BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-23 Tu
The "hoping for acquisition" SV business model; Ian Cuttress on new silicon; immigration back to the American normal; local projections, sunk costs, prompt injection, the destruction of British han...
MUST-READ: Þe Silicon Valley Shuffle Once Again, Þis Time in ChatBots:
The desired game, of course, is (a) build out the framework, and then (b) get acquired by (c) some larger company that thinks it can benefit from being the natural next step for those using langchain who want to do bigger, faster, more comprehensive things in ChatBots. We have seen this many times before, after all. Give it away to a mass audience that does not place a high valuation on the basic software system, and charge—somehow, for something added on—the élite audience that has deep pockets and does see substantial value:
Matthew Lynley: Parrots, Geckos, and Frameworks as a Business: ‘LangChain's company dream is a head scratcher among some people in the investor and open source community…. Everyone I speak with agrees that LangChain is a transformative framework on top of emerging AI models. LangChain is also actually a company with real funding and a very real valuation. And there are a lot of questions around the potential staying power of a company built on top of a framework…
Almost always, of course, it ends in tears and in losses for VCs—and in a lot of work put in that is unremunerated. The question is whether something of durable use is created in the meantime…
ONE VIDEO: Ian Cuttress: New Silicon for Supercomputers: A Guide for Software Engineers
ONE IMAGE: Back to þe Normal Pre-1925 Pattern of Turning Immigrants into Americans:
Very Briefly Noted:
Phillips P. O’Brien: ‘It really is the week that Ukraine won the war—the noteworthy change in Biden Administration Rhetoric…. The administration is significantly firming up its position on Ukraine having the right to take back all of its territory…. Ukraine is being given a public green-light to do what it needs in Crimea…
Yanis Varoufakis: Who’s Afraid of Central Bank Digital Currencies?: ‘why so much venom against CBDCs by those untroubled by the surveillance and control already exercised over us by Wall Street-controlled digital money?… Outrage is serving the interests of bankers panicking at the prospect of [individual] Fed accounts…
Rachel Metz: Google’s Big Generative AI Experiment Is a Test for Humanity: ‘I attended Google’s I/O developer event this week in Mountain View and one thing CEO Sundar Pichai said kind of blew my mind.... This stuff is still an experiment…. That makes users the subjects…. love the prospect of trying new technologies—but it’s also a little unsettling…
Xinyang Geng & al.: Koala: A Dialogue Model for Academic Research: ‘We introduce Koala, a chatbot trained by fine-tuning Meta’s LLaMA on dialogue data gathered from the web…
Tim Burke: The News: Precedent Unpresident: ‘The kind of proceeding that… descended… on George Santos has so far kept out of Trump’s path…. Any liberal democracy that soft-steps around an undisguised, sustained, serious attack on its central premises is playing a dangerous game…. The hope is plainly that somehow the threat will simply fade away…. That has not happened very often…
Jesus Rodriguez: Inside Koala, Berkeley University’s LLaMA-Based Model Fine-Tuned with ChatGPT Dialogues: ‘The model provides a lighter, open-source alternative to ChatGPT and includes EasyLM, a framework for training and fine-tuning LLMs… trained on a single Nvidia DGX server equipped with 8 A100 GPUs… [taking] 6 hours to complete for 2 epochs. This type of training run typically costs less than $100…
Janan Ganesh: Don’t blame the elites alone for populism: ‘Refusal to see fault in the public is… infantilising…. A more honest account…. A large minority of the public need no manipulation to vote for populism…. Yes… mismanagement…. It cannot explain why someone might giggle as an accuser of sexual assault is called a “whack job” by a former president. No, that is a straightforward case of civic irresponsibility. Or nihilism…
Scott Stein: I Tried an AR Laptop. It's Way Ahead of Its Time: ‘The Spacetop is like a Chromebook for AR headsets. With Apple's hardware looming, it also feels like a reminder of how computers could change…
Kathleen Stock: Can the NatCon Revolution Escape the Past?: ‘As I watched the conference unfold, I started to think that having a name that starts with “National” and ends with “ism” might be the least of National Conservatism’s image problems…
Monticello: ‘In the summer of 1806, [Joe] Fossett surprised Jefferson by running away from Monticello…. Jefferson was stunned by such insubordination…. Fossett was not "running away" but was going to see his wife…. Following Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826, Fossett became a free man, one of five persons freed from slavery by the terms of Jefferson's will. In contrast, his wife Edith and their children were among the "130 valuable negroes" offered at the executors' sale in January 1827…
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Òscar Jordà: Estimation and Inference of Impulse Responses by Local Projections: ‘This paper introduces methods to compute impulse responses without specification and estimation of the underlying multivariate dynamic system. The central idea consists in estimating local projections at each period of interest rather than extrapolating into increasingly distant horizons from a given model, as it is done with vector autoregressions (VAR). The advantages of local projections are numerous: (1) they can be estimated by simple regression techniques with standard regression packages; (2) they are more robust to misspecification; (3) joint or point-wise analytic inference is simple; and (4) they easily accommodate experimentation with highly nonlinear and flexible specifications that may be impractical in a multivariate context. Therefore, these methods are a natural alternative to estimating impulse responses from VARs. Monte Carlo evidence and an application to a simple, closed-economy, new-Keynesian model clarify these numerous advantages…
Dan Davies: ‘Is there any single proposition which absolutely all economists would agree to?… I think there is one…. “Bygones are bygones”…. Economic decision making… has to flow from the current state of resources…. “This historic crime means that these resources should be redistributed today”… [is] not part of economics. It can be contrasted to something like “the current consequences of this historic crime are that today there is an unjust distribution of resources, which needs to be addressed”…. It's… limited… but the limitations are not all bad…. [So] I still consider myself to basically be an economist…
Simon Willison: Delimiters Won’t Save You from Prompt Injection: ‘The fundamental issue here is that the input to a large language model ends up being a sequence of tokens—literally a list of integers…. When you ask the model to respond to a prompt, it’s really generating a sequence of tokens that work well statistically as a continuation of that prompt. Any difference between instructions and user input, or text wrapped in delimiters v.s. other text, is flattened down to that sequence of integers. An attacker has an effectively unlimited set of options for confounding the model with a sequence of tokens that subverts the original prompt. My above example is just one of an effectively infinite set of possible attacks…
B. Schneider: Technological unemployment in the British industrial revolution: the destruction of hand spinning: ‘This paper analyzes the elimination of hand spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it was one of the earliest examples of large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. These estimates reinforce and expand upon the findings of Muldrew (2012): spinning employed up to 20% of women and children by c. 1770. Next, the paper systematically analyzes the course, extent, and locations of technological unemployment produced by mechanization using more than 200 detailed qualitative sources. It first presents an estimate of job loss in hand spinning of cotton by the late 1780s. It then uses evidence from more than 2200 observations by contemporary social commentators, county agricultural surveys, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission’s Rural and Town Queries to show the breadth and duration of unemployment produced by mechanization. The destruction of hand spinning began to impact women and households in the 1780s, and the effects persisted until at least the mid-1830s. Finally, it shows that this technological shock likely had an unequal effect on family incomes that resulted from variation in household composition and local labor market conditions. The findings demonstrate that unemployment must be incorporated into analysis of the impacts of industrialization on living standards and highlight the potential long-run costs of job replacing technology…
Many thanks for the Jorda paper!
Janan Ganesh "Don't blame the elites...:" His point is well taken. But then, he also says, "A more honest account of events would go like this. A large minority of the public need no manipulation to vote for populism." Well, 46.8% (or about 74 million) of the total vote in a high turnout general election is more than a "large minority," isn't it?