Reward of the Coprophages

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including the launch of the National AI Research Resource Task Force, which will serve as a federal advisory committee and produce at least two reports to Congress (a roadmap and implementation plan) by November 2022. Google and Harvard University release a 1.4 PB reconstruction of a cubic millimeter of human brain tissue. Google reports a deep reinforcement-learning system that outperforms humans in designing floorplans for microchips, both in time and inefficiency. Researchers from the UK, Germany, and China fuse electronics to the Madagascar hissing cockroach to create an insect-computer hybrid for autonomous search and rescue. The Navy's MQ-25 tanker drone refuels a manned aircraft for the first time. Researchers use large-scale experiments and machine learning to discover a greater hierarchy of theories of human decision-making. OpenAI introduces a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) as a way to try to mitigate bias in transformer models such as GPT-3. A concept paper from DeepMind examines why reward systems are enough to constitute a solution to artificial general intelligence. And Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto publish the second edition of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction.