GPS collars reveal more about the power struggle between these two iconic carnivores. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Lionesses and cubs from one of the prides Barker worked with at Etosha National Park; the collared lioness is visible on the left. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

It took a while for humans to climb the food chain. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most paleobiologists believe humanity truly began around 2 million years ago with a species known as . Part of this evolutionary demarcation stems from the theory that the early hominins were some of the first primates to consistently shift from the role of "prey" to that of "predator." But according to an analysis of tiny injuries on two fossilized jaw fragments, some researchers now believe our ancestors required a bit more time to ascend the food chain.

The performance of Large Language Models has achieved superhuman breadth with unprecedented depth. At the same time, the language models are mostly black box models and the underlying mechanisms for performance have been evaluated using synthetic or mechanistic schemes. We extend current mechanistic schemes to incorporate Logic, memory, and nuances of Language such as latent structure. The proposed framework is called LOLAMEME and we provide two instantiations of LOLAMEME: LoLa and MeMe languages. We then consider two generative language model architectures: transformer-based GPT-2 and convolution-based Hyena. We propose the hybrid architecture T HEX and use LOLAMEME framework is used to compare three architectures. T HEX outperforms GPT-2 and Hyena on select tasks.

This paper introduces a novel framework for DNA sequence generation, comprising two key components: DiscDiff, a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) tailored for generating discrete DNA sequences, and Absorb-Escape, a post-training algorithm designed to refine these sequences. Absorb-Escape enhances the realism of the generated sequences by correcting `round errors' inherent in the conversion process between latent and input spaces. Our approach not only sets new standards in DNA sequence generation but also demonstrates superior performance over existing diffusion models, in generating both short and long DNA sequences. Additionally, we introduce EPD-GenDNA, the first comprehensive, multi-species dataset for DNA generation, encompassing 160,000 unique sequences from 15 species. We hope this study will advance the generative modelling of DNA, with potential implications for gene therapy and protein production.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by architectures like GPT-4, has reshaped the landscape of natural language processing. This paper introduces a pioneering approach to address the efficiency concerns associated with LLM pre-training, proposing the use of knowledge distillation for cross-architecture transfer. Leveraging insights from the efficient Hyena mechanism, our method replaces attention heads in transformer models by Hyena, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional pre-training while confronting the challenge of processing long contextual information, inherent in quadratic attention mechanisms. Unlike conventional compression-focused methods, our technique not only enhances inference speed but also surpasses pre-training in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. In the era of evolving LLMs, our work contributes to the pursuit of sustainable AI solutions, striking a balance between computational power and environmental impact.

Attention-free language models that combine gating and convolutions are growing in popularity due to their efficiency and increasingly competitive performance. To better understand these architectures, we pretrain a suite of 17 attention and "gated-convolution" language models, finding that SoTA gated-convolution architectures still underperform attention by up to 2.1 perplexity points on the Pile. In fine-grained analysis, we find 82% of the gap is explained by each model's ability to recall information that is previously mentioned in-context, e.g. "Hakuna Matata means no worries Hakuna Matata it means no" $\rightarrow$ "??". On this task, termed "associative recall", we find that attention outperforms gated-convolutions by a large margin: a 70M parameter attention model outperforms a 1.4 billion parameter gated-convolution model on associative recall. This is surprising because prior work shows gated convolutions can perfectly solve synthetic tests for AR capability. To close the gap between synthetics and real language, we develop a new formalization of the task called multi-query associative recall (MQAR) that better reflects actual language. We perform an empirical and theoretical study of MQAR that elucidates differences in the parameter-efficiency of attention and gated-convolution recall. Informed by our analysis, we evaluate simple convolution-attention hybrids and show that hybrids with input-dependent sparse attention patterns can close 97.4% of the gap to attention, while maintaining sub-quadratic scaling. Our code is accessible at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/zoology.

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.

Commonsense knowledge (CSK) supports a variety of AI applications, from visual understanding to chatbots. Prior works on acquiring CSK, such as ConceptNet, have compiled statements that associate concepts, like everyday objects or activities, with properties that hold for most or some instances of the concept. Each concept is treated in isolation from other concepts, and the only quantitative measure (or ranking) of properties is a confidence score that the statement is valid. This paper aims to overcome these limitations by introducing a multi-faceted model of CSK statements and methods for joint reasoning over sets of inter-related statements. Our model captures four different dimensions of CSK statements: plausibility, typicality, remarkability and salience, with scoring and ranking along each dimension. For example, hyenas drinking water is typical but not salient, whereas hyenas eating carcasses is salient. For reasoning and ranking, we develop a method with soft constraints, to couple the inference over concepts that are related in in a taxonomic hierarchy. The reasoning is cast into an integer linear programming (ILP), and we leverage the theory of reduction costs of a relaxed LP to compute informative rankings. This methodology is applied to several large CSK collections. Our evaluation shows that we can consolidate these inputs into much cleaner and more expressive knowledge. Results are available at https://dice.mpi-inf.mpg.de.

SUPERCOMPUTERS usually fill entire rooms. But the one on the fifth floor of an office building in the centre of Bristol fits in an average-sized drawer. Its 16 processors punch more than 1,600 teraflops, a measure of computer performance. This puts the machine among the world's 100 fastest, at least when solving certain artificial-intelligence (AI) applications, such as recognising speech and images. The computer's processors, developed by Graphcore, a startup, are tangible proof that AI has made chipmaking exciting again.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a simple but powerful framework that explains how complexity can come from simplicity: how everything biological around us - from the microbial biofilms on your teeth to the majestic redwood trees - emerged from the very simplest of beginnings. How exactly this happened is, of course, a matter of intense research. Each species is finely adapted to thrive in its environment, which in turn has shaped that species' evolutionary history. But those environmental forces exerted on a species occurred over a very long period of time, in the often very distant past. How can we understand which environmental features were responsible for which adaptations we see today?