Month: January 2023
Sunday assorted links
1. Nathan Labenz on Gary Marcus and AI. Here is Gary Marcus, responding and critical of GPT.
2. And top AI conference bans the use of AI to write papers for the conference. And GPT in your email, and more, coming soon? And a new open source LLM — how good is it? And Stanford course on LLMs.
3. Classical music markets are pretty efficient! (the top-performed composers).
4. Ezra Klein on flying cars and the fear of energy (NYT).
5. Scott Aaronson skeptical about the latest quantum reports.
Do pay transparency laws raise wages?
It seems not:
Labour advocates champion pay-transparency laws on the grounds that they will narrow pay disparities. But research suggests that this is achieved not by boosting the wages of lower-paid workers but by curbing the wages of higher-paid ones. A forthcoming paper by economists at the University of Toronto and Princeton University estimates that Canadian salary-disclosure laws implemented between 1996 and 2016 narrowed the gender pay gap of university professors by 20-30%. But there is also evidence that they lower salaries, on average. Another paper by professors at Chapel Hill, Cornell and Columbia University found that a Danish pay-transparency law adopted in 2006 shrank the gender pay gap by 13%, but only because it curbed the wages of male employees. Studies of Britain’s gender-pay-gap law, which was implemented in 2018, have reached similar conclusions.
Another misconception about pay-transparency laws is that they strengthen the bargaining power of workers. A recent paper by Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and Bobby Pakzad-Hurson of Brown University analysed the effects of 13 state laws passed between 2004 and 2016 that were designed to protect the right of workers to ask about the salaries of their co-workers. The authors found that the laws were associated with a 2% drop in wages, an outcome which the authors attribute to reduced bargaining power. “Although the idea of pay transparency is to give workers the ability to renegotiate away pay discrepancies, it actually shifts the bargaining power from the workers to the employer,” says Mr Pakzad-Hurson. “So wages are more equal,” explains Ms Cullen, “but they’re also lower.”
Here is more from The Economist.
Nathan Labenz on AI pricing
I won’t double indent, these are all his words:
“I agree with your general take on pricing and expect prices to continue to fall, ultimately approaching marginal costs for common use cases over the next couple years.
A few recent data points to establish the trend, and why we should expect it to continue for at least a couple years…
- OpenAI reduced core LLM pricing by 2/3rds last year.
- StabilityAI has recently reduced prices on Stable Diffusion down to a base of $0.002 / image – now you get 500 images / dollar. This is a >90% reduction from OpenAI’s original DALLE2 pricing.
- OpenAI has also recently reduced their embeddings price by 99.8% – not a typo! You can now index all 200M+ papers on Semantic Scholar for $500K-2M, depending on your approach.
- Emad from StabilityAI projects ~1M fold cost improvement over next 10 years – responding to Chamath who had predicted 1000X improvement
Looking ahead…
- continued application of RLHF and similar techniques – these techniques create 100X parameter advantage (already in use in force at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google – but limited use elsewhere)
- the CarperAI “Open Instruct” project – also affiliated with (part of?) StabilityAI, aims to match OpenAI’s current production models with an open source model, expected in 2023
- 8-bit and maybe even 4-bit inference – simply by rounding weights off to fewer significant digits, you save memory requirements and inference compute costs with minimal performance loss
- pruning for sparsity – turns out some LLMs work just as well if you set 60% of the weights to zero (though this likely isn’t true if you’re using Chinchilla-optimal training)
- mixture of experts techniques – another take on sparsity, allows you to compute only certain dedicated sub-blocks of the overall network, improving speed and cost
- distillation – a technique by which larger, more capable models can be used to train smaller models to similar performance within certain domains – Replit has a great writeup on how they created their first release codegen model in just a few weeks this way!
- distributed training techniques, including approaches that work on consumer devices, and “reincarnation” techniques that allow you to re-use compute rather than constantly re-training from scratch
And this is all assuming that the weights from a leading model never leak – that would be another way things could quickly get much cheaper… ”
TC again: All worth a ponder, I do not have personal views on these specific issues, of course we will see. And here is Nathan on Twitter.
“Unveiling the Price of Obscenity”
Does legitimating sinful activities have a cost? This paper examines the relationship between housing demand and overt prostitution in Amsterdam. In our empirical design, we exploit the spatial discontinuity in the location of brothel windows created by canals, combined with a policy that forcibly closed some of the windows near these canals. To pin down their effect on housing prices, we apply a difference-in-discontinuity (DiD) estimator, which controls for the precise location of brothel windows and the effect of other policies and local developments. Our results show that the housing prices are discontinuous at the bordering canals, and this discontinuity nearly disappears after closures. The discontinuity is also found to decrease with the distance to brothels, disappearing after 300 yards. Our estimates indicate that homes right next to sex workers were 30 percent cheaper before the closures. This result seems unrelated to the presence of other businesses, such as bars and cannabis shops. Instead, the price discount is partly explained by petty crimes. However, 73 percent of the effect remains unexplained after controlling for many forms of crime and risk perception. Our findings suggest that households tend to be against the visible presence of sex workers and related nuisances, reaffirming their marginalization.
That is from a new paper by Erasmo Giambona and Rafael P. Ribas, via a highly reputable man.
Ngi Hamba Mabuse
By Dorothy Masuka.
Saturday assorted links
2. Chat with historical figures, 20,000 of them. When will they do economists? And using GPT for therapy, how do you think it did? People preferred the GPT, until they found out they were speaking with a machine.
3. What some top chess players won in prize money.
4. Claims about quantum computing.
5. Rasheed Griffith on where to eat in Panama.
6. “The use of a longitudinal database of Famine immigrants who initially settled in New York and Brooklyn indicates that the Famine Irish had far more occupational mobility than previously recognized. Only 25 percent of men ended their working careers in low-wage, unskilled labor; 44 percent ended up in white-collar occupations of one kind or another—primarily running saloons, groceries, and other small businesses.” Link here.
GPT and my own career trajectory
For any given output, I suspect fewer people will read my work. You don’t have to think the GPTs can copy me, but at the very least lots of potential readers will be playing around with GPT in lieu of doing other things, including reading me. After all, I already would prefer to “read GPT” than to read most of you. I also can give it orders more easily. At some point, GPT may substitute directly for some of my writings as well, but that conclusion is not required for what follows.
I expect I will invest more in personal talks, face to face, and also “charisma.” Why not?
Well-known, established writers will be able to “ride it out” for long enough, if they so choose. There are enough other older people who still care what they think, as named individuals, and that will not change until an entire generational turnover has taken place.
I expect the entire calculus here is very different for someone who is twenty years old, and I hope to write more on that soon.
Today, those who learn how to use GPT and related products will be significantly more productive. They will lead integrated small teams to produce the next influential “big thing” in learning and also in media. Most current contributors will miss that train almost entirely, just as so many people missed the importance of the internet for learning and also for media. But we still don’t know how important this “next big thing” will be, for instance, compared to YouTube.
In the short run, using GPT for ideas and inspiration will be more important than using it for copy. Like blogging, I am happy when people attack it, because that raises the moat surrounding it.
Overall the trajectory of change is very difficult to predict, as are the forthcoming technological developments themselves.
How long does a Roman emperor last for?
Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death. This has been known for a while, if not quantitatively at least qualitatively. What is not known, however, and has never been examined is the time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors. This work adopts the statistical tools of survival data analysis to an unlikely population, Roman emperors, and it examines a particular event in their rule, not unlike the focus of reliability engineering, but instead of their time-to-failure, their time-to-violent-death. We investigate the temporal signature of this seemingly haphazardous stochastic process that is the violent death of a Roman emperor, and we examine whether there is some structure underlying the randomness in this process or not. Nonparametric and parametric results show that: (i) emperors faced a significantly high risk of violent death in the first year of their rule, which is reminiscent of infant mortality in reliability engineering; (ii) their risk of violent death further increased after 12 years, which is reminiscent of wear-out period in reliability engineering; (iii) their failure rate displayed a bathtub-like curve, similar to that of a host of mechanical engineering items and electronic components. Results also showed that the stochastic process underlying the violent deaths of emperors is remarkably well captured by a (mixture) Weibull distribution.
That is from a new paper by Joseph Homer Saleh. Via Patrick Moloney. And here are new results on why Roman concrete was so much more durable than the emperors.
What should I ask Noam Dworman?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. Noam is the owner of Comedy Cellar, considered by many to be the world’s best comedy club, located in Greenwich Village, NYC. There is a branch in Las Vegas too. The Cellar also has its own TV show.
Here is Norm’s LinkedIn page. Noam also makes music in a band, usually playing guitar.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
2. “Why do they hate the children?” Hat tip @pmarca.
3. Apple unveils AI-voiced audiobooks. And some insights into how ChatGPT models work. And can ChatGPT do analogical reasoning without explicit training?
4. Is Garett Jones channeling the Lord of the Vineyard?
5. Self-perceived attractiveness reduces face mask-wearing intention.
6. 41% of NYC school students were chronically absent last year.
7. Was Vermeer a Jesuit? And it seems he may have used a camera obscura.
Herbert Gintis has passed away, RIP
ChatGPT and the revenge of history
I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible. Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates. Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”?
I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the historian of ideas. You can ask Chat about obscure Swift pamphlets and it knows more about them than Google does, or Wikipedia does, by a long mile. Presumably it “reads” them for you?
When I ask about current economists or public intellectuals, however, more errors creep in. Hallucinations become common rather than rare. The most common hallucination I find is that Chat invents co-authorships and conference co-sponsorships like crazy. If you ask it about two living people, and whether they have worked together, the fantasy life version will be rather active, maybe fifty percent of the time?
Presumably that bug will be fixed, but still it seems that for the time being Chat has shifted some real intellectual heft back in antiquarian directions. Perhaps it is harder for statistical estimation to predict words about events that are still going on?
Here are some tips for using ChatGPT.
Of course Chat is already a part of my regular research and learning routine. Woe be unto those who cannot or do not use it effectively! I feel sorry for them, get with the program people…
David Wallace-Wells on the pandemic
Rather than quote the parts where he says nice things about Alex and me, how about a wee excerpt on the GBD crowd:
Dr. Bhattacharya, for instance, proclaimed in The Wall Street Journal in March 2020 that Covid-19 was only one-tenth as deadly as the flu. In January 2021 he wrote an opinion essay for the Indian publication The Print suggesting that the majority of the country had acquired natural immunity from infection already and warning that a mass vaccination program would do more harm than good for people already infected. Shortly thereafter, the country’s brutal Delta wave killed perhaps several million Indians. In May 2020, Dr. Gupta suggested that the virus might kill around five in 10,000 people it infected, when the true figure in a naïve population was about one in 100 or 200, and that Covid was “on its way out” in Britain. At that point, it had killed about 45,000 Britons, and it would go on to kill about 170,000 more. The following year, Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff together made the same point about the disease in the United States — that the pandemic was “on its way out” — on a day when the American death toll was approaching 600,000. Today it is 1.1 million and growing.
It has fallen down the memory hole a bit just how um…”off” these people were, and that is the polite word. That said, I don’t think they should have been banned from any social media platforms. Here is the full NYT piece, excellent throughout, and mostly about other topics. For the pointer I thank Alex T.
Thursday assorted links
Shruti Rajagopalan and Janhavi Nilekani podcast
In this episode, Shruti speaks with [the excellent] Janhavi Nilekani about India’s high rate of C-sections compared with vaginal births, problems with maternal healthcare, the present and future of Indian midwifery and much more. Nilekani is the founder and chair of the Aastrika Foundation, which seeks to promote a future in which every woman is treated with respect and dignity during childbirth, and the right treatment is provided at the right time. She is a development economist by training and now works in the field of maternal health. She obtained her Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard and holds a 2010 B.A., cum laude, in economics and international studies from Yale.
Here is the link.