Marcel Salathé

@marcelsalathe
59 Followers
254 Following
1.2K Posts

Professor at EPFL.
Co-director EPFL AI Center.
Health, Technology, Science.

AI, Digital Epidemiology, Nutrtion. This Mastodon account is almost exclusively about science (with some exceptions - however, no politics, ever).

I also toot Swiss🇨🇭local stuff (in German) at https://swiss.social/@marcelsalathe

Substackhttps://digitalepi.substack.com
LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/salathe/
About mehttps://www.digitalepidemiologylab.org/team/marcel-salathe
Bookhttps://www.digitalepibook.com/
Marcel SalathéDec 19, 2024
This may be the most remarkable paragraph I’ve read about AI this year. It shows a level of self-awareness (in the technical sense) that’s just mind boggling.
Marcel SalathéDec 19, 2024

Academic writing is getting harder to read - the humanities most of all

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/18/academic-writing-is-getting-harder-to-read-the-humanities-most-of-all

Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all

We analyse two centuries of scholarly work

The Economist
Marcel SalathéDec 18, 2024

Context windows in #AI models are increasing massively, but this study suggests anything beyond 10,000 tokens and you're asking for trouble.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10149

BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack

In recent years, the input context sizes of large language models (LLMs) have increased dramatically. However, existing evaluation methods have not kept pace, failing to comprehensively assess the efficiency of models in handling long contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the BABILong benchmark, designed to test language models' ability to reason across facts distributed in extremely long documents. BABILong includes a diverse set of 20 reasoning tasks, including fact chaining, simple induction, deduction, counting, and handling lists/sets. These tasks are challenging on their own, and even more demanding when the required facts are scattered across long natural text. Our evaluations show that popular LLMs effectively utilize only 10-20\% of the context and their performance declines sharply with increased reasoning complexity. Among alternatives to in-context reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation methods achieve a modest 60\% accuracy on single-fact question answering, independent of context length. Among context extension methods, the highest performance is demonstrated by recurrent memory transformers after fine-tuning, enabling the processing of lengths up to 50 million tokens. The BABILong benchmark is extendable to any length to support the evaluation of new upcoming models with increased capabilities, and we provide splits up to 10 million token lengths.

arXiv.org
Marcel SalathéDec 14, 2024

Confidently wrong: No model so far was able to answer this correctly. Not o1 pro, not Gemini advanced, not Claude Opus. The "better" the model, the more confident it was in its wrong answer.

At least Mistral and Claude Sonnet were able to say they didn't know.

This is a real issue. Most of us expect the better models to be more "aware" of possible mistakes. But that does not yet seem to be the case.

Marcel SalathéDec 13, 2024

What do people use AI models for? These are the top 10 use cases on Claude.ai

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/research/clio

Clio: Privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use

A blog post describing Anthropic’s new system, Clio, for analyzing how people use AI while maintaining their privacy

Marcel SalathéDec 12, 2024

Science is amazing 🤩 - an HIV vaccine is slowly but surely becoming a reality.

https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2024

Marcel SalathéDec 11, 2024

Not good: 1/5 of adults in OECD are at primary school level in math & reading.

The top performers earn 75% more, and are happier & healthier.

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/12/10/are-adults-forgetting-how-to-read

Are adults forgetting how to read?

A survey by the OECD suggests a worrying decline in literacy

The Economist
Marcel SalathéDec 10, 2024
It's really fascinating how much in quantum computing is still quite voodoo - love this section from the original Google Willow paper 👇
Marcel SalathéDec 9, 2024

I wonder how much economic value the Gartner hype cycle has prevented from being created.

Imagine managers in August 2023, looking at the chart and thinking, Generative AI? Nope, clearly a hype - we’re not investing.

Marcel SalathéDec 9, 2024
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