John Patrick2024-08-29T15:47:56-05:00August 29th, 2024|

This new single-tier point-of-care test for Lyme disease, a synthetic peptide-based multiplexed vertical flow assay (xVFA) with results available in 20 minutes, sounds somewhat promising.   Early results show 95.5% sensitivity and 100% specificity in a separate validation cohort from the Lyme Disease Biobank. There was some limited evidence that it was effective in detecting disease within 1-4 weeks from what was thought to be the incident tick bite.  One question I have is whether there will be a way for the testing to determine acute versus previous Lyme disease, and what the false positive rate might be for patients with a past history of Lyme.  More testing required, original article published August 20 in nature communications.

John Patrick2024-08-26T13:57:56-05:00August 26th, 2024|

A very interesting study appeared in the July 24 on-line Nature:
Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631, 755–759 (2024).

An excerpt with an example of what happens after only 9 rounds of the model learning via its own output:

“Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs).”

“Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches : those…

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-“

The authors suggest that degradation of output (“data poisoning”) can occur via indiscriminate web-scraping that includes AI generated text and that the material used for training needs to be carefully vetted.

• Yes, it’s getting all too easy to generate completely realistic photo images using Google’s Pixel 9 and Magic Editor/Reimagine functionality.  This has the potential to become a dangerous tool, especially without proper watermarking.  See this article in the Verge. An excerpt:

“The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.”

• From Jamelle Bouie’s August 10 opinion piece in the NYT, JD Vance has right-wing friends in high places:

“When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans…

Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”…

Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.””

• David Wallace-Wells delivers his usual excellent piece in the NYT, this time discussing our woeful public health efforts on H5N1.

Credit: Getty Images