gopher

Ahead of the next inevitable round of herp de derp "Skynet iz here" hot takes on social media, Boston Dynamics showed off more of its Atlas robot's stunning agility and dexterity in a new demo video Wednesday morning. This time, the humanoid machine had to deliver a tool bag to the top of some scaffolding using only its roboparkour powers.   In the video above, Atlas shows a surprising amount of forethought, grabbing and placing a wooden plank across a large gap before heading over to pick up the tool bag itself. From…

Can bigger models solve all of our problems?Get it? It’s a gopher! (Photo by Lukáš Vaňátko on Unsplash)Within this overview, we will take a look at the generation of large language models (LLMs) that came after GPT-3 . The incredible results of GPT-3 demonstrated clearly that increasing the size of language models (LMs) is very beneficial. The question is, however, when does this trend plateau? Does model performance continue to improve exponentially as the number of parameters continues to increase?This question was…

It was thought that humans were unique amongst mammals when it came to farming – but depending on how strict we are with definitions, it turns out we might not be alone when comes to tending the land to grow food.  Scientists have discovered that pocket gophers (Geomys pinetis) also practice a form of agriculture.Measurements on a field containing burrows built by the little critters suggest they don't just harvest the longleaf pine roots that grow into their homes – they cultivate them.At hundreds of meters long, those…

Months before making a ground-breaking pocket gopher discovery, Veronica Selden arrived at a grassy pasture in Gainesville, Florida, with two shovels, three oil barrels, and a question: Why were these small animals building such big tunnels? The answer, according to a new study, is that the gophers graze on roots that grow into their tunnels, in what Selden and others say could be the first example of nonhuman mammals doing a kind of farming. Other scientists say real agriculture…