If this were a science paper, you would expect a country that picks its science workforce at random as a “weak baseline” and a leading nation like the US to actively experiment towards state-of-the-art, or at least beat the baseline.

Not providing a guaranteed path for…

Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:

🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment.

We're starting to roll out API support for Gemini 1.5 Pro for developers. We're excited to see what you build with the 1M token context window!

We'll be onboarding people to the API slowly at first, and then we'll ramp it up. In the meantime, developers can try out Gemini 1.5…

New Album !!! It’s Finally here - !!! New JBL Quartet Record “Transfiguration” @intakt_records Featuring : Chad Taylor on Drums , Brad Jones on Bass , and Aruan Ortiz on Piano #music #news #buzz #announcement @bandcamp #newalbum #newrelease
- jamesbrandonlewis.bandcamp.com/album/transfig…

Sobering day in the Sierra following the avalanche at Palisades. Had the chance to stroll around the hills with friends, which revealed a rotten snowpack and non-stop whumphing, indicative of widespread instability. Quick hand pits revealed the culprit facets.

Out today in Nature Biotechnology! PhD students & postdocs: there's a trick – overlooked and underused – for having new ideas in the creative process. Talk science 1 on 1 with a science buddy that you trust and think of it as an improvisation. nature.com/articles/s4158……
Martin Lercher

My babies are the October Molecule of the Month pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/286

Really nice thread on why basic science is good

Meet Nuvem, a cable to connect Portugal, Bermuda, and the U.S. Google Cloud cloud.google.com/blog/products/…

Do NOT sleep on @tomasfujiwara's potent 7 Poets Trio w/ Patricia Brennan & Tomeka Reid. 'Pith' opens up a fresh new approach in jazz. Here's the whole lowdown: is.gd/b1dLmv From Out Of Your Head Records

I'm very excited about this work from our climate research team in Google AI. Contrails turn out to be surprisingly large contributors to global warming, & in a partnership w/americanair+Breakthrough Energy we showed they can be avoided w/low cost! (cont)
blog.google/technology/ai/…

So many congrats to Alison Gopnik news.berkeley.edu/2023/07/27/uc-…

I can't get enough of this PhD Comics, special PTA edition!! AHHHH!
Check it out - The Nanohertz Gravitational-Wave Detection Explained physics.aps.org/articles/v16/1…
Was great to work with Jorge Cham on this! Fast learner :)

Google's Yossi Matias recently sat down with World Meteorological Organization Director of Infrastructure Anthony Rea for a conversation that touched on how recent advances in AI are creating opportunities to better forecast hazards and their impacts. Worth a read:
blog.google/outreach-initi…

HOW COOL IS THIS?! Scientists have discovered the FIRST lifeform known to actually EAT VIRUSES! A “virovore” is a microscopic organism known to actively feed on viruses. Halteria, a single-celled protozoan that EATS chloroviruses, has officially just been crowned the first! 🦠

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New paper: task design, evaluation and models for 'attributed QA'. Here, we pose a question to an LM, and require that it produces an answer, paired with an 'attribution' in the form of a paragraph from a trusted index, such that the attribution supports the answer. 1/

UPenn NLP has bought you things such as the LDC and NLP professors in practically every school in the US and beyond. After decades of doing #nlproc , we now have a Twitter handle: UPenn NLP!

Come join our party and tell your friends!

Great thread on music that I've been loving and music I need to listen to.