Opportunities
Applications are still open for The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, through Aug 11. Launch a blog, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and begin building your audience
Longevity startup Loyal hiring a Marketing Director (via @celinehalioua)
Apply for the South Park Commons Founder Fellowship (via @adityaag)
Niko McCarty in SF this weekend, meet him and chat about synthetic bio
Announcements
Fervo Energy has demonstrated an advanced geothermal well that generated 3.5MW of electricity. Via @TimMLatimer: “Geothermal has long been held back by drilling costs. We just got a lot better at drilling”
Llama-v2 is open source, authorized for commercial use. Pre-trained models available with 7B, 13B and 70B parameters (via @ylecun) [Update Aug 9: See @Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment below: “Meta is only offering a limited commercial license which discriminates against specific users and bans many valuable use-cases, both economic and in alignment research.” Zac works for Anthropic, although I assume this opinion is his own.]
ChatGPT now supports custom instructions. Because even @sama knows that it is too verbose and caveats too much
Links
Jake Seliger wants to make the FDA’s “invisible graveyard” a bit more visible: “I’m going to be buried in it, in a few weeks or months” (via @AlanMCole)
A game that tests your ability to predict how well GPT-4 will perform at various types of questions. I scored 85th percentile (B+) and was only slightly overconfident
Lessons learned about Focused Research Organizations (via @SGRodriques)
Dan Wang’s China notes. China sees LLMs as akin to social media: “technologies with little economic upside and significant political risk.” Social media apps “are not increasing TFP … they are freewheeling platforms for expression, with the potential to create political unrest.” But: “Americans are now integrating these tools into their lives. And they will start showing up in productivity statistics…. The longer that most Chinese are unable to work with them, the greater the risk that China will be left behind in some way”
An argument that ’Oumuamua is probably a natural object (via @Astro_Wright)
Stanford President resigns over academic fraud (via @StanfordDaily)
Video
Converting scrap steel to rebar (via @Jess_Riedel)
Queries
How much nitrogen is required to grow a specific amount of produce, for various crops?
If Niko wrote an introductory book on genetic design, would you read it?
Quotes
Mokyr: Hope for progress in the 1700s was based on a metaphysical belief that nature is knowable
Andy Warhol (1975) and Harper’s Magazine (1957) on capitalist equality
Back when we couldn’t figure out what to do with computers, in 1977
Tweets and threads
Someone should write about science news the way Matt Levine writes about finance news. Related, someone should do a historical, progress-studies take on money and banking
Looking for big ideas? Scan through mid–20th century government research papers
Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head into a particle accelerator, got hit with a proton beam, survived, and completed his PhD thesis. The 20th-century Phineas Gage
We’re not at the end-state of capitalism until you can buy fresh peaches all year
“Vannevar Bush: General of Physics”, TIME cover, April 1944 (via @calebwatney)
Please note that Llama 2 is not open source; Meta is only offering a limited commercial license which discriminates against specific users and bans many valuable use-cases, both economic and in alignment research. See my linked comment for more details, but as an open-source maintainer I think this requires substantial pushback.
Thanks Zac. I don’t have an opinion on this myself but I’ll add your comment to this digest and mention it in the next one as well.
Thanks—https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/ is less detailed but as close to an authoritative source as you can get, if that helps.
And yes, this opinion is my own. More relevant than my employer is is my open source experience: eg I’m a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, “nominated for their extraordinary efforts and impact upon Python, the community, and the broader Python ecosystem”.