with an LLM focus in their afvanced AI group.

    I do think that if you’re a company building a lot of parallel compute capacity now, that to make a return on that, you need to take advantage of existing or quite near-future stuff, even if it’s not AGI. Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

    https://datacentremagazine.com/news/why-is-meta-investing-600bn-in-ai-data-centres

    Meta reveals US$600bn plan to build AI data centres, expand energy projects and fund local programmes through 2028

    So Meta probably cannot only be doing AGI work.