Favorites April 7th 2023

David Watson

Apr 8, 2023

This San Francisco office vacancy chart is unreal. https://sfstandard.com/business/downtown-san-francisco-vacancies-hit-record-high-as-city-nears-breaking-point/ — src

If you're wondering why folks are discussing practicality of office-to-housing conversions.

LLMs Are Better Than Human Data Annotators -GPT-3 was helpful but not better than humans (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13487) -GPT-3.5 is about on par w/ humans (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16854 w/ self-explanations) -GPT-4 is better than $25/hr humans (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03279) — src

Still lots of space before the LLMs are at expert level, but on the other hand, at some point it's not ever clear what your source of truth is.

In the early-2000s, a team cracked the Roulette Wheel game. The game is supposed to be completely random but the Wheel develops flaws over time (grooves, knicks) which make it predictable. One Roulette hustler read a wheel so well, he turned ~£1000 into £1,000,000 in one night. — src

I like the line from the article, "To make money in roulette, all you need to do is rule out two numbers". There are apparently devices you can use to where the ball is likely to land once it's moving.

Every time I look at these jobs numbers they just get better. Highest prime-age employment rate in decades. Highest female prime-age employment rate ever. Highest Black prime-age employment rate ever. Highest Asian prime-age employment rate ever. — src

Jobs report looking really good. Apparently higher black employment ratio than white for the first time ever.

Threads

• Apparently Chrome now ships with WebGPU. TL;DR this means it should be possible for StableDiffusion or LLMs to run in browser on the local machine.