HackerNews Summary (2023-06-28 07PM)

Source: Thousands of species of animals probably have consciousness

Summary
A rock band, The Amygdaloids, whose lead singer is Joseph LeDoux, a renowned expert on the amygdalas, performed at the 26th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The meeting featured the announcement of the results of an “adversarial collaboration” on the nature of consciousness and settled a bet between researchers David Chalmers and Christof Koch.

Facts

🎸 The Amygdaloids is a rock band from NYU, led by Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the amygdalas in the brain responsible for generating fear.

🔬 An “adversarial collaboration” determined the nature of consciousness, settling a bet between researchers David Chalmers and Christof Koch.

❓ Consciousness remains enigmatic, with the “hard problem” relating to subjective experiences remaining unresolved.

🧠 The experiment aimed to adjudicate between Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GWNT) in understanding consciousness.

🔌 Merely connecting nerve cells is not enough to create consciousness; the specific connections and feedback loops between cells are important factors.

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Source: Larry Ellison: Oracle Database 1,000x Faster Than AWS Aurora

Summary
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison claims that Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave database is 1,000x faster than AWS Aurora, its counterpart from Amazon Web Services. Ellison attributes this performance advantage to Oracle’s fast network and asserts that Oracle’s cloud growth is driven by its superior performance across the entire cloud stack.

Facts

⚡️ Oracle chairman Larry Ellison claims that Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave database is 1,000x faster than AWS Aurora.

💨 Ellison attributes this speed advantage to Oracle’s fast network, which allows them to build GPUs that their competitors cannot.

💻 Oracle’s cloud growth of 54% for the quarter ended May 31 is 2x, and in some cases, 3x higher than other world-class cloud vendors.

💰 Ellison argues that Oracle’s superior performance and competitive pricing makes them an attractive choice for customers.

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Source: Long Sequence Modeling with XGen: A 7B LLM Trained on 8K Input Sequence Length

Summary
Salesforce has trained a series of large language models (LLMs) named XGen-7B with up to 8K sequence length. XGen achieves comparable or better results on standard NLP benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art LLMs. The models perform well in both text and code tasks. The training cost is $150K for 1T tokens. Codebase and model checkpoint are available.

Facts

🧠 XGen-7B achieves comparable or better results on standard NLP benchmarks compared to other LLMs.

📊 XGen-7B with 8K-seq models shows benefits over 2K- and 4K-seq models for long sequence modeling benchmarks.

🔢 XGen-7B performs equally well in text (e.g., MMLU, QA) and code (HumanEval) tasks.

💰 Training XGen-7B on 1T tokens costs $150K under Google Cloud pricing for TPU-v4.

🔗 Codebase: https://github.com/salesforce/xGen

💾 Model Checkpoint: https://huggingface.co/Salesforce/xgen-7b-8k-base

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