Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence currently taking the world by storm. They include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and various others. All are trained on vast databases of written articles in which they measure the likelihood of a word appearing, given the sequence of words that appear before it. Armed with that knowledge, the AI produces responses to a given prompt by listing the most likely sequence of words that the model suggests. Computer scientists have furth ...read more
Having a son can be a costly experience for orca mothers, also known as killer whales — and it comes at the expense of having additional offspring, researchers have found. In a recent study, researchers report that male offspring from a population known as the southern residents — which are found off the Pacific coast of the U.S. — depend upon their mothers to such an extent that they reproduce less. (Daughters, however, don't appear to impact reproduction.) These adult sons impose “biol ...read more
On an afternoon in May, 1953, author Aldous Huxley drank a glass of dissolved mescaline, the main psychoactive ingredient in the peyote cactus, and found his home rather transformed. At one point, he looked at a flower arrangement he had appreciated that morning in a clear-headed state for its colors.“But that was no longer the point,” Huxley writes. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, mome ...read more
In the field of economics, the sunk cost fallacy — also called the sunk cost effect — is notorious. It occurs whenever we double down on poor financial decisions based on past investments that can't be recouped.But the phenomenon isn’t relegated only to the realm of business. You may be surprised to learn that it often rears its ugly head in our relationships as well.Sunk Cost Fallacy Examples Christopher Olivola, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, offers up ...read more
A 2022 attempt at creating a sweeping family tree for the human race, and at least three others, reached back 2 million years, long before Homo sapiens are believed to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago.The study from Oxford’s Big Data Institute drew on 3,601 human genomes taken from several modern databases, eight ancient individuals and 3,589 more ancient samples derived from 100 other studies. Using specialized algorithms, the researchers fleshed out the tree further, adding limbs ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
