Favorites March 23rd 2023

Mountain View, December 2022

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Why is Japan so much poorer than Germany or the USA?

Sorta wild how they can do well with great transit and low crime, but they still end up pretty far behind. It's worse on productivity.

Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17

Something I can't shake is that in one sense, Biden's 2020 victory was genuinely impressive for a challenger. Biden got 51.3% of the vote. That's the highest vote share achieved by a challenger against an incumbent president since...FDR in 1932 (Reagan got 50.8% vs Carter).

I had not realized how well Biden had performed by this measure. Jain goes on further in a thread, the election was considered close because the tipping point state was still quite close. But winning nationally by a lot helps the down-ballot races.

Threads

• Highlights of a recent paper arguing that GPT-4 appears to be a true Artificial General Intelligence. Here's a second, longer, summary of the same work, my favorite highlight is that the version of GPT-4 trained only on text can actually draw correct simple images of things.