AI diagnosticians, arms race, malaise, Megalopolis
What kind of (math) problem am I trying to solve?
Newsom vetoes SB 1047 (a). Zvi gives a close reading of the Governor's announcement; Dean Ball on what comes after SB 1047.
"Doctors were given cases to diagnose, with half getting GPT-4 access to help. The control group got 73% score in diagnostic accuracy (a measure of diagnostic reasoning) & the GPT-4 group 77%. No big difference. But GPT-4 alone got 88%."
Buck Shlegeris lets an AI agent roam free on his machine: "Unfortunately, the computer no longer boots."
Somehow I learned about this for the first time just last week: "Aladdin is an electronic [risk management] system built by BlackRock... As of 2020, Aladdin managed $21.6 trillion in assets." It has been operational since 1988, and inflected strongly after the Great Financial Crisis.
OpenAI raises $6.6B and is now valued at $157B. No word on whether Sam got his 7% (for those keeping score at home, 7% of $157B is $11B).
CRV is returning $275M to LPs (a) rather than investing it.
Prescient Forster: The Machine Stops (1909)
"Anna's Archive... describes itself as aiming to 'catalog all the books in existence.'"
"The suicide rate for men ages 25 to 34 is up 30% between 2010 and 2023 (a)... the biggest increase among any age cohort."
13% of people age 18 to 25 report using cannabis near-daily (a).
"It is certainly true that, whatever (you imagine) your utility function is at the start, that utility function will claim that your life is worse after you start meditating." (Much more at the link!)
Tyler Cowen reviews Megalopolis.
Matthew Yglesias reviews Megalopolis:
The actual film has a lot of problems – its grasp repeatedly exceeds its reach. But it’s in the text of the film that this is good and necessary, that we need to try more things and be less paralyzed by fear of failure. That as a society we cannot collapse into a choice between stasis and mindless populism. That we ought to try audacious, difficult, bizarre things.
(I recommend Megalopolis!)
Meta announces Sora competitor: Movie Gen
A certain kind of tenacity undergirded the Congress of Vienna:
Remarkably, negotiations continued unaffected despite the outbreak of fighting triggered by Napoleon's return from exile and resumption of power in France during the Hundred Days of March to July 1815.
The Congress's agreement was signed nine days before Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.
Safety teams pleaded with Murati for more time, the source said. In the past Murati had sometimes intervened, over the objections of OpenAI’s commercial teams, to delay model debuts when safety teams said they needed more time for testing. But in this case, Murati said the timing could not be changed.
That deadline was largely dictated by another company: Google. OpenAI, the sources said, knew Google was planning to introduce a host of new AI features, and tease a powerful new AI model with similar capabilities to GPT-4o, at its Google I/O developer conference on May 14. OpenAI desperately wanted to steal attention away from those announcements and derail any narrative that Google was pulling ahead in the race to develop ever more capable AI models. So it scheduled its live debut of GPT-4o for May 13.
The Network School (backed by Balaji) is running September 23 to December 23, "near Singapore." If I were in a more wandering chapter of life, I would go check it out.
Foresight's Vision Weekend is in the Bay, December 6 to 8. I will be there.
Vox on neuromodulation for meditation.
However, TOCP is a slow-acting neurotoxin. Weeks after consumption, victims typically noticed numbness in the legs, followed by weakness, foot drop, and eventual paralysis. Later, a similar progression often afflicted the arms. Recovery was slow, and many patients were left with permanent neurological damage.
Over 1930 and 1931, this disease affected tens of thousands of Americans with estimates as high as 100,000. So many people were affected that the afflicted founded the "United Victims of Ginger Paralysis Association," which claimed 35,000 members.