Results for “400”
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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…

  • 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.

Looking ahead…

  • 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
  • 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!

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.

Advancing antivenom

Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent disabilities. This ranks it among the deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, alongside better-known ailments such as typhus and cholera.

For many years, the number was believed to be much lower. The World Health Organization had previously estimated that only 50,000 died from snakebites each year, and the problem – known as envenoming – was prioritized accordingly. In 2014, an enormous study documenting one million deaths in India concluded with surprising results. They found that 46,000 people were dying yearly from snakebites in India alone, five times more than the WHO had anticipated. The WHO subsequently doubled their global estimate from around 50,000 to their new range of 81,000 to 138,000.

Despite playing host to the world’s most venomous snakes (including the inland taipan, the most venomous animal in the world), Australia averages only two deaths from snakebites each year…

An Australian is typically a short drive from a well-equipped hospital carrying antivenom in cold storage. Australian doctors and others in the West can use advanced diagnostic equipment to determine the species of snake the patient was bitten by and administer highly effective species-specific antivenom.

An Indian victim, on the other hand, would typically face a long journey to the nearest clinic. For over 34 percent of Indian snakebite victims, it takes more than six hours to receive treatment.

In other words, the problem is solvable.  Here is more from Mathias Kirk Bonde at Works in Progress.  Here is the new issue of Works in Progress.  Small steps toward a much better world!

Is the EA movement dead?

No.

To be clear, I am not “an EA person,” though I do have sympathies with considerable parts of the movement.  Most of all it has struck me, as I have remarked in the past, just how much young talent the movement has attracted.  Money enabled the attracting of that talent, but I never had the sense that the money was the reason why the talent was showing up at EA events.  So a less well-funded EA movement still will be potent, at least assuming it gets over the immediate trauma.  That trauma may even help to drive away some of the less serious poseurs who thought EA was the easiest path to polyamory, or whatever..

Intellectual movements can be quite influential on small sums of money.  What exactly was the budget for the Apostles?  Or take libertarianism, which arguably saw peak influence in the last 1970s and early 1980s, when it was much less well funded than in later times.

How much money did the Benthamites have?  Nonetheless they influenced policy a great deal.

As a side note, Open Philanthropy spent over $400 million in 2021.  I know zero about their plans, but I don’t see any reason to think they will be unimportant in the future.  That is plenty of funding right there.

A mere month ago, I witnessed the game of young people sitting around, speculating how many future billionaires will be attracted to EA.  Probably that number has fallen, for reasons related to the current bad publicity, but I don’t see why it has to have fallen to zero.  The next set of billionaires might simply choose a different set of labels.

I do anticipate a boring short-run trend, where most of the EA people scurry to signal their personal association with virtue ethics.  Fine, I understand the reasons for doing that, but at the same time grandma, in her attachment to common sense morality, is not telling you to fly to Africa to save the starving children (though you should finish everything on your plate).  Nor would she sign off on Singer (1972).  While I disagree with the sharper forms of EA, I also find them more useful and interesting than the namby-pamby versions.

Tyrone knocks at the door: “Tyler, you are failing to state the truth about SBF!  He did maximize social welfare!  And sacrificed himself to that end.  What indeed is Christ without Judas?  Judas sacrificed his reputation.  So did SBF.  Now the jump-started EA ideas will live on for eternity.  And those who hold crypto through Caribbean exchanges are about the most deserving losers you can think of.  Those assets did not represent social value anyway.  And isn’t discouraging crypto investment exactly what we should be doing?  (SBF is good for the environment!)  And you need a celebrity example of wrongdoing for that lesson to stick, not just a few random price drops for bitcoin.  He is surely a true angel…”  At which point I had to ask Tyrone to leave the penthouse and shut his dirty mouth…he is not a valid boy!

Dan Klein responds to Bryan Caplan on immigration

Here is one bit from the longer piece, graciously reproduced by Bryan on his Substack:

Big changes have large and unknowable consequences, including critical consequences about basic political stability, functionality, and integrity. Liberal civilization is not entirely natural to man. Alexis de Tocqueville worried that despotism is.

And:

Would Bryan call for Sweden to open its country of 10 million people to the world’s 8 billion people? (Listen to the UnHerd conversation with Swede Ivar Arpi here.)

Would he call for New Zealand to do so?

If the ranking shown above would not go for Sweden or New Zealand but would go for the United States, why the difference? What is there in the Swedish case that changes the ranking?

On the same premise: You’d think that open border advocates would confront that matter directly, telling us which countries should have open borders and which shouldn’t. Maybe they do this. A discussion of where open borders is/is not recommended would, I should think, also elaborate the basis for the separating nations into those two bins.

I would stress that I favor a 3x increase in immigrant flow for the United States, but not Sweden.  I do not favor Open Borders for any country that large numbers of people might want to move to.  I also observe that the nations that have done the most to take in more immigrants — Canada and Australia — maintain a pretty “hard ass” control over their borders.  There is a lesson here.  When a citizenry feels “in control,” they are more likely to be generous to arriving outsiders.  Some of us call that “the control premium,” following I think Cass Sunstein.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Stanford professors protest [sic] free speech conference.

2. In defense of missile defense.

3. How Bryan and I met (includes a correction of my previous account).

4.”What English habits do you still have? How do you incorporate them into your New Jersey lifestyle?” (NYT)  Perhaps a good question for job candidates!

5. Given that AI can craft essays, how will writing instruction have to change?

6. “San Francisco must give back a $15 million grant it received from the federal government to improve Market Street because it can’t start construction by the required deadline — which is three years away.”  Link here.

7. (Temporary) gas oversupply in Europe.

Overrated or underrated?

Ramagopal asks: Peter Bauer, Mises, Joan Robinson

1. Peter Bauer is underrated.  He was a brilliant development economist who wrote seminal early and detailed books on the rubber sector and also networks of West African trade.  He also recognized the importance of the informal sector early on.  He then moved into a more polemic mode, writing books on market-oriented development strategies and very critical of foreign aid.  I believe at the time he was largely correct about foreign aid, though I would recognize also that since then the quality and effectiveness of foreign aid has improved considerably, most of all because the receiving governments have on average improved in quality.

His family had a coat of arms, linked above at his name.

I once met Bauer at a seminar at NYU, way back when.  He reminded me of a character from LOTR and he had a thick mane of white hair.  I believe Bauer was also one of the first well-known economists to come out as gay.

2. Mises is underrated.  His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever.  His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever.  Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.

Liberalism I quite like.  His book Bureaucracy is underdeveloped but still pretty interesting, and his hypotheses about the logic of cascading interventionism, if not entirely correct, still are an important contribution to public choice.  They do explain a lot of the data.  Human Action is big, cranky, and dogmatic, but for some people a useful tonic and alternative to the usual stuff.  I can’t say I have ever really liked it, and in an odd way the whole emphasis on “Man acts” undoes at least one part of marginalism.  The early Theory of Money and Credit was a pretty good early 20th century book on monetary theory.

Hayek somehow ended up as “the reasonable face of classical liberalism,” but in fact Mises was far more politically correct by current standards.

Obviously there is a sliver of people who very much overrate Mises.  Here is a guy who hardly anyone rates properly.  I’m still sticking with considerably underrated.

3. Joan Robinson’s Theory of Imperfect Competition was a very important book, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of later thinking about market structure, both geometrically and conceptually.  But she didn’t understand actual economics, was a Maoist, and seemed to like the regime of North Korea.  So I have to say overrated.  Her  Accumulation of Capital also was no great shakes, though hardly her greatest sin.  Her growth theory was far too Marxian, and far too fond of “Golden Rule” constructs, which are mechanistic rather than insightful as models ought to be.  Her writings in Economic Philosophy were not profound.  So she has one truly major contribution, but I can’t get past the really bad stuff.

My podcast with Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh writes me:

“Your interview for The Lunar Society is out! Extremely fun & interesting throughout!!! Thank you so much for your time!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple PodcastsSpotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript at the episode website.
 
Here are some…quotes from the interview:

Dwarkesh Patel   Somebody comes in, and they’re very humble.Tyler Cowen   Immediately I’m suspicious. I figure most people who are going to make something of themselves are arrogant. If they’re willing to show it, there’s a certain bravery or openness in that. I don’t rule out the humble person doing great. A lot of people who do great are humble, but I just get a wee bit like, “what’s up with you? You’re not really humble, are you?”Tyler Cowen   But we’ll be permanently set back kind of forever. And in the meantime, we can’t build asteroid protection or whatever else. It’ll just be like medieval living standards: super small population, feudal governance, lots of violence, rape. There’s no reason to think like, oh, read a copy of the Constitution in and 400 years, we’re back on track. That’s crazy wrong…

Dwarkesh Patel   What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening?Tyler Cowen   To anaesthetize people? To feel they’re learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.”

Recommended.

Sadly swept from the headlines

Cost estimate, we hardly knew ye:

Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for federal aid borrowers is expected to cost about $400 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office...

About 95% of borrowers meet the criteria for forgiveness and about 45% of borrowers will have their balances completely wiped out, the CBO said.

Here is the full story.

Newfoundland notes, St. John’s and environs

“Canada’s youngest province and Britain’s oldest colony” is what some of them say.

About 60 percent of St. John’s is Irish in background, and most people in the city above age 45 have a noticeable Irish accent, albeit with some Canadianisms thrown in.  Those accents are close to those of Waterford, Ireland, and many Irish from the southeast of the country came over in the 1790-1820 period.  The younger residents of St. John’s sound like other Canadians.

If you walk into the various pubs and houses of music, of which there are quite a few, you are most likely to hear offshoot forms of acoustic Celtic folk music.

The scenery of St. John’s reminds me of the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand.  On top of that, many of the homes are Victorian, as in the Wellington area.  In St. John’s the row homes are called “jellybeans” because of their bright colors.  They are in a uniform style because of a major fire in the city in 1892.  A jellybean house near center city now runs between 300k-400k Canadian, the result of a big price hike once some offshore oil was discovered.  The city is hilly and the major churches are Anglican, even though the Irish migrants were almost entirely Catholics.

Indians and Filipinos are playing some role in revitalizing the city.  Not long ago about one thousand Ukrainians arrived.

In the Sheraton hotel the old mailbox is still “Royal Mail Newfoundland” and not “Royal Mail Canada.”  Newfoundland of course was a dominion country of its own from 1907-1934, and a legally odd part of Britain 1934-1949, when it joined Canada through a 52% referendum result.  In 1890 a NAFTA-like trade agreement was negotiated with the United States, but Canada worked Great Britain to nix the whole thing.  A later agreement in 1902 was in essence vetoed by New England.  Newfoundland had earlier rejected confederation with Canada in 1860.

Newfoundland ran up major debts in WWI, and tried to relieve them by selling Labrador to Canada.  Canada refused.

Apart from the major museum (“The Rooms”), there are few signs of the indigenous.

Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless message on Signal Hill on December 12, 1901.  In the 1950s, Gander was the world’s busiest international airport, because of all the planes that could not cross the Atlantic directly.

As you might expect to find in a small country, but not in a small province, you regularly meet people who seem too smart or too attractive for their current jobs.  Many head to Calgary, but a lot of them don’t want to leave.

It has the warmest winter of any Canadian province.

Terre is the place to eat.  The scallops are excellent everywhere.  Fish and chips are a specialty too.

I would not say it is radically exciting here, but overall I would be long St. John’s.  If nothing else, it makes for an excellent three-day weekend or nature-oriented week-long trip, and I hardly know any Americans who have tried that.

Hume on the Rise And Progress of the Arts And Sciences

Avarice, or the desire of gain, is an universal passion, which operates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons: But curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure, education, genius, and example, to make it govern any person. You will never want booksellers, while there are buyers of books: But there may frequently be readers where there are no authors.

David Hume explaining why it’s more difficult to explain the progress of the arts and sciences than economic progress, even if the latter may depend on the former. And here is Hume on geography and the growth of the arts and sciences:

But the divisions into small states are favourable to learning, by stopping the progress of authority as well as that of power. Reputation is often as great a fascination upon men as sovereignty, and is equally destructive to the freedom of thought and examination. But where a number of neighbouring states have a great intercourse of arts and commerce, their mutual jealousy keeps them from receiving too lightly the law from each other, in matters of taste and of reasoning, and makes them examine every work of art with the greatest care and accuracy. The contagion of popular opinion spreads not so easily from one place to another. It readily receives a check in some state or other, where it concurs not with the prevailing prejudices. And nothing but nature and reason, or, at least, what bears them a strong resemblance, can force its way through all obstacles, and unite the most rival nations into an esteem and admiration of it.

…In China, there seems to be a pretty considerable stock of politeness and science, which, in the course of so many centuries, might naturally be expected to ripen into some thing more perfect and finished, than what has yet arisen from them. But China is one vast empire, speaking one language, governed by one law, and sympathizing in the same manners. The authority of any teacher, such as Confucius, was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to the other. None had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion. And posterity was not bold enough to dispute what had been universally received by their ancestors. This seems to be one natural reason, why the sciences have made so slow a progress in that mighty empire.

If we consider the face of the globe, Europe, of all the four parts of the world, is the most broken by seas, rivers, and mountains; and Greece of all countries of Europe. Hence these regions were naturally divided into several distinct governments. And hence the sciences arose in Greece; and Europe has been hitherto the most constant habitation of them.

See Tyler’s In Praise of Commericial Culture for more Humean themes.

The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think

Wiping out 10k in student debt is not the most expensive part of the Biden student loan program. Most Federal student loans are now eligible for an income based repayment plan, under these plans students pay a small percentage of their “discretionary” income, say 10%, and then after a fixed number of years the debt is wiped off the student’s books. At first glance these plans don’t seem crazy, but as Matt Bruenig points out they create perverse incentives.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, law graduates that go on to work in the public sector, which is a lot of them as the public sector employs many lawyers, only have to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years in order to have their debt forgiven.

Law schools figured out many years ago that, for a student who is planning to enroll in PSLF upon graduation, prices and debt loads don’t matter. Ten percent of your discretionary income is ten percent of your discretionary income regardless of what the law school charges you and how much debt you nominally have to take on.

Law schools also realized that they could make the deal even sweeter by setting up LRAPs [repayment programs, AT] that give graduates money to cover the the modest repayments required by the PSLF.

The LRAP schemes work as follows:

  • The school increases their tuition.
  • The student takes out federal loans to cover the tuition increase.
  • The school squirrels away the debt-financed tuition increase into an LRAP fund.
  • The school disburses money from the LRAP fund to cover PSLF repayments.

Did you get that? Here’s a stylized example. Suppose a student will make 150k per year for 10 years working in the public sector. If they have 200k in debt they pay 15k every year to the government for 10 years and then 50k is “forgiven.” But now the law school comes to the student and says ‘heh, I have a deal which will make both of us better off. We are going to raise the price of law school to 400k but don’t worry not only won’t that cost you a penny more than the 15k a year you are already obligated to pay it will actually cost you much less because we will pay your payments of 15k per year!’ This indeed is a great deal for the student who pays nothing and it’s a great deal for the law school which gets 200k more revenue immediately in return for 150k of payments paid out over the following 10 years. Win-win! Except for the taxpayer of course.

But wait there’s more. Student loans can be used not only to pay tuition and fees but also to pay “living expenses.” Thus, under these plans, students have an incentive to take out as big a loan as allowed in excess of tuition and fees because no matter how large the loan the student’s costs are zero! Lyman Stone has a good tweet thread giving many examples of how to game the system such as “Every student should borrow their maximum loan eligibility and then find some way to invest it illegally. My strategy would be: rent a wildly oversized apartment and sublet.” And here is a tweet thread from Michael Feinberg showing how even wealthy parents may be able to game the system.

Furthermore, the new Biden plan makes the income driven repayment schemes even more generous!

The IDR changes are four-fold:

  • Increase the amount of income not subject to IDR from 150 percent of the federal poverty line to 225 percent of the federal poverty line.
  • Reduce the interest rate on IDR-enrolled loans to 0 percent.
  • For undergraduate debt, reduce the IDR rate from 10 percent of income beyond the threshold in (1) to 5 percent of income beyond the threshold in (1).
  • For IDR-enrolled debts with original loan balances below $12,000, reduce the repayment period from 20 years to 10 years.

Essentially what this means is that every school will now have the possibility of using a law school like program to shift costs onto taxpayers. Thus Bruenig concludes:

…going forward, these new rules could quite radically alter the incentives of colleges and students when it comes to college prices, institutional financial aid, how much debt to take on, and how to approach repayment.

Indeed, these programs are likely to be very expensive and the resulting increase in the price of tuition will lead to calls either to end the program or for price controls on education.

Who are the richest athletes in the world?

These numbers are surely inexact, but still this piece makes for interesting reading.  Excerpt:

4. Anna Kasprzak

Net Worth: $1 Billion

Anna Kasprzak is a Danish dressage rider who has represented Denmark in the Summer Olympics in 2012 and 2016. Kasprzak is considered to be one of the best dressage riders in the world and she has won multiple medals throughout her career.

As of August 2022, Anna Kasprzak’s net worth is estimated to be $1 billion.

Was not on my Bingo card.  Nor was Vinnie Johnson, who clocks in at $400 million!  The Human Microwave to be sure…

Tuesday assorted links

1. Cultural intelligence” as a factor behind your talent, and talent-spotting?  From 2017.

2. The Physiognomy Theory of Revolutionary History (speculative).

3. Changing Congressional lingo on UFOs.  Don’t worry, though, it is just the stupid bureaucracy.

4. Car seat laws as contraception.

5. Lance Taylor has passed away.

6. “Using US tax return data, we find that support for the incumbent president crowds out charitable donations.

7. Why is it so difficult for Carlsen to achieve a rating of 2900?