Month: December 2022
Merry Christmas!
From the Thomas Jefferson room at the Library of Congress.
Merry Christmas!
We thank you all for reading!
Saturday assorted links
1. Using ChatGPT to scrape websites. And publicly announced ChatGPT variants and alternatives. And Alpa.
2. The culture that is Finland? Just don’t be proud of it!
3. Claims about Russia (speculative).
4. Under current U.S. patent law, including some 2022 cases, AI cannot count as an “inventor” and receive IP protection.
5. Ali Ahmed Aslam RIP, credited with inventing chicken tikka masala (NYT).
Open Sesame!
The excellent Alec Stapp points us to an absolute classic in the law of unintended consequences:
APNews: A new federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences — increasing the number of products with the ingredient.
Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies.
Rewatching *A.I* (minor spoilers)
Yes, the 2001 Spielberg movie. Some parts drag, but mostly it has held up very well. I was struck by how Girardian it is. A few points struck me:
1. The robots will be Girardian, whether we like it or not.
2. To the extent we can solve the alignment problem, we do so by torturing the A.I.’s and placing them in situations where they cannot possibly be content.
3. The robots work effectively, but the ChatGPT equivalent in the movie is quite buggy.
4. People are morally superficial, and they love others for what they do for them, not for their own sake. It is the robots who engage with the human beings for sex who learn this truth.
5. The hardest thing to predict is what the A.I.’s will learn from us, and that will make some of them unique and also difficult to manage.
Emergent Ventures, 23rd cohort
Yudhister Kumar, Temecula, CA, high school student, “Changing the world with efficient, solid hydrogen storage, appeals to rationality, and cool physics.”
Anonymous winner, to investigate who is Satoshi. A serious effort.
Mike McCormick, San Francisco and venture capital, to see if the Emergent Ventures model can be scaled.
Michael Florea, from Estonia, currently in Cambridge, Mass., start-up for longevity research.
Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus, to pursue work in science policy and the economics of science.
Michael Slade, Dublin, to build an app for Marginal Revolution University.
Mike Gioia, Los Angeles, to pursue AI and film.
Oded Oren, Bronx, NYC, former public defender, a new non-profit — Scrutinize — to apply data-driven accountability to our criminal justice system, for instance by identifying overzealous prosecuting attorneys.
Sam Glover, London, 25 year old writer, focusing on social science, Effective Altruism, and forecasting.
Jonathan Schulz, Fairfax, George Mason University, to run RCTs in Benin and research gender inequality and for general career support
Nikolay Sobernius, from Russia currently in Istanbul, general career support, his eventual ambition is to build a new kind of GiveWell about which are the best charities.
Grazie Sophia Christie and Ginevra Lily Davis, Miami, to publish a new magazine The Miami Native, to express the spirit and culture of Miami.
Lydia Nottingham, 18 years old, Oxford University, general career development.
Ukraine tranche:
Mariia Serhiienko, from Cherkasy, Ukraine, currently living in Wroclaw, Poland. Studying Communication Design and working on the art of Ukraine and its relation to contemporary issues.
Alex Mikulenko, currently living and studying in the Netherlands, Leiden University. Theoretical physics, sound/acoustics project, particle physics, neutrinos, general career development.
Mykhailo Marynenko, from Ukraine, “I’m a software engineer with a passion for building modern, collaborative, performant, and scalable web applications and libraries. But also in my spare time I’m a doing live-streaming, security researches, open-source software development, IoT and R&D.”
What is YouChat?
Some discussion here.
Is there an on-line advertising duopoly?
Remember that complaint? Funny how it typically came from people who also hated on-line ads (and thus presumably should have wished them to be more expensive?). Here is the latest (FT):
Meta and Alphabet have lost their dominance over the digital advertising market they have ruled for years, as the duopoly is hit by fast-growing competition from rivals Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft and Apple.
The share of US ad revenues held by Facebook’s parent Meta and Google owner Alphabet is projected to fall by 2.5 percentage points to 48.4 per cent this year, the first time the two groups will not hold a majority share of the market since 2014, according to research group Insider Intelligence.
This will mark the fifth consecutive annual decline for the duopoly, whose share of the market has fallen from a peak of 54.7 per cent in 2017 and is forecast to decline to 43.9 per cent by 2024. Worldwide, Meta and Alphabet’s share declined 1 percentage point to 49.5 per cent this year.
The whole Tim Wu, anti-Facebook crowd has pretty much been wrong about everything from my vantage point…
Friday assorted links
1. Randall Kroszner appointed to the Financial Services Committee of the BOE. And CHIPs program looking to hire.
2. Rare albino baby porcupine rescued in northern B.C.
3. Black neighborhood choice and SES.
4. Assortative mating on blood type? Hard for me to believe, but…
5. Another attempt to understand how LLM work. And will work on LLMs and machine learning now become less open? What is the role of academia in all of this? And how is GPTChat on medical questions?
Is ChatGPT moving toward the median voter?
1. ChatGPT no longer displays a clear left-leaning political bias. A mere few weeks after I probed ChatGPT with several political orientation quizzes, something appears to have been changed in ChatGPT that makes it more neutral and viewpoint diverse. 🧵https://t.co/bbrXWhWaWa pic.twitter.com/JHznag2Nve
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) December 23, 2022
Ben Thompson interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman
On the GPTs, this one starts with Ben:
…if text and images are all a commodities, that value increasingly comes not from the item itself but from the brand surrounding it. I mean, does that seem like a reasonable way this might play out?
NF: I think it does increase the returns to things that you trust, and I think it increases the returns to thoughtfulness, insight, surprising ideas that are true.
Or just surprising ideas that are not necessarily true.
NF: Yeah, I mean, if the models cause us to downgrade the appearance of authoritativeness, then that might be an excellent thing for society. If our societal adaptation is, just because it sounds formal and authoritative, maybe we shouldn’t trust it, that would be probably great. We become altogether more truth seeking. It’s like you can no longer judge people based on whether they wear a suit because everyone can afford a suit, and so wearing a suit may not be the perfect signal of reliability. I think that’s sort of where we are too. Just because you wrote four paragraphs full of complete sentences, doesn’t mean necessarily that you have an original or really thoughtful idea here.
The model so far cannot produce these big out of distribution kind of insights that kind of cause you to rewrite your whole model of the world in your head. I’m not finding that. I do occasionally find myself using ChatGPT for brainstorming and it’s like, “Gosh, how should I solve this problem?” And it’ll come up with sort of five obvious ideas. The problem sometimes is that I haven’t tried two of them.
Here is the link, yes you must pay to subscribe but worth it (I only pay for three Substacks or Substack-like products, this and Matt Y. and some NBA, Noah too.). Covers many different issues, interesting throughout! And some say the transcript is ungated.
The economic costs of depression amongst the young
A growing body of evidence indicates that poor health early in life can leave lasting scars on adult health and economic outcomes. While much of this literature focuses on childhood experiences, mechanisms generating these lasting effects – recurrence of illness and interruption of human capital accumulation – are not limited to childhood. In this study, we examine how an episode of depression experienced in early adulthood affects subsequent labor market outcomes. We find that, at age 50, people who had met diagnostic criteria for depression when surveyed at ages 27-35 earn 10% lower hourly wages (conditional on occupation) and work 120-180 fewer hours annually, together generating 24% lower annual wage incomes. A portion of this income penalty (21-39%) occurs because depression is often a chronic condition, recurring later in life. But a substantial share (25-55%) occurs because depression in early adulthood disrupts human capital accumulation, by reducing work experience and by influencing selection into occupations with skill distributions that offer lower potential for wage growth. These lingering effects of early depression reinforce the importance of early and multifaceted intervention to address depression and its follow-on effects in the workplace.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Buyi Wang, Richard G. Frank, and Sherry A. Glied.
Let’s get real about this stuff
Which media outlets and periodicals are at most danger of “being GPT-ed”? Your nominations? Or how about which particular features of those outlets?
Thursday assorted links
1. Words from the Chinese translator of Sally Rooney, a good piece.
2. Updating your syllabus for the GPTs. I’ll be doing this myself for the spring.
4. Are toy prices falling? (short video)
5. Chrome browser add-on logs your ChatGPT history.
6. From a reader: “Project Relate is a Google app that allows users with speech impediments to create a customized voice model so they can interact with Google’s voice assistant. After the user trains the model it can pretty effectively parse what they are saying even when other humans can’t.” Link here.
I Still Hate Flexible Spending Accounts
According to a new report in Money workers lost billions in so-called flexible savings accounts:
…44% of workers with FSAs in 2019 forfeited money. On average, the amount lost totals $339 per person.
…With reliable data on how often workers forfeit, how much they forfeit and how many FSAs workers hold, we can now reasonably estimate that workers forfeited approximately $3 billion in 2019 and $4.2 billion in 2020.
As I said in my post from 2017 (no indent), I hate “flexible” spending accounts, i.e. those accounts where you put say $1000 in tax-free but you then must submit a bunch of health or education receipts to claim the money–and the “benefits manager” tells you half of the receipts you submitted are no good so you have to trawl through your files to find more–or lose the money. The whole process is demeaning. My hatred of this process, however, pales in comparison to that of Scott Sumner who gives a correct analogy:
Imagine a government that took 10% of each person’s income, and put in in a wooden box. The box was placed at the end of a 10-mile gravel road. Each citizen was given a knife, and told they could crawl on their hands and knees down the road, and then use the knife to cut a hole in the box, and retrieve their money.
Scott’s point is twofold. First, there is a lot of waste in crawling down the road. Second, taken in isolation, it looks like the plan at least offers people an option and so, in isolation, flex accounts and their ilk appear to benefit taxpayers. In the big picture, however, the total amount taken in taxes is somewhat fixed by politics and economics so if we got rid of the spending accounts, taxes would probably fall in other ways that are difficult to predict but nonetheless real.
Some want to crawl down the gravel road, fearing that if they abolish the program the government will not reduce their tax rates, instead the money in the box will be diverted to welfare for the poor, or higher salaries for teachers. I can’t deny that this might occur, but if we don’t even TRY to build a good country, how can we possibly succeed? Isn’t it better to try and fail, rather than not even try?
I agree with Scott. If I am going to be forced to pay taxes I’d like to hand over my cash standing like a man and not be given the option of crawling to recoup some bills the tax collector magnanimously throws on the floor.