Just back from a conference in Huntsville. Lots of very expensive ways to deliver energy to a point in space at a particular time. I need to write up my thoughts in more detail later. Also EXPENSE REPORT!

Announcing AI21 Studio and Jurassic-1 Language Models

• We are thrilled to announce the launch of AI21 Studio, our new developer platform where you can use our state-of-the-art Jurassic-1 language models to build your own applications and services. Jurassic-1 models come in two sizes, where the Jumbo version, at 178B parameters, is the largest and most sophisticated language model ever released for general use by developers. AI21 Studio is currently in open beta, allowing anyone to sign up and immediately start querying Jurassic-1 using our API and interactive web environment.

Research community dynamics behind popular AI benchmarks

• The widespread use of experimental benchmarks in AI research has created competition and collaboration dynamics that are still poorly understood. Here we provide an innovative methodology to explore these dynamics and analyse the way different entrants in these challenges, from academia to tech giants, behave and react depending on their own or others’ achievements. We perform an analysis of 25 popular benchmarks in AI from Papers With Code, with around 2,000 result entries overall, connected with their underlying research papers. We identify links between researchers and institutions (that is, communities) beyond the standard co-authorship relations, and we explore a series of hypotheses about their behavior as well as some aggregated results in terms of activity, performance jumps and efficiency. We characterize the dynamics of research communities at different levels of abstraction, including organization, affiliation, trajectories, results and activity. We find that hybrid, multi-institution and persevering communities are more likely to improve state-of-the-art performance, which becomes a watershed for many community members. Although the results cannot be extrapolated beyond our selection of popular machine learning benchmarks, the methodology can be extended to other areas of artificial intelligence or robotics, and combined with bibliometric studies.

The Learning on Graphs and Geometry Reading Group

Alpha Zero’s “Alien” Chess Shows the Power, and the Peculiarity, of AI

• What’s also remarkable, though, Hassabis explained, is that it sometimes makes seemingly crazy sacrifices, like offering up a bishop and queen to exploit a positional advantage that led to victory. Such sacrifices of high-value pieces are normally rare. In another case the program moved its queen to the corner of the board, a very bizarre trick with a surprising positional value. “It’s like chess from another dimension,” Hassabis said.

SBIR

• Standup – done
• Respond to Steve – done multiple
• Schedule story time with Andrew – done. Now I just need to put them in Jira
• Schedule golf with Aaron? Done! Sim first (using MARE and enhanced sim), then prototype, then build a trade show version (indoor so no weather), then try fielding at some willing golf course? Paul could probably help with that