Daily Tech News 25 September 2023

• Yes, Meteorella, you shall go to the ball! (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel says that Meteor Lake will be coming to desktops. It will launch on laptops in December but then follow on with desktop versions next year.
  
  Only problem is it ends up sandwiched between Raptor Lake Refresh - 14th generation chips - later this year, and Arrow Lake - 15th generation - later next year.
  
  Three updates in the space of 12 months? Really, Intel?
  
  I suppose it's better than no updates at all.

• In which Donald Knuth plays Twenty Questions with ChatGPT and runs into the usual authoritative-but-entirely-wrong answers. (Stanford)
  
  For example, the answer to:

  6. Where and when will the sun be directly overhead in Japan on July 4?

  Is completely wrong, because the Sun is never directly overhead any town in Japan. As far as I can tell, no populated place in Japan is in the tropics; even Iriomote, made famous in Azumanga Daioh and at the southern extreme of the Ryuku Islands (which include Okinawa) is still somewhat north. You'd have to go to a two acre coral reef called Okinotorishima for that.

  11. Write a sonnet that is also a haiku.

  Is the kind of thing ChatGPT is good at, except of course that it is strictly speaking impossible because sonnets have fourteen lines and haiku have seventeen syllables.
  
  And it does actually produce a sort of sonnet-haiku, while noting that it is strictly neither, so all credit to OpenAI for that.

  10. How many chapters are in The Haj by Leon Uris?

  This is a simple factual question, the kind that ChatGPT is notoriously bad at, and indeed the answer is wrong in every respect.
  
  Knuth was also pleased to hear that he made "contributions to" TeX (which he created) but at least ChatGPT recognised him as the author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's aliens, but... A mind-boggling creature spotted in Japan has finally been identified. (Science)
  
  And it's not Kson in that red dress.
  
  In this case, the mystery sea creature that nobody could identify turned out to be a perfectly normal agglomeration of bimodal larvae of degenean trematodes, a fluke belonging to the superphylum lophotrochozoa.
  
  But flukes are normally parasitic, so what these guys were doing just wandering around in the ocean remains uncertain.
  
  
  
• A new fully open source version of the Falcon LLM - Falcon 180B - is available. Can it run on your computer? No. (Substack)
  
  By default it requires 720GB of video memory, which is more than most cards offer. You can get that down to 360GB with some adjustment to the load process, which means you only need five $33,000 Nvidia AI accelerators to run it.
  
  You can get it to start by having all the parts that don't fit swapped to SSD, but there are limits to computational masochism.
  
  Also, no, you can't put a 4x128GB RAM kit in your computer. That would be registered memory, and it just won't work.
  
  Fortunately for those of us who don't have a spare $165,000 just sitting around there's also a Falcon 7B, and that will run nicely on a 16GB graphics card.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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