~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (39)

Here is a new paper by Sara Abrahamsson.  Perhaps there is Norwegian exceptionalism at work, but the results reflect my expectations reasonably closely.  The basic setting is that smart phones were banned in middle school, but at varying (and exogenous) rates around the country.  Here are some of the core findings, noting that reading the […] The post The Norwegian ban on smart phones...

By Rohit Krishnan, he and I are both interested in the question of what LLMs cannot do, and why.  Here is one excerpt: It might be best to say that LLMs demonstrate incredible intuition but limited intelligence. It can answer almost any question that can be answered in one intuitive pass. And given sufficient training data […] The post What can LLMs never do? appeared...

That is the new Daron Acemoglu paper, and he is skeptical about its overall economic effects.  Here is part of the abstract: Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear nontrivial but modest—no more than a 0.71% increase in total factor productivity over 10 years. […] The post “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” appeared...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, along with almost thirty minutes of audience questions, filmed in Miami.  Here is the episode summary: Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should […] The post My excellent Conversation with Peter Thiel...

“Name three famous people who all share the exact same birth date and year.” Usually it fails, the most common failure being it names someone with the correct date but the incorrect year.  Telling it to “reason step by step” is no panacea either.  And if you want to make it harder, ask for more […] The post GPT-4-Turbo still doesn’t answer this question...

One MR reader, Luca Piron, writes to me:  I found myself puzzled by a thought you expressed during your interview with Professor Haidt. In particular, from my understanding you suggested that in the near future AI will be able to sum up the content a user may want to see into a digest, so that they can […] The post A simple model of AI and...

From Anton Korinek here is a recent paper: Generative AI, in particular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize research. I describe dozens of use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation and feedback, writing, background research, data […] The post Generative AI for economists appeared first...

The LLMs basically win: This paper presents a novel study on harnessing Large Language Models’ (LLMs) outstanding knowledge and reasoning abilities for explainable financial time series forecasting. The application of machine learning models to financial time series comes with several challenges, including the difficulty in cross-sequence reasoning and inference, the hurdle of incorporating multi-modal signals […] The post LLMs vs. ARMA-GARCH appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt: First, as a matter of practice, if there is a true AI boom, or the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the demand for capital expenditures (capex) will be extremely high. Second, as a matter of theory, the productivity of capital is […] The post Will strong AI raise or lower...

Try it here, click on the right on the mention of making full, two-minute songs and use the Explore tab.  To me it is remarkable the resulting AI-generated music is as good as it is.  But it still isn’t anything I would listen to, other than out of curiosity.  It is best at edm, standardized […] The post My review of Suno, AI-generated music...

On the road, I haven’t had a chance to read this paper yet, but I pass it along as a matter of interest: Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) […] The post Is an Economic Growth Explosion Imminent?...

We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access […] The post Lawyering in the Age of Artificial...

Knowing that the proper use of AI will help the Church accomplish God’s work of salvation and exaltation, the Church has issued the following guiding principles for using AI. These were introduced to employees of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints worldwide on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, by Elder Gerrit W. Gong of […] The post LDS principles for AI appeared first...

By Anton Korinek and Donghyun Suh, in a new NBER working paper: We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be […] The post Scenarios for the Transition to AGI...

I think they still favor the defensive. On the front line they make movement, hence offense, very difficult. In the strategic sense we’ve already seen Ukraine adjust to the propeller drone/cruise missile attacks. The first few months were terrible for them but then they organized a defense system with the mobile anti drone teams. The […] The post Austin Vernon on drones and defense...

a16z has issued the talks from that event, and we are issuing it too, as a bonus episode of CWT.  But note it is shorter than usual, and not the typical CWT format — this was done for an audience of actual DC human beings! Excerpt: COWEN: Why is open-source AI in particular important for national […] The post Marc Andreessen and I talk AI...

I’ve blogged this in the past, and don’t have much to add to my previous views.  I will say this, however: if TikTok truly is breaking laws on a major scale, let us start a legal case with fact-finding and an adversarial process.  Surely such a path would uncover the wrongdoing under consideration, or at […] The post TikTok divestiture appeared first on Marginal...

As many MR readers will know, I don’t think the concept of AGI is especially well-defined.  Can the thing dribble a basketball “with smarts”?  Probably not.  Then its intelligence isn’t general.  You might think that kind of intelligence “doesn’t matter,” and maybe I agree, but that is begging the question.  It is easier and cleaner […] The post Claude 3 Opus and AGI appeared...

This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is […] The post GPT as ethical advisor appeared first...

In a way, everyone’s been wondering, trying to analogize ChatGPT with the printing press, but in reality it’s almost the opposite. The entire thing is happening in the inverse of that, where the printing press was a technology to disseminate information through a book basically and convince people to do things, and the kind of […] The post Daniel Gross on the printing press...

I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious. offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece. A […] The post Grimes on Gemini images appeared first...

Here is my episode with @patrickc We discuss: – what it takes to process $1 trillion/year– how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships– what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is an open ended task, and the Collison brothers are just… pic.twitter.com/Wx52cJI9Ve — Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp) February 21, 2024 The post Dwarkesh Patel with Patrick Collison appeared first on Marginal...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: The more clear and present danger to Hollywood is that would-be viewers might start making their own short videos rather than watching television. “Show my pet dog Fido flying to Mars and building a space colony there” is perhaps more fun than […] The post The commercial impact of Sora appeared...

We create a firm-level ChatGPT investment score, based on conference calls, that measures managers’ anticipated changes in capital expenditures. We validate the score with interpretable textual content and its strong correlation with CFO survey responses. The investment score predicts future capital expenditure for up to nine quarters, controlling for Tobin’s q and other determinants, implying […] The post ChatGPT as a predictor of corporate...