Category Physics

Language Agents Help Large Language Models ‘Think’ Better and Cheaper

Language agents help large language models 'think' better and cheaper
An example of the agent producing task-specific instructions (highlighted) for a classification dataset IMDB. The agent only runs once to produce the instructions. Then, the instructions are used for all our models during reasoning. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.03710

The LLMs that have increasingly taken over the tech world are not “cheap” in many ways. The most prominent LLMs, such as GPT-4, took some $100 million to build in the form of legal costs of accessing training data, computational power costs for what could be billions or trillions of parameters, the energy and water needed to fuel computation, and the many coders developing the training algorithms that must run cycle after cycle so the machine will “learn.”

But, if a researcher needs to do a specializ...

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Engineers 3D Print Sturdy Glass Bricks for Building Structures

In the middle of Killian Court, a stout pyramid of the glass bricks is four layers tall, and looks about 15 feet across and four feet high.
Here, the manufactured glass bricks are assembled together in a wall configuration in Killian Court.
Credits:Image: Ethan Townsend

The interlocking bricks, which can be repurposed many times over, can withstand similar pressures as their concrete counterparts. Engineers developed a new kind of reconfigurable masonry made from 3D-printed, recycled glass. The bricks could be reused many times over in building facades and internal walls.

What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building’s lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks.

That’s the idea behind cir...

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New Organic Thermoelectric device that can Harvest Energy at Room Temperature

Researchers have succeeded in developing a framework for organic thermoelectric power generation from ambient temperature and without a temperature gradient. Thermoelectric devices are devices that can convert heat into electrical energy. Researchers have now developed a thermoelectric device composed of organic materials that can generate electricity from ambient temperature alone. The device is made from copper phthalocyanine and copper hexadecafluoro phthalocyanine as charge $transfer materials and was combined with fullerenes and BCP as electron transport layers.

Researchers have developed a new organic thermoelectric device that can harvest energy from ambient temperature. While thermoelectric devices have several uses today, hurdles still exist to their full utilization...

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Flexible Circuits made with Silk and Graphene on the horizon

By controlling silk protein nanostructure for the first time, scientists pave the way for advanced microelectronic and computing applications. Ultra-thin layers of silk deposited on graphene in perfect alignment represent a key advance for the control needed in microelectronics and advanced neural network development.

After thousands of years as a highly valuable commodity, silk continues to surprise. Now it may help usher in a whole new direction for microelectronics and computing.

While silk protein has been deployed in designer electronics, its use is currently limited in part because silk fibers are a messy tangle of spaghetti-like strands.

Now, a research team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has tamed the tangle...

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