The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville's formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.
The recent ransomware attack on ChangeHealthcare, which severed the network connecting health care providers, pharmacies, and hospitals with health insurance companies, demonstrates just how disruptive supply chain attacks can be. In this case, it hindered the ability of those providing medical services to submit insurance claims and receive payments.
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions — essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details — and thus sputter when asked to do more sophisticated tasks.
