BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-25 Tu
Limited vision of text-continuation GPT models; crypto in decay; Réne Walter: On Stochastic Libraries; Samantha Hancox-Li: The Illiberal’s Dilemma; John Gruber: If You Come at the King; Ron Amadeo...
MUST-READ: A Text-Continuation Model Has Limited Vision Department:
GPT-AI is not AGI! It is but the most promising branch of the current mode of “AI”. And the current mode of “AI” is three things:
Very large scale classification and regression…
Much better chatbot interfaces to databases…
A new frontier and separating gullible venture capitalists from their money…
Timothy B Lee: Why I'm not worried about AI causing mass unemployment: ‘Software didn't eat the world and AI won't either….. Andreessen’s essay reflected a persistent blind spot in Silicon Valley thinking: a tendency to overestimate the power of information technology and underestimate the complexity of the physical world. In 2011, this led to excessive optimism about the economic impact of software startups. Today I suspect this same bias is distorting many people’s thinking about the likely impact of artificial intelligence…
Now do not get me wrong: Very large scale classification and regression and much better chatbot interfaces to databases are wonderful things. On the General Purpose Technologies for white-collar work front, they rank alongside mainframes, PCs, and the Internet in their potential reach. There is every hope that they will be a positive contribution to humanity, as opposed to the dumpster fire that was social media Web2 and the cynical grift that has been crypto-blockchain Web3. Plus: separating gullible venture capitalists from their money and spending a good deal of that money on blue-sky R&D is almost always a net social-welfare plus in and of itself.
But the path of internet simulation we have gone down—“if this prompt here were an image caption on the internet, what would the image look like?” and “if this prompt here were a text chunk on the internet, what would the continuation of the document look like?” is not going to give us Skynet or Universal-AC.
ONE AUDIO: Crypto in Decay:
Trashfuture: Some Day a Real Use Case Will Come feat. Molly White
<https://overcast.fm/+LX9kh7qWg>
This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice speak with friend of the show Molly White (@molly0xFFF) about a recent presentation from Andreesen Horowitz in which they predict… a much rosier 2023 for crypto, Web 3.0, and the various other VC money-sumps that will magically resolve their structural problems any day now. Check out Molly’s newsletter here!:
I want to be a Web3 optimist. I want to believe!
I think it would be very nice to have a trusted, decentralized database of things that I could access that was not some of some wannabe monopolist’s walled garden.
Mind you, all of that has absolutely zero to do with the value of any currently traded crypto assets of any sort…
ONE IMAGE: Crypto Valuations Have Developed Not Necessarily to Andreesen-Horwitz’s Clients’ Advantage:
Andreesen-Horwitz State of Crypto 2023: <https://api.a16zcrypto.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/State-of-Crypto.pdf>
Very Briefly Noted:
Willem Buiter: The Overwhelming Case for CBDCs…
Financial Times: Janet Yellen’s welcome overture to China: ‘Beijing should respond to the olive branch from the US Treasury secretary…. The Treasury secretary underlined that the US was not trying to undermine China’s competitiveness, nor to constrain its development. “Economics are not a zero-sum game,” she said…
Tim Duy: Bottom Line: ‘The Fed isn’t ready to declare this next hike is the last. As usual, the Fed remains more hawkish than market participants expect at inflection points in the cycle…
Anton Cebalo: When America Received a Message from the Future: ‘The 1939 New York World's Fair promised a dream future unlike any other, but the consequences of its vision were buried beneath the spectacle…. Two fundamental visions that fit together… Bernays’s view of consumer democracy and Geddes’s dream of magic motorways…
Daniel W. Drezner: Chinese Diplomacy Steps In It Yet Again: ‘If you think wolf warrior diplomacy was bad, wait until you hear the latest!…
Timothy L.O’Brien: Crash Course: Supreme Court Justices Aren’t Immune to Greed: ‘Consider this: The Supreme Court justices get lucrative book deals ($2 million for Amy Coney Barrett and $3 million for Sonia Sotomayor), luxe travel junkets and the freedom to invest in almost anything they want — all with limited and forgiving disclosures…
Oliver Willis: Biden Aligns Democrats With "Freedom" As GOP Goes Into Fascism Overdrive: ‘It's Long Past Time To Reclaim What The Right Stole. The first word in President Joe Biden’s reelection announcement video is “freedom.” Biden’s statement, “Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” plays against a backdrop of flag waving and demonstrators supporting voting rights, abortion rights, and transgender rights…
Harold James: Says More: ‘We need more microeconomic analysis… to tackle the social problems… driving… domestic political tensions and… geopolitical fractures…
Sebastian Raschka: Understanding Large Language Models: ‘A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed…
Mark Gurman: Apple Will Take Scattershot Approach to Pitching AR/VR Headset: ‘Apple… watch…. Apple had little idea which options would resonate. In the end, it focused on health tracking, notifications and complication-rich watch faces—but only after customers zeroed in on those features as their favorites…. Nine years later, we’re about to see something similar play out with the Apple headset…
¶s:
Réne Walter: On Stochastic Libraries: ‘Alison Gopnik… on LLMs as cultural technologies…. “Recent work on large language models has focused on whether or not they are analogous to individual intelligent agents. I argue that instead we should think of them as cultural transmission technologies, by which accumulated information from other humans is passed on in a compact form. This makes them aanogous to other human technologies such as writing, print, libraries and internet search, and arguably language itself rather than as intelligent systems…
Samantha Hancox-Li: The Illiberal’s Dilemma: ‘Illiberal Regimes Hate Modernity But Can’t Live Without It…. Everybody wants what modern prosperity offers—power, comfort, security, wealth. On the other hand, illiberals reject what makes modern prosperity possible—freedom, diversity, the continual churn of change…. The continual churn of new productive technologies is inimical to the maintenance of stable status hierarchies…. This dynamic recurs over and over. Coal baron from West Virginia? Sad news, new solar plants are cheaper than existing coal plants, and all those billions in assets you had buried beneath the ground are rapidly ticking down to zero. Don't like Jim Crow? Move north and get a factory job. Your father wants you to be a boy? Move to the city and work as a coder…. Petro-dictators respond to the illiberal's dilemma by displacing modernity in space. "Modernity abroad, repression at home," with the gap bridged by the extraordinary wealth that oil brings…. Herrenvolk democracies… propose to offer the benefits of modern liberal democracies (democracy, rights, economic growth) to certain citizens, while simultaneously stripping it from other members…. This nominally provides the benefits of both modernity and hierarchy to those fortunate enough to be members of the true Volk. As it happens, this does not work particularly well in practice…. Authoritarian capitalists respond… [with] "Modernity for the economy, hierarchy for politics." The model here is, famously, China…
Ron Amadeo: After demolishing swaths of San Jose, Google puts campus project on hold: ‘Google's cost-cutting comes for its 80-acre "mega campus" in downtown San Jose. For a while, Google has planned to build a new 80-acre mega campus that would take over a large chunk of downtown San Jose, California. If you expressed doubt that the modern-day shutdown-happy Google could commit to the "10-to-30-year" timeline for the construction project, congratulations! CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google has put the idea "on pause" after just two years of construction…
John Gruber: If You Come at the King: ‘Raymond Wong, reporting for Inverse, “Watch Humane’s Wearable AI Projector in Action”…. “Finally, you can replace this thing that you despise” is a powerful marketing message. “Finally, you can replace this thing that you love” is not…. Anything that attempts to establish a post-phone beachhead has to do the things we love to do with our phones, or entertain us in new ways that make us forget about them. I don’t see how a laser projector on a chest badge does that…
"8. Harold James: Says More: " The 1840s were terrible in so many ways. Bad harvests. Hungry Forties. Going by median/mean stature at adulthood, some of the shorter cohorts -- if not the shortest -- of the 19the century were born and raised in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. The kids were not alright. Oliver Twists were real (including what's in the book). This probably had long-reaching repercussions.
Janet Yellen via FT "“Economics are not a zero-sum game,” she said…"
I hope at least US politicians are listening.
Harold James: In a more sensible world we would be getting more theory driven data analysis from political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists but in the meantime, economists will have to continue the Imperial Project. :)
Hancox Li: Nicely said, but it leaves out the hard part: the appeal of illiberalism within Liberal Democracies. Is Liberalism but the dying embers of the fire of Faith?