The Invasion of Ukraine and Possibly Conscious Neural Networks

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TL;DR

Our thoughts and prayers to the Ukrainian people in this difficult time. We make a few brief comments about the ongoing crisis followed by a brief discussion of conscious neural networks and end with a roundup of interesting science news from across the web.

The Invasion of Ukraine

The crisis in Ukraine is unfolding rapidly. It is impossible to say what the long term repercussions of the conflict will be, but we have unambiguously entered a dangerous new world.

Naval @naval

Pax Americana has ended.

Trends such as the rising importance of secure supply chains will only become more important in the years to come. Companies and countries will have to plan for a world in which conflicts routinely disrupt global trade.

Are Neural Networks Conscious?

The chief scientist of OpenAI made a controversial tweet, questioning whether large neural networks could be “slightly conscious.”

Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut

it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious

Famous AI researcher Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta immediately refuted the claim

Yann LeCun @ylecun

@ilyasut Nope. Not even for true for small values of "slightly conscious" and large values of "large neural nets". I think you would need a particular kind of macro-architecture that none of the current networks possess.

The largest neural networks now can display powerful facsimiles of intelligent behavior. While these systems clearly lack the intelligence of a human, there is something new and even unsettling about their capabilities.

Weekly News Roundup

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a-cell-probes-lifes-hidden-rules-20220224/: An ambitious new study undertakes a detailed simulation of a minimal cell.

• https://spectrum.ieee.org/cobol-programming-shelf-life: The slow migration away from Cobol continues

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-lays-out-broad-changes-to-address-supply-chain-shortfalls-11645696800: The Biden administration is continuing to explore methods of shoring up supply chain shortfalls.

• https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/27: A study of the physics of yarn

• https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/down-synthetic-details: A deep dive into process chemistry

Feedback and Comments

Please feel free to email me directly (bharath@deepforestsci.com) with your feedback and comments! 

About

Deep Into the Forest is a newsletter by Deep Forest Sciences, Inc. We’re a deep tech R&D company building an AI-powered scientific discovery engine. Deep Forest Sciences leads the development of the open source DeepChem ecosystem. Partner with us to apply our foundational AI technologies to hard real-world problems. Get in touch with us at partnerships@deepforestsci.com! 

Credits

Author: Bharath Ramsundar, Ph.D.

Editor: Sandya Subramanian, Ph.D.