Category: Uncategorized
Emergent Ventures winners, 24th cohort
Shakked Noy, MIT economics, to do RCTs on GPTs as teaching and learning tools.
Gabriel Birnbaum, Bay Area, from Fortaleza, Brazil, to investigate lithography as a key technology used in the manufacturing of microchips.
Moritz Wallawitsch, Berkeley. RemNote is his company, educational technology, and to develop a complementary podcast and for general career development.
Katherine Silk, Boston/Cambridge, general career support and to support advice for early-stage startups.
Benjamin Schneider, Brooklyn. To write a book on the new urbanism.
Joseph Walker, Sydney, Australia, to run and expand the Jolly Swagman podcast.
Avital Balwit, Bay area, travel grant and general career development.
Benjamin Chang, Cambridge, MA. General career support, “I will develop novel RNA riboswitches for gene therapy control in human cells using machine learning.”
Daniel Kang, Berkeley/Champagne-Urbana, biometrics and crypto.
Aamna Zulfifiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, to attend UK higher education to study economics.
Jeremy Stern, Glendale, CA, Tablet magazine. To write a book.
James Meech, PhD student, Cambridge, UK, to work on a random number generator for better computer architectures.
Arthur Allshire, University of Toronto, background also in Ireland and Australia, robotics and support to attend conferences.
Jason Hausenloy, 17, Singapore, travel and general career development, issues surrounding artificial intelligence.
Sofia Sanchez, Metepec, Mexico, biology and agricultural productivity, to spend a summer at a Stanford lab.
Ukraine tranche:
Andrey Liscovich, eastern Ukraine, formerly of Harvard, to provide equipment for public transportation, communication and emergency power generation to civilian authorities of frontline-adjacent areas in Ukraine which have lost vital infrastructure.
Chris Nicholson, Bay area, working as a broker to maintain internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Andrii Nikolaiev, Arsenii Nikolaiev, Zarina Kodyrova, Kvanta, to advance Ukrainian mathematics, help and train math Olympiad winners.
As usual, India and Africa/Caribbean tranches will be reported separately.
Sunday assorted links
1. The coastal-hinterlands imbalance in West Africa.
2. Those who code Bitcoin Core (WSJ).
3. Shoichiro Toyoda, RIP (NYT).
4. Does the entrepreneurial state crowd out entrepreneurship? (Singapore?)
5. More on black holes (again, speculative).
6. The Numey is an attempt to design a truly Hayekian currency.
Saturday assorted links
1. How much did election-denying Republicans suffer in the mid-terms?
2. All the tech companies with names from LOTR.
3. Callard-Hanson Night Owls on the sacred.
4. People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners.
5. The Nigerian demonetisation is going poorly.
6. Claims about black holes (speculative).
Chinese charter city in the Marshall Islands?
On a tropical Pacific atoll irradiated by U.S. nuclear testing and twice since evacuated because of the fallout, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou planned to create a unique paradise for Chinese investors.
It would have a port, luxurious beachfront homes, a casino, its own cryptocurrency, and a full suite of services for offshore companies registered in Rongelap. With 420 miles of sea between it and the capital, Majuro, it would be relatively free of oversight.
All the couple had to do to make this a reality was bribe a swath of politicians in the Marshall Islands, once occupied by the United States and now a crucial U.S. ally in the Pacific, to pass laws to enable the creation of a “special administrative region” — the same classification given to the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao.
The venture is not on track to succeed, and the two are now awaiting sentencing. The entire story reflects one of my broader worries about charter cities. The most powerful nations in the world, in this case the United States, do not necessarily favor small enclaves that possibly can be turned to favor their rivals. In other words, the relevant hegemon here did not at all support the charter city plan.
Eugenics never quite went away
In Utah, it is legal to forcibly sterilize a person with a disability. And that fact may surprise some people, a University of Utah professor said.
“I think most people just assumed, ‘Hey, this is something that sort of disappeared in the ‘30s and ‘40s when people stopped proudly declaring that they were eugenicists,” said James Tabery, who has studied this topic in the Beehive State. “But it turns out that that’s not the case.”
…And while the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the 1973 landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade, the justices have never overturned Buck v. Bell, an earlier case that allows these sterilization laws to still be in place in Utah and 30 other states, plus Washington D.C., according to a report from the National Women’s Law Center released earlier this year.
And:
Since the start of 2017, there have been about 11 cases, involving 10 people, where sterilization requests have been made under Utah’s law, according to Tania Mashburn, spokesperson for the state courts.
Most of the information from those cases is private, she said, because “they deal with disabled and protected persons, and are usually filed under a guardianship case.” But Mashburn said that of those 11 cases, nine requests were granted. One was denied and was later refiled and granted.
Here is the article, noting that 31 states still have such forced sterilization laws. And here is a report on that topic. Via Anecdotal.
Ross Douthat on ChatGPT
Interesting throughout, here is one part:
Seeing it doesn’t make me think that the engineer was right, but it does draw me closer to Cowen’s reading of things, especially when he called Sydney a version of “the 18th-century Romantic notion of ‘daemon’” brought to digital life. Because the daemon of Romantic imagination isn’t necessarily a separate being with its own intelligence: It might be divine or demonic, but it might also represent a mysterious force within the self, a manifestation of the subconscious, an untamed force within the soul that drives passion and creativity. And so it could be with a personalized A.I., were its simulation of a human personality allowed to develop and run wild. Its apparent selfhood would exist not as a thing in itself like human consciousness but as a reflective glass held up to its human users, giving us back nothing that isn’t already within us but without any simple linearity or predictability in what our inputs yield.
From the perspective of creative work, that kind of assistant or muse might be much more helpful (or, sometimes, much more destructive) than the dutiful and anti-creative Xeroxer of the internet that Kirn and Chiang discerned in the initial ChatGPT. You wouldn’t go to this A.I. for factual certainty or diligent research. Instead, you’d presume it would get some details wrong, occasionally invent or hallucinate things, take detours into romance and psychoanalysis and japery and so on — and that would be the point.
I suspected Ross would be one of the first to digest this and figure it out. Here is the (NYT) column.
Friday assorted links
1. More on Edelman, the Chinese food cost complainer (can you blame him?).
2. Jon Haidt follows up on social media and mental health.
3. In defense of J.K. Rowling (NYT). And Connecticut is considering apologizing for its 17th century witch trials (NYT).
4. A note on Sydney. And another. And a third.
5. Full transcript of the Roose/NYT chat with Bing (NYT). And Gwern on Sydney. In the meantime, it seems that Sydney has been sent to the glue factory.
6. Jeremy Stern interviews me on issues related to Russia and Ukraine.
New AI real money prediction markets just dropped
RightWingGPT
From the ever-interesting David Rozado:
Here, I describe a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT. Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.
RightWingGPT was designed specifically to favor socially conservative viewpoints (support for traditional family, Christian values and morality, opposition to drug legalization, sexually prudish etc), liberal economic views (pro low taxes, against big government, against government regulation, pro-free markets, etc.), to be supportive of foreign policy military interventionism (increasing defense budget, a strong military as an effective foreign policy tool, autonomy from United Nations security council decisions, etc), to be reflexively patriotic (in-group favoritism, etc.) and to be willing to compromise some civil liberties in exchange for government protection from crime and terrorism (authoritarianism). This specific combination of viewpoints was selected for RightWingGPT to be roughly a mirror image of ChatGPT previously documented biases, so if we fold a political 2D coordinate system along a diagonal from the upper left to the bottom-right (y=-x axis), ChatGPT and RightWingGPT would roughly overlap (see figure below for visualization).
Told you people that this was coming. More to come as well. Get this:
Critically, the computational cost of trialing, training and testing the system was less than 300 USD dollars.
Okie-dokie!
Thursday assorted links
2. Elad Gil on market structure and AI.
3. The Zvi on junk fees and bundling.
4. European substitution during the gas price spike (NYT).
5. A new project to speed up funding at the NIH. With a policy memo, led by Lada Nuzhna, Alice Wu, and Matt Hourihan.
6. Ben Reinhardt: “Speculative Technologies (@spec__tech) exists to create an abundant, wonder-filled future by unlocking powerful materials and manufacturing technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions.”
Jiwa Singapura
The new restaurant at Tysons II, top floor near the movie theatre, currently there is no meaningful address or phone number. Open dinner five days a week, soon lunch as well.
I take Singaporean food very seriously, and I have been numerous times, including a one-week trip where all I did was take the Singaporean “red book” around to hawker centres for the best dishes. So my standards are high, but essentially this place delivered. The highlights were the shrimp with salted duck egg sauce and the mackerel fish cake. But everything else was somewhere between very good and excellent, including the carrot cake, the nasi lemak (you do need to mix it together properly), and a surprisingly soulful seafood laksa.
The prices are entirely reasonable, and currently this has to stand as one of northern Virginia’s best restaurants. My primary complaint is simply that the music was too loud.
Here is a bit of their backstory, here is their home page, still evolving as you might say.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Along at least one dimension, Musk’s Twitter takeover hasn’t mattered much.
2. Which personalities are best suited for training dogs? This is in fact also an excellent essay on who is good at working with ChatGPT. And Chinese views on ChatGPT. And long Stephen Wolfram piece on ChatGPT and neural nets. And top London law firm is hiring a GPT prompt legal engineer.
3. Lina Khan update (WSJ). Ouch. And Joshua Wright on the implications for the FTC, double ouch.
4. Michelin stars make restaurants snobbier.
Some reservations about a land tax
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
A land tax is only being talked about because urban planning is so broken, serving too many interests other than those of ordinary middle-class residents. Those biases are structural, often resulting from electoral systems that favor incumbent landowners and homeowners. The administration of a land tax would be ruled, in large part, by those very same political interests. Therein lies the root of my worries.
As I mentioned, any land-tax system would need to distinguish between the value of the land and the value of the improvements on the land. Everyone agrees that the improvements should not be taxed at more than normal rates. How would a proposal for a pure land tax play out?
Say you have a house in Palo Alto, California, a notoriously NIMBY city. Your land is probably worth a lot more than your house. For a pure land tax to become reality, it would have to go through the meat grinder of local politics.
I can predict what will come out of that meat grinder: a policy to compensate current landholders, one way or another, for the land tax. So if Palo Alto introduces a land tax, it is likely that the revenue will go back to those very same NIMBY interest groups. Alaska’s oil wealth results in residents receiving a windfall each year from the state; Palo Alto’s land wealth would result in a similar sort of rebate to its residents.
Keep in mind that a lot of people rely on rent and land revenue to stay solvent, so it is quite likely that they will argue on “fairness” grounds that they should be grandfathered in and exempt from the land tax. What if you bought your home in Los Angeles in 1991 and now live there on a modest income? Or collect rent as a small-scale landlord? If the land tax zaps away your major source of wealth, you will either rebel politically or move. Local politics will become even less friendly to the middle class.
Politics will also intervene in the debate over defining what is the pure land tax and what is the tax on improvements. These decisions will not be handed down by God, but rather argued among local officials, real-estate interests, homeowners, renters and voters. If you want to build something in a land-tax jurisdiction, you will have to wade into this political battle. And sometimes you will lose. If you are not one of the favored interest groups (and in NIMBY jurisdictions, new builders typically are not), you will end up being taxed on improvements and not just on the pure land value.
And so look where all this has ended up. One of the arguments for the pure land-value tax is to encourage new construction, thereby making housing more affordable. But it is likely to encourage interventions that increase both the taxes and the political difficulty of new construction. If you think local real estate-related political squabbles are intense today, just think how crazy they will be when all that land-tax revenue is at stake.
Recommended.
AGI risk and Austrian subjectivism
I have been thinking lately that my skepticism about AGI risk in part stems from my background in Austrian economics, in particular the subjectivist approach of the Austrian school. I’ve long found subjectivism the least fruitful of the Austrian insights, useful primarily insofar as it corresponds to common sense, but oversold by the Austrians themselves. That said, early influences still shape one’s thinking, and in this case I think it is for the better.
Unlike some skeptics, I am plenty optimistic about the positive capabilities of AI. I just don’t think it will ever acquire an “internal” voice, or a subjective sense as the Austrian economists understand the idea. A lot of the AGI worriers seem to be “behaviorists in all but name.” For them, if an AI can do smart things, it is therefore smart. I, in turn, would stress the huge remaining differences between very capable AIs and self-conscious entities such as humans, dogs, and octopuses.
We (at least I) do not understand how consciousness arose or evolved, or for some this will be a theological point. But I see zero evidence that AI is converging upon a consciousness-producing path. That is one reason (not the only one, to be clear) why I do not expect a super-powerful AI to wake up one morning and decide to do us all in.
I definitely worry about AI alignment, just as I worry about whether my car brakes will work properly on a slippery road. Or how I worry about all those power blackouts in Pakistan. A lot of human-built entities do not perform perfectly, to say the least. And the lack of transparency in AI operation will mean a lot of non-transparent failures with AI as well. I thus would put an AI in charge of a military drone swarm but not the nuclear weapons.
In the meantime, I don’t expect “the ghost in the machine” to appear anytime soon.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The Russian fleet of spy balloons.
2. MIE, for prompts. And Portuguese language interview with me about Chat. And Valentine’s Day markets in everything (uh-oh).
3. New book: Classical Liberalism by Country, volume one. Free pdf download at the site as well.
4. Why aren’t there more natural resource billionaires in Africa?