The NLP Cypher | 07.25.21

Welcome back! This week’s Cypher will be a bit shorter than usual, it was a slow week in NLP land. But first, I want to update you on the BlenderBot 2.0 situation. On last week’s Cypher, the last hurdle to overcome with the instantiation of blenderbot inference was the search server (which gives the bot the ability to comb the web to answer factoid type of questions). Well we finally have a search server repo to work with!

Thank you to Jules Gagnon-Marchand for creating a wonderful repo that provides a seamless integration with ParlAI’s library for creating your own search server. Even comes with its own colab, and depending on what kind of instance you get, you may or may not run out of memory (results have been mixed) but you should still try it out!

Heard of the Pegasus project? If you haven’t, well… a private contractor based in Israel called the NSO Group created mobile spying software that can extract data such as “a target’s messages, passwords, contacts, photos”(The Verge) from your phone with some reports suggesting it only takes a text message to achieve this. Of course, given these features plus the ability to hide the identity of the bad actor, it didn’t take long for national govs to take advantage of this tech.

You can get the full recap here:

official report:

For the CyberSec peeps, you can get network and mobile device indicators of compromise from this repo:

Harvard’s Avi Loeb, the physicist who famously posited that the Oumuamua object that drifted inside the Solar System could have been a UFO artifact is gearing up a project to study UFOs.

It will take around 10–15min to download dependencies and load model. Inference will be ~10 seconds…

Here’s a sample output with a top_p = 0.9 and temperature = 0.7.

prompt= “The NLP Cypher | 07.25.20 Hey Welcome Back”

A collection of recently released repos that caught our 👁