- Urine-derived stem cells: A Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology paper (doi:10.3389/fcell.2022.890574) was highlighted for showing that human urine contains abundant stem cells with high regenerative potential, offering a non-invasive source for therapeutic applications.

- Offline knowledge preservation: Participants discussed the desire for local, internet-independent access to large corpora of books; the Pirate Library Mirror project was cited as having preserved an additional 7 TB of books not already in LibGen.

- RETRO language model: A blog post (mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html) was shared describing DeepMind’s RETRO architecture, which couples a 7.5 B-parameter transformer to a 2-trillion-token retrieval index, achieving GPT-3-level fluency with a 25× smaller model and enabling source attribution.

- Stack Exchange as training data: The channel noted that Stack Exchange’s text corpus is roughly five times larger than Wikipedia’s, and that Kiwix dumps provide partial access; the importance of including all topical sub-sites to avoid systematic knowledge gaps was emphasized.

- Cloud GPU economics: Current pricing for on-demand NVIDIA V100 GPUs or TPUs was quoted at US $2.50 per hour, with spot/preemptible instances dropping to US $0.75 per hour, making large-scale model training or fine-tuning more accessible.

- GPT-3 IRC bot experiment: A rate-limited GPT-3 bot (“Muaddib”) joined the channel to attempt humorous conversation; users quickly observed repetitive, canned responses and nickname-triggered behavior, concluding that smaller models fail at nuanced, context-rich dialogue compared to OpenAI’s larger “davinci” engine.