Favorites March 15th 2023

AI Grades, Aerial packages and Urban Economics

April 2019, Mountain View

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

"Saying that borrowing short to lend long is 'one of the most elementary errors in banking' is like saying that jumping out of a plane is 'one of the most elementary errors in skydiving'."

noahpinion.substack.comSVB and the FedCharting a course between inflation and bank failures.

Noah Smith's summary of the SVB situation was great, and I particularly liked the above line from the article.

James Pethokoukis @JimPethokoukis

GOLDMAN SACHS on the generative AI/LLM gap between the US and China, according to a leading Chinese researcher:

With the massive potential impact of these new AI systems, I'm not sure how much of a difference a 2 year delay is. Yglesias' joke about this news: "Good news, the computer that wipes out humanity will very likely be made in the USA. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸"

M. Nolan Gray @mnolangray

A new study of San Diego estimates that land-use regulations raise city-level rents by an average 28% and explain 7% of the residents living in fire-prone areas—with the number of exposed residents set to grow 12% over 40 years. aospital.com/publication/wi…

I would actually expect an even higher number than 28%, but maybe they're only including city-level land use choices, not like... repealing prop 13.

Matthew Barnett @MatthewJBar

I graded GPT-4's responses on @bryan_caplan's economics midterm—the same one that ChatGPT got a D on—and it got an A. I don't think GPT-4 is at human-level yet across a wide range of tasks, but I'm feeling good about my bet right now.

matthewbarnett.substack.comGPT-4 takes Bryan Caplan’s midterm and gets an AOn January 9th, a little over two months ago, Bryan Caplan wrote, Many, perhaps most, of my friends are giddy about ChatGPT. My Inbox is full of emails from Tyler Cowen touting its glories. More concretely, Alex Tabarrok recently assured me that existing AIs could already beat the performance of mos…

He Bet Bryan Caplan $500 that an AI could consistently pass Caplan's tests by 2029

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Long overdue decision by the Biden admin. We would never have allowed the Soviet Union to control programming on CBS, NBC, or ABC during the Cold War. Same applies to TikTok and the CCP.

Oh dang, they're really going for it. As always, remember the real threat is not the spying on American's data, it's the opaque algorithm.

Mr. Bedtime @InternetHippo

Thanks to a 3D reconstruction of his vocal chords, for the first time we can hear Julius Caesar's last words as they sounded during his assassination by the Senate

Threads

• Now that GPT-4 is available, someone is running an experiment of letting it "run" a business to try and make money, starting with $100.

• Thread from Zipline about their newest generation of package delivery drones, which lower a mini-drone on a cable to do the actual delivery. It's a really cool design in my opinion.