David Wright

@collision @tylercowen I think data transfer is a big problem with this vision. My experience has been incredible difficulty getting all the data from counterparties. It's not even that they don't want to.. It's just super hard to mobilize all those pdfs for all the reasons. Integrated players win here

We've been thinking a lot at Stripe about the Coasean lens on AI: - The obvious near-term effect is reduced transaction costs within companies: shared context, systems of record, aligned incentives etc. - But inter-company transaction costs also reduce sharply: agents are great at discovery, make it trivially easy to integrate; make contracting much more straightforward; agent-to-agent commerce. - On net, we think second effect bigger in medium term: fewer people per firm, more output per firm, just more firms, and more coordination happening through market-like mechanisms

@michael_nielsen (truth obviously totally not influenced by culture)

@michael_nielsen To me, culture messes up the latter two. With humans power became about coordinated action which is dominated by questions of goodness and legitimacy and values.

I'd happily read a book entitled "Moral Philosophy for Chimpanzees" "Good" is such a strange and interesting idea. A decade ago I sketched some notes for an essay on "The Good, the True, and the Powerful". One odd thing I noticed was the different origin times: (very roughly) there has always been truth; power emerged with life; good emerges with humanity The laws of physics simply are; a rock simply *is*; one lifeform may be more powerful than another; only humans sin (Yes, there are many caveats to all this. Try to riff interestingly if you reply, not make obvious statements about how a rock may be considered powerful, other mammals may have primitive notions of goodness etc)

@__TheBaron__ @alz_zyd_ Ha, insurance ftw

@alz_zyd_ This is often extremly successful, but This also often fails when the actual world is actually Byzantine or highly nonlinear, but covered by a thin veneer of simplicity.

The software-engineer-on-twitter thing where they just ignore prior literature/experts and just try to first-principles figure out all of human knowledge is quintessentially American The reason America is great is because whenever one of these folks finds a convoluted mess of a body of knowledge defended by pompous credentialed experts, they just think, fuck it, it'll be faster if I just figure it out from scratch

@mbrendan1 This is a super strong statement. What do you mean? The combination would seem to be somewhat self correcting?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by expected utility maximization and Bayesian probability

@mbrendan1 With respect I think it's the wrong analytical frame. Technology supports both.. Cultures evolve based on status not tech. My read of WEIRD history is that status has been awarded to dissociative applications because they increase scope of specialization so economic growth.

Does AI promote association or atomization? Tocqueville thought association, in which individuals voluntarily come together to achieve various goals, was the “mother science” of democracy He thought atomization, in which individuals withdraw into themselves, was a major threat

@mbrendan1 @KTmBoyle Try @edelwax for inspiration in this direction. Designing systems that do these things means measuring them first! Perhaps a better system is possible.

@KTmBoyle People seeking the good life? Not legible as a “system” per se, and probably much more likely to eschew the categorizations

The world makes a lot more sense when you realize some people are optimizing for money and other people are optimizing for power. The number of sophisticated people who don’t seem to ask this question up front when picking a job, a mentor, an industry or even a customer is baffling to me.

@pentagoniac @martin_casado could seem that adding more parameters might make this 'worse', as in increase the dimensionality of the hyperspace so increasing the number of 'subspaces' and making ICL (agreed "learning" is not the right term) even more important?

@martin_casado The prompt/context places the model’s activations in a particular point in hyperspace—one that is near the many patterns/concepts evoked by said prompt. This biases subsequent generation to the subspace of these patterns/concepts.

Does anyone have a good intuitive explanation of why in context learning works? Unlike content creation and conversation, it’s not obvious to me why this ability would fall out of next token prediction.

@pentagoniac @martin_casado I've seen this. It got massively stuck misunderstanding an insurance accounting answer in an actuarial exam. Even when I said x is wrong it disagreed with me! I included a two sentence accounting tutorial instead and it nailed it. Always thought of it as "relocating" focus.

RIP Mahbod, founder of RapGenius. You were a legend in your own time.

@paulg Heh. Learning is pain. Suffering. Forcing yourself to voluntarily learn a whole new way of doing something is.. like, every fiber of my being tells me to stop playing with these stupid prompts.

AI will magnify the already great difference in knowledge between the people who are eager to learn and those who aren't.

“What are human values, and how do we align to them?” Very excited to release our new paper on values alignment, co-authored with @ryan_t_lowe and funded by @openai. 📝: meaningalignment.org/values-and-ali…

@AgnesCallard Haha, I had an exchange with Cathy O'Neil on my podcast where we talked about the irony that the inner journey of a "smart person" is to constantly feel stupid. At least that's how I remember it. Agnes I think we touched on it too. Otherwise ur doing it rong!

I believe in (full-blown, unmitigated) Socratic intellectualism--but when I tell people that, they misunderstand what I am saying, so I made this meme to clarify.

@robinhanson Once in a while GPT falls down a well of complexity and it takes a human to sort through what in the heck is going on. If you don't know the underlying ideas you're bricked. GPT just can't climb out. Average devs are just as euchred.

"GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it’ll proliferate" newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…

@cremieuxrecueil "Live by the sword die by the sword!" say the medieval monks who copied bibles by hand with a bitter laugh.

Employment in publishing was stable from the late-1980s all the way to 2000, and since then two-thirds has disappeared.

@karpathy @eladgil @patrickc Economic reward mechanisms are way better than fame mechanisms for the 300 under 30. Winner take all (Einstein) satisfies the audience more than the full body of candidates. For every Einstein there are dozens of nearly Einsteins that get near zero adulation. I say rah capitalism

In AI at least, the real 30 under 30 imo you have never heard of. They are 5 layers down the org chart from the CEO. They are usually not on Twitter, they have an unmaintained LinkedIn, they don’t go on podcasts, and they maybe published at one point but don’t do so anymore. They are today’s Einsteins and directly invent and build miracles. I wish they weren’t hidden inside big tech and startups in return for very large paychecks but here we are.

Who would be on a real 30 under 30 today? Interesting to wonder by sector - which sectors today have the most young people with lots of responsibility or impact? Who are they? Maybe in retail it is Mr Beast and Kylie Jenner? CC @patrickc

@pmarca Hm.. Money today or maybe not malaria tomorrow? Tomorrow self be damned. (later.. Regulation and bureaucracy to the rescue! !)

"We conclude that the use of mosquito nets for fishing may contribute to food insecurity, greater poverty and the loss of ecosystem functioning." link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@ID_AA_Carmack And collaboration and leadership. The returns to these go up with every advance

I’m not sure about this. The belief that creativity is uncorrelated with drive and discipline is comforting to many, but I usually see the opposite. I expect there will be much more improvement in accelerating those that are already hustling, versus jump starting the idle.

@owenbroadcast Giant country combining scale and outsider cultural roots. Exciting that it exists.. depressing to wonder if it can be replicated.

it kind of seems like america isnt a protestant country. america is a radical reformation country.

a low IQ (me) thread on an extremely complex topic: our error in making one folder called "protestantism" + what this reveals about america some people already know about this. personally i had to read literally thousands of pages to understand it. and now, ill just tell you:

@TenenbaumSteven @josephwang Doesn't mean a bank run, though. Insolvency is a notional thing until they need to come up with the cash.

@davecwright @josephwang Every local bank heavily invested in fixed rate mortgages becomes "insolvent" when interest rates rise.

SVB was just a badly run bank that went bust. Happens all the time. What's special about SVB is that many influential people banked with them, and are now lobbying for special treatment. Let's hope our system is fair.