Tiago 

Advent of LLMs hasn't raised the number of NBER working papers above trend. (Or submissions to top journals: next tweet). Why? Probably because LLMs substitute for good RAs, but not for good ideas. And RA labor supply hasn't been the binding constraint in economic scholarship.

Will AI become smarter than humans? If so, is humanity in danger? I went to Silicon Valley to ask some of the leading AI experts that question. Here’s what they had to say:

This is a poor person’s idea of luxury

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says most white-collar work "will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” If that’s true, it’s an economic earthquake. We need a moratorium on new AI data centers to make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires.

every four years, the Olympic Committee works tirelessly to prevent the single greatest eugenic procration event in human history. we could be breeding superhumans

Je ne serai plus Conseillère de Paris après les élections de mars. Ce n’est pas mon choix. Mon nom a été rayé des listes par les écologistes et les socialistes.

Okay. Last point on this art/culture question (for now). Very few remarked on this, but a few months ago a coalition of non-profits, including Mellon and McCarthur and Ford etc., launched a $50 million Literary Arts Fund. $50 million. You, reading this, will never see this money. You, reading this, will never participate in this project. It will be spent on regional poetry journals, local workshops, small grants for short story writers, creative writing programs, short term residencies, bulk book purchases, awards, prizes, teaching fellowships, etc. etc. Wonderful, important things. But it is not for you, dear reader. It is for them. $49 million of it will be spent on writing and writers you will never hear of. Work that will never break through to mainstream culture. And yet it is not a waste! It is money incredibly well spent. It is money to build the invisible infrastructure that the visible culture sits on top of and depends on. You do not get a visible culture without all of this stuff underneath it. I cannot stress this enough. And until the right, broadly speaking, wakes up to this asymmetry, all we have are our impotent complaints.

It’s interesting that the word “aura” is piercing the mainstream consciousness just as AI art is taking off. Aura, in the Walter Benjamin sense, is exactly what all of this is lacking, an existence in material space. And in fact, AI art can’t ever, definitionally, have aura, since aura is the very thing that gets lost in digital reproduction. AI art is *only* digital reproduction. It’s not that it’s fake art. It’s that it can only ever be a mechanical rendering of a piece of art. The photograph of a painting rather than the physical, tactile, living thing. Aura is the thing we want. We are aura hungry.

EPSTEIN: “One of the bad things to teach children is how to write…writing forces you into a very narrow channel of thinking.” “Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle…never wrote anything. They spoke, and people around who could write wrote. Socrates could think.” Epstein was asked about Jesus of Nazareth in the same context, someone who spoke while others recorded his words. Epstein responded with this answer before oddly thanking Steve Bannon at the end.

Imagine telling someone “you’re being dramatic— that guy is obviously just joking about following you and home. When you saw him following you It was just a really obvious prank!” False positives are cheap; false negatives could be fatal.

> The Norwegian Crown Princess says she googled Epstein. > At the time, Epstein was described in Norwegian media as a 'convicted pedophile billionaire'. > "Agree didn't look too good : )" > The contact continues for over three years.