Category: Web/Tech
AI update
We’re in that “a lot of people have stopped caring” phase of the transition, don’t let the status quo and recency biases fool you:
Google’s new flagship AI model, “Gemini,” is set to be a direct competitor to GPT-4 and boasts computing power 5 times that of GPT-4. Trained on Google’s TPUv5 chips, it’s capable of simultaneous operations with a massive 16,384 chips. The dataset used for training this model is around 65 trillion tokens, and it’s multi-modal, accepting text, video, audio, and pictures. Moreover, it can produce both text and images. The training also included content from YouTube and used advanced training techniques similar to “AlphaGo-type” methods. Google plans to release the Gemini model to the public in December 2023.
And that may or may not prove the most important event of that half year…
YouTube does not polarize, yet further results in this direction
We find that while the [YouTube] algorithm pulls users away from political extremes, this pull is asymmetric, with users being pulled away from Far Right content stronger than from Far Left. Furthermore, we show that the recommendations made by the algorithm skew left even when the user does not have a watch history.
That is from a new research paper by Hazem Ibrahim, et.al. For further cites showing that YouTube does not polarize, see this CWT. Via Matt Grossman.
Emergent Ventures winners, 28th cohort
Anup Malani and Michael Sonnenschein, Chicago and Los Angeles respectively, repeat winners, now collaborating on a new project of interest.
Jesse Lee, Calgary, to lower the costs on developing safe and effective sugar substitutes.
Russel Ismael, Montreal, just finished as an undergraduate, to develop a new mucoadhesive to improve drug delivery outcomes.
Calix Huang, USC, 18 years old, general career development, AI and start-ups,
Aiden Bai, NYC, 18, “to work more on Million.js, an open source React alternative,” and general career development. Twitter here.
Shrey Jain, Toronto, AI and cryptography and privacy.
Jonathan Xu, Toronto, currently Singapore, general career support, also with an interest in AI, fMRI, and mind-reading.
Viha Kedia, Dubai/ starting at U. Penn., writing, general career development.
Krishiv Thakuria, entering sophomore in high school, Ontario, Ed tech and general career development.
Alishba Imran, UC Berkeley/Ontario, to study machine learning and robotics and materials, general career development, and for computing time and a home lab.
Jonathan Dockrell, Dublin, to finance a trip to Próspera to meet with prospective venture capitalists for an air rights project.
Nasiyah Isra-Ul, Chesterfield, VA, to write about, promote, and create a documentary about home schooling.
Sarhaan Gulati, Vancouver, to develop drones for Mars.
And the new Ukrainian cohort:
Viktoriia Shcherba, Kyiv, now entering Harris School, University of Chicago, to study economic and political reconstruction.
Dmytro Semykras, Graz, Austria, to develop his career as a pianist. Here is one recent performance.
Please do note there is some “rationing of cohorts,” so some recent winners are not listed but next time will be. And those working on talent issues will (in due time) end up in their own cohort.
The economic impact of AI
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is part of my argument:
I am a believer in the power of current AI trends. But a look at the way economies work argues for more moderate (but still substantial) estimates of AI’s impact. The most likely scenario is that economic growth will rise by a noticeable but not shocking amount.
Economic historians typically cite Britain’s England’s Industrial Revolution as the single most significant development ever in boosting living standards. Through the late 18th and 19th centuries, it took people from a near-subsistence existence to modern industrial society.
Yet economic growth rates during the Industrial Revolution were hardly astonishing. From 1760 to 1780, often considered a “take-off” period, annual British growth was about 0.6%. The strongest period was 1831 to 1873, when annual growth averaged about 2.4% — a very good performance, but “revolutionary” only if sustained over longer periods of time.
The important feature of the Industrial Revolution, of course, is that growth did continue for decades, and thus living standards did not regress. But it was not possible to move quickly to an advanced industrial economy. For each step along the way, a lot of surrounding infrastructure and social practices had to be put into place. A profitable steel factory may require a nearby railroad, for instance, and an effective railroad in turn requires agreement on compatible gauges and equipment, and all these numerous decisions take a long time to sort out. There are always bottlenecks, and there is no simple way to fast forward through the entire process.
One way to estimate the impact of AI on economic growth is to look at all the human intelligence brought into the global economy by the social and economic development of Korea, China, India and other regions. There are many more potential innovators and researchers in the world, and the market for innovation is correspondingly larger. Yet all that new human intelligence does not seem to have materially boosted growth rates in the US, which on average were higher in the 1960s than in more recent times. All that additional talent is valuable — but getting stuff done is just very difficult.
I owe that latter point to The Wisdom of Garett Jones, though I could not find the Twitter link. And then:
My best guess, and I do stress that word guess, is that advanced artificial intelligence will boost the annual US growth rate by one-quarter to one-half of a percentage point. That is nothing to sneeze at: Consider that US per capita income is currently approaching $80,000. If it grows at 2% a year, in 50 years that figure will be almost $215,000. Alternatively, if the economy grows at 2.5% a year, it will be almost $275,000 — a substantial difference, and with compound returns that gap widens with time.
In the shorter run, that difference in growth rates could mean the difference between an easy path forward vs. a looming fiscal crisis and big tax increases. It could mean a world where most cancers are cured in 30 years, rather than 70 or 80. It’s possible to recognize the importance of those developments for human well-being, while still understanding that most of GDP is a huge lump of goods and services, most of whose production cannot be revolutionized quickly, no matter how much intelligence (artificial or otherwise) is available.
Finally:
None of those estimates should be taken to suggest that AI development will be anything less than hugely impressive over the next few decades. But as one set of constraints is relaxed — in this case access to intelligence — the remaining constraints will matter all the more. Regulatory delays will be more frustrating, for instance, as they will be holding back a greater amount of cognitive horsepower than in times past. Or as AI improves at finding new and better medical hypotheses to test, the lags and delays in systems for clinical trials will become all the more painful. In fact they may worsen as the system is flooded with conjectures.
I should note also that there is nothing else on the horizon likely to boost growth more than AI will.
The talks from the Civic Future conference on the Great Stagnation
From my email, from Civic Future:
We held our inaugural annual conference The Great Stagnation Summit 2023 last month at the University of Cambridge. Well, you can now watch and listen to videos of the panel discussions on our YouTube channel. We have also made the discussion transcripts available, which you can read using the links below or on the summit page.
Progress: Have we run out of road? – Tyler Cowen (keynote), David Edgerton, Sam Bowman, Diane Coyle Video / Transcript
Rekindling Britain’s economic flame – Lord Sainsbury, Andy Haldane, Anton Howes, Deirdre McCloskey, Tim Besley Video / Transcript
Progress on trial – Aria Babu, Nicholas Boys Smith, Matt Ridley, Sam Richards, Inaya Folarin Iman Video / Transcript
How to be good stewards of progress – James Phillips, Ben Reinhardt, Stian Westlake, Rachel Wolf, Munira Mirza Video / Transcript
Unlocking the Potential – Matt Clifford, Logan Graham, Saffron Huang, Marc Warner, John Thornhill Video / Transcript
Which countries will win the AI race?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and I mean this above and beyond whichever countries make and sell AI services. Here is one bit:
Broadly speaking, most economic endeavors fall into one of two categories: those with known routines, and new projects. AI will favor nations that excel at the latter and hurt those which rely on the former.
Most activity falls into the routinized category — it describes a lot of bureaucracies, attempts at medical diagnosis, back-office work, and so on. To be clear, this is not a criticism: Routinizing activities lowers their costs. New projects — startups, attempts to build new towns or cities, trying to establish a colony on Mars, founding a new university — are different…
So to the extent a country specializes in providing routine activities, such as the call centers and back-office support provided by firms in India and the Philippines, AI presents a risk. It could take away many of those jobs and shift the associated profits to foreign firms…
In contrast, consider new projects. Current AI models are not anywhere close to being able to conceptualize a new idea, communicate the new vision, assemble and inspire the necessary talent, raise money and deal with the corporate politics — to name just a few important components of new projects. So AI cannot substitute for the essential creative forces of entrepreneurs.
That said, AI makes many new projects easier to pull off by aiding with the routine work along the way. Say you have a brilliant new idea for a fintech firm, but need help with the slide deck and marketing copy and all the email inquiries. AI will be of use to you.
So countries and regions that are good at executing new projects are the most likely to benefit from the AI revolution. Which countries might those be?
One possible candidate is China, which has successfully carried out a large number of infrastructure projects. But there is a tension between free-flowing commercial AI and the Chinese government’s policy of censorship. What if someone asks the AI some political questions that the regime is not so keen to see discussed? Exactly how much will the Chinese government allow or encourage decentralized access to quality AI models?
India is another possible winner, even though it is vulnerable in the area of back-office support. Indian infrastructure has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, a sign the nation now has greater ability to pull off new projects. The Indian Aadhaar program, which has done bio-scans of well over 1 billion Indians and helped them make and receive payments, was a major new project that largely succeeded. India has some censorship issues as well, although they are not as serious as China’s.
Saudi Arabia is planning some major projects, such as the ambitious desert city of Neom. Perhaps the Saudis will need yet further technological advances to pull off those plans, but at least they are trying to make some significant changes. They are possibly a big winner from AI advances.
Recommended, I consider other countries as well.
Ken Rogoff on chess and AI
From an interview:
Rogoff, who is also the Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics at Harvard University, doesn’t see artificial intelligence as bad for chess. “It’s actually made it more interesting so far,” he says.
Having seen how fast AI evolved within the game, Rogoff predicts applications like ChatGPT will be unrecognizable in five years. Advancements will come “faster than you think,” but if the experience of chess is any indication, the technology’s evolution won’t be as “detrimental” as some may fear…
I don’t want to sound evangelical, because I don’t know which way it’s going to go. But, yes. If you look at the experience of chess faster than you think and for longer than you think but also not necessarily as detrimental as you might think. Humans have adjusted. And it’s been very good.
JULIE HYMAN: Well, can you elaborate on that a little bit? You said it’s made chess more interesting. How?
KENNETH ROGOFF: Well, first of all, people have thought a lot of positions were boring. That the computer shows, well, try me at this position, and it turns out to be just wellsprings of creativity positions, where the best player in the world, Bobby Fischer, I think would have maybe even given me a draw back in 1975. Now is the beginning of the game for many players, so this depth of learning. Players venture much more complicated and interesting positions because they have other ways to explore them.
So surprisingly, we thought it would lead to more draws, right? If you figured out better, you’re going to get more draws. Not at all. So here’s this simple compared to human intelligence game, which you would think you would solve out, and yet you find these layers of interest. I think we’ll see this in art and many, many things.
Here is the link, it references the longer chat with some economics of debt and inflation.
That was then, this is now (sacred robot edition)
From the Amazon summary of the forthcoming book by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd:
An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays.
This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.
In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.
Ross Douthat, telephone! (I did, of course, pre-order the book.)
My very excellent Conversation with Paul Graham
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what’s gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he’s optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we’re underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.
Of course mostly we talked about talent selection, here is one bit:
COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?
GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.
COWEN: So, you think it’s mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft?
GRAHAM: It certainly helps.
COWEN: Then talent’s responding accordingly. Fundamentally, what went wrong?
GRAHAM: You invent some shtick, right?
COWEN: Right.
GRAHAM: And then — technically, it’s called a signature style — you paint with this special shtick. If someone can get some ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your shtick and hangs it on the wall in their loft in Tribeca. And people come in and say, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a so and so,” which they recognize because they’ve seen this shtick. [laughs]
COWEN: Say, if we have modernism raging in the 1920s, and the ’20s mass media is radio for the most part —
GRAHAM: No, no, no, newspapers were huge. Modernism was well —
COWEN: But not for showing paintings, right? There’s no color in the papers. You had to be —
And here is one exchange on talent:
COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?
GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.
COWEN: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?
GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]
As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”
[laughter]
It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.
COWEN: How much of what you do is reshuffling their networks? There are people with potential. They’re in semi-average networks —
GRAHAM: Wait. That was such an interesting question. We should talk about that some more because that really is an interesting question. Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people can be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. There’s got to be more to it than just the fact that I don’t have to do the work.
COWEN: I think a lot of it is reshuffling networks. You need someone who can identify who should be in a better network. You boost the total size of all networking that goes on, and you make sure those people with potential —
GRAHAM: By reshuffling networks, you mean introducing people to one another?
COWEN: Of course.
GRAHAM: Yes.
COWEN: You pull them away from their old peers, who are not good enough for them, and you bring them into new circles, which will raise their sights.
GRAHAM: Eh, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there’s often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They suddenly become more excited because there’s a critical mass of like-minded people around. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. I mean, that is a big thing.
Definitely recommended.
Can ChatGPT Help Investors Process Financial Information?
Surprise, surprise, disclosures are bloated past the point of being informally useful:
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can fundamentally change the way investors process information. We probe the economic usefulness of these tools in summarizing complex corporate disclosures using the stock market as a laboratory. The unconstrained summaries are dramatically shorter, often by more than 70% compared to the originals, whereas their information content is amplified. When a document has a positive (negative) sentiment, its summary becomes more positive (negative). More importantly, the summaries are more effective at explaining stock market reactions to the disclosed information. Motivated by these findings, we propose a measure of information “bloat.” We show that bloated disclosure is associated with adverse capital markets consequences, such as lower price efficiency and higher information asymmetry. Finally, we show that the model is effective at constructing targeted summaries that identify firms’ (non-)financial performance and risks. Collectively, our results indicate that generative language modeling adds considerable value for investors with information processing constraints.
That is from a new paper by Alex Kim, Maximilian Muhn and Valeri Nikolaev.
Behavioral Economics and ChatGPT: From William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante
We prompted GPT-4 (an artificial intelligence large language model) to use literary fictional characters to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment. We prompted GPT-4 with 148 characters from the 17th century to the 21st century. Their 888 decisions were used to compare characters over time as well as characters to human players. There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. 41% of the decisions of 17th century characters are selfish compared to just 21% of the decisions of characters from the 21st century. In the Human-AI comparison, Humans are much more selfish than the AI characters with 51% of humans making selfish decisions compared to 28% of the AI characters.
Here is the full (short) paper by Gabriel Abrams (a junior in high school).
Would room temperature superconductivity benefit military offense or defense?
If, if, if, people we still do not know yet. But I am one who likes to ask if, and GPT-4 plus is willing to accommodate those desires:
Room temperature superconductivity could potentially benefit both offensive and defensive military capabilities, but it will depend on how this technology is applied.
Offense: The military could potentially use superconductors to develop high-energy weapons or improve the range and accuracy of existing weaponry. For instance, electromagnetic railguns, which use electric fields to launch projectiles at incredibly high speeds, could be made far more practical and powerful. Additionally, it could help with enhanced signal processing to improve intelligence gathering and surveillance capabilities.
Defense: On the other hand, room temperature superconductors could also be used defensively. They could enhance the shielding of military bases, vehicles, or personnel by enabling creation of powerful electromagnetic shields, improving stealth technology, or developing advanced missile defense systems. Superconductive tech could also enhance communication systems, making them more secure and less susceptible to interception or jamming by enemies.
Then some ethics blah blah blah. People, it seems to me that it is more likely to benefit military offense. Sources of strong power are simply more likely to be portable?
Emergent Ventures India, Cohort Five
The following was compiled by Shruti Rajagopalan, who directs Emergent Ventures India. I will not indent the material:
Ankita Vijayvergiya is a computer Science Engineer and an entrepreneur. She founded BillionCarbon along with her co-founder Nikhil Vijayvergiya, to work on solving two problems that plague India – soil degradation and managing biodegradable waste. At BillionCarbon, they are nutrient mining from biodegradable waste to convert it into liquid bio-fertilizer. Their EV grant is to execute proof of concept with pilots, field trials, and technology validation.
Sujata Saha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wabash College, Indiana. Her primary research interests are in International Finance and Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Financial Inclusion. She received her EV grant to study entrepreneurship and economic development in Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest slum in the world.
Aditya Mehta is an Arjuna Award-winning professional snooker player. Through the non-profit organization, The ACE Snooker Foundation, he aims to teach and promote cue sports in India. He is creating a technology-based digital cue sports coaching solution, specifically aiming to develop a curriculum-based approach for schools and colleges across India.
Aditi Dimri (PhD, Economist) & Saraswati Chandra (Engineer, Entrepreneur) co-founded Cranberry.Fit to develop a virtual menstrual health coach with the aim to break through the traditional silence and apathy regarding painful periods and menstrual health. The EV grant supports the development of the virtual coach to help manage menstrual symptoms with the help of a personalized habits plan.
Vedanth Ramji is a 15-year-old high school junior from Chennai, passionate about research at the intersection of Math, Computer Science, and Biology. He is currently a student researcher at the Big Data Biology Lab at QUT, Australia, where he develops software tools for Antimicrobial (AMR) research. He received his EV grant to travel to his lab at QUT, to develop deeper insights into AMR research and collaborate with his team on a publication which he is currently co-authoring.
Abhishek Nath is a 43-year-old entrepreneur tackling public restroom infrastructure and sanitation in urban areas head on. He is determined to bring Loocafe – a safe, hygienic, and accessible restroom for everyone – to cities around the world. He seeks to ensure that no city is more than a kilometer away from accessing a safe public toilet, providing youth easy and safe access to hygienic urban sanitation.
Sandhya Gupta is the founder of Aavishkaar, a teacher professional development institute that aims to educate, equip, and enable teachers of K-10 to become excellent science and math educators. Sandhya and Aavishkaar received an EV grant to help create an army of female Math educators helping students enjoy Math while chartering a career pathway for themselves in STEM fields.
Ankur Paliwal is a queer journalist and founder of queerbeat, a collaborative journalism project to cover the historically underserved LGBTQIA+ community in India. Over the last 13 years, Ankur has written narrative journalism stories about science, inequity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. He received an EV grant to build an online community and newsletter alongside queerbeat, to help transform public conversation about LGBTQIA+ persons in India.
Arsalaan Alam is a web developer, machine learning enthusiast, and aspiring rationalist. He is working on improving the conditions of harmonic coexistence between humans and wildlife. He got his Emergent Ventures grant to continue building Aquastreet, which consists of a hardware device that can be attached beneath a boat, after which it takes in audio of fish’s voices and converts the audio into a MEL frequency and then performs machine learning to classify the fish species, which is then displayed on the Aquastreet mobile app.
Soundarya Balasubramani is a 26-year-old writer, author, and former product manager. She moved to the United States to pursue her master’s at Columbia University in 2017. Immigrants in the US face several barriers, including the decades-long wait times to get a green card for Indians, the lack of a startup visa for entrepreneurs, and the constant political battle that thwarts immigration reform. To reduce the barrier skilled immigrants face, Soundarya is has written a comprehensive book (Unshacked) and is building an online community where immigrants can congregate, get guidance, and help each other.
Aadesh Nomula is an engineer focused on cybersecurity. He is working on a single-point cybersecurity device for Indian homes and small-scale factories. His other interest is Philosophy.
Aurojeet Misra is an 18-year-old biology student at IISER Pune. He received his EV grant for his efforts on a radioactive tracing system to detect and locate forest fires. He hopes to test a prototype of this system to better understand its practical feasibility. He is interested in understanding different scientific disciplines like molecular biology, public health, physics, etc., and working on their interface.
Divyam Makar is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and developer working on Omeyo, a platform to connect local pharmacists, which aims to provide a large inventory to users with all the needed items, along with being super low-cost and interactive. They aim to deliver medicine to their users in as little as 20 minutes.
Divas Jyoti Parashar is a 23-year-old climate entrepreneur from Assam. He founded Quintinno Labs, a cleantech company driving the electric vehicle revolution by developing power banks for EVs. These compact and portable devices that fit in your car’s trunk aim to reduce range anxiety and offer emergency relief to EV users in developing countries that lack a charging station network. He is also working on deploying hydro-kinetic turbines in Assam to generate clean energy from flowing water. His recent passion project was a documentary about the impact of the 2021 volcanic eruption on the local population in La Palma Island.
Ray Amjad is prototyping scalable tools for finding and supporting the lost Einsteins and Marie Curies of the world – young people with exceptional math and science ability from under-resourced backgrounds. He received his EV Grant to help him find collaborators. He graduated from Cambridge, where he filmed many educational videos.
Amandeep Singh is a 22-year-old inventor and entrepreneur interested in machine learning and deep learning. He is building ‘Tiktok for India’, a short video-sharing app that allows people to edit and share videos with the world, create communities, and deliver authentic video content. Prior to this, he founded an AI surveillance startup, particularly for CCTV cameras.
Govinda Prasad Dhungana is an assistant professor at Far Western University, Nepal, and a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a public health researcher and co-founder of the Ostrom Center and he designs and implements high-impact HIV/Family Planning programs in marginalized communities. His EV grant will be used for piloting the community-based distribution (using Ostrom’s Design Principles and behavior change models) of a new self-injectable contraception (Sayana Press).
Kalash Bhaiya is a 17-year-old high-school student and social entrepreneur. She founded Fun Learning Youth (or FLY), a nonprofit that employs cohort-based mentorship by volunteers in their localities and received her EV grant to help reduce middle-school dropouts within underserved communities.
Kranthi Kumar Kukkala is a serial entrepreneur and technologist from Hyderabad. He is working on a health care device – HyGlo – a non-invasive anemia diagnosing device. HyGlo is similar to a pulse oximeter, when a person puts their finger in the device probe, it investigates blood inside the finger without taking a blood sample and finds the hemoglobin percentage in the blood. This device can help young girls and women manage anemia (a big problem in India).
Kulbir Lamba is a 35-year-old researcher and practitioner, interested in understanding the startup landscape and received an EV grant for studying the evolution of DeepTech startups in India.
Keshav Sharma is a 23-year-old entrepreneur working at the intersection of design, technology & marketing. Two years ago, he founded Augrade, a deeptech startup with his college friends. Augrade is an AI+AR platform to streamline the creation, editing, validation & visualization of 3D models at scale.
Srijon Sarkar is a 19-year-old researcher from Kolkata interested in mathematical oncology and applied rationality. He received his EV grant to study cancer systems, particularly Epithelial/Mesenchymal Plasticity through a lens of mathematical models and statistical algorithms, during his gap year. He will start his undergraduate degree (mathematics and biology) with a full scholarship at Emory University starting Fall 2023.
Shubham Vyas s an advocate for open discourse and democratic dialogue in India. With a background in data science and interest in philosophy, he received his EV grant to build his venture “Conversations on India,” into a multi-platform media venture to help shape the Indian political and economic discourse landscape.
Navneet Choudhary is an entrepreneur, and his journey started when he was 21 with a food delivery app for trains and buses across 70 cities in India. He received his EV Grant to develop LAMROD, a mobile application-based platform to manage trucking and cargo fleet operations at one place.
Srinaath Krishnan is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. He received his EV grant to work on Zephyr, a start-up making credit scores universal and mobile, to enable immigrants to qualify for financial products using their international credit history.
Venkat Ram is an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, researching the development and deployment of human capital. He received his EV grant to study the structure and functioning of labor addas (proverbial marketplaces most daily wage laborers in India find work).
Arvind Subramanian, is a 25-year-old sailor from Chennai and works as a product manager at Sportstar, the oldest sports magazine in India. He won his EV grant to enable his (and his team’s) participation in the 2022 J80 World Sailing Championship in Rhode Island, USA. He is working towards building and scaling the niche sporting scene in India.
Some past winners received additional grants:
Karthik Nagapuri, a 21-year-old programmer and AI engineer, for general career development.
Akash Kulgod is a 23yo cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley founded Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. His grant will go towards launching a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack, about effective altruism, talent-search, psychedelics, and sci-fi uplift.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, and fourth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
The political impact of social media has been grossly overrated
Finally the truth is coming out. A series of new research papers, surveyed in the NYT, present a pretty sobering reality. Here is just one excerpt:
One of the studies was titled “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes?” In that research, which included more than 23,000 Facebook users and 21,000 Instagram users, researchers replaced the algorithms with reverse chronological feeds, which means people saw the most recent posts first instead of posts that were largely tailored to their interests.
Yet people’s “polarization,” or political knowledge, did not change, the researchers found. In the academics’ surveys, people did not report shifting their behaviors, such as signing more online petitions or attending more political rallies, after their feeds were changed.
And:
In another paper, researchers found that reducing the amount of content in 23,000 Facebook users’ feeds that was posted by “like-minded” connections did not measurably alter the beliefs or political polarization of those who participated.
“These findings challenge popular narratives blaming social media echo chambers for the problems of contemporary American democracy,” the study’s authors said.
In a fourth study that looked at 27,000 Facebook and Instagram users, people said their knowledge of political news fell when their ability to reshare posts was taken away in an experiment. Removing the reshare button ultimately did not change people’s beliefs or opinions, the paper concluded.
This entire episode is one of the more egregious instances of an anti-business, anti-tech falsehood taking root and being repeated endlessly. Of course, some of us having been saying this for years — the basic point is not hard to grasp if you are someone who…writes for a public audience…
How to assign property rights in actor AI likenesses
This is an issue in the Actors and Writers Guild strikes, with a key issue being whether studios should be making “take it or leave it” offers which give them rights to the AI likenesses in perpetuity, even for extras. Here is part of my take in my latest Bloomberg column:
I suggest that the eventual strike settlement forbid studios from buying the rights to AI likenesses for more than a single film or project. Or, as a compromise, the contract could be for some limited number of projects, but not in perpetuity. Actors thus would remain in long-run control of their AI likenesses, yet if they wanted to keep selling those likenesses – project by project – they could do so.
Note that this proposal is along some dimensions quite inegalitarian. That is, future stars would end up much richer and the large numbers of actors who fail would end up slightly poorer. They would not be paid small upfront sums for rights that would quickly become worthless.
We can feel better about that trade-off if we consider the interests of the fans. Many people (myself included) enjoy the image and thought of Han Solo (one of Ford’s most famous roles), whether or not they are paying money in a given year to see the Star Wars movies. Would those fans prefer that Ford or some movie studio be in control of the Han Solo image?
The answer may depend on the wisdom and aesthetic taste of the actor in question, but overall I would opt for actor control of the AI likenesses. At least some actors will care about the quality of the projects their likenesses are attached to, rather than just seeking to maximize profit from deploying the likenesses. So, if the question is whether an AI likeness of Han Solo can greet visitors at the entrance to a Disney ride, Disney might say yes but Ford might say no, or at least he would have that choice.
Having celebrity images remain scarce rather than overexposed is a good aesthetic decision, even if it keeps some market power in the hands of Ford, his eventual heirs and future movie stars more generally. With these additional restraints on AI likenesses, we will likely end up with a more exciting, less tired and less overexposed kind of celebrity culture, and I hope that leads to broader social benefits, if only by cultivating better taste among fans and viewers.
Such a proposal is not so unusual when viewed in a broader context. Standard labor contracts don’t allow you to sell your labor to your boss in perpetuity, as you always retain the right to quit. Few people consider that limitation on contracting objectionable, as it protects human liberty against some hasty or ill-conceived decisions, such as selling yourself into slavery. If your AI likeness ends up being such a good substitute for your physical being, as it seems our current technological track may bring, why should we not consider similar restrictions on the contracts for the AI likeness?
Worth a ponder, these are not easy issues.