While I sort through whatever is happening with GPT-4, today's scheduled post is two recent short stories about restaurant selection.

Ye Olde Restaurante

Tyler Cowen says that restaurants saying ‘since year 19xx’ are on net a bad sign, because they are frozen in time, focusing on being reliable.

For the best meals, he says look elsewhere, to places that shine brightly and then move on.

I was highly suspicious. So I ran a test.

I checked the oldest places in Manhattan. The list had 15 restaurants. A bunch are taverns, which are not relevant to my interests. The rest include the legendary Katz's Delicatessen, which is still on the short list of very best available experiences (yes, of course you order the Pastrami), and the famous Keen's Steakhouse. I don’t care for mutton, but their regular steaks are quite good. There's also Peter Lugar's [...]

---

Outline:

(00:12) Ye Olde Restaurante

(04:41) Ye Newfangled Restaurante

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[Editor's note: I forgot to post this to WorldPress on Thursday. I’m posting it here now. Sorry about that.]

Sam Altman is not playing around.

He wants to build new chip factories in the decidedly unsafe and unfriendly UAE. He wants to build up the world's supply of energy so we can run those chips.

What does he say these projects will cost?

Oh, up to seven trillion dollars. Not a typo.

Even scaling back the misunderstandings, this is what ambition looks like.

It is not what safety looks like. It is not what OpenAI's non-profit mission looks like. It is not what it looks like to have concerns about a hardware overhang, and use that as a reason why one must build AGI soon before someone else does. The entire justification for OpenAI's strategy is invalidated by this move.

I have [...]

---

Outline:

(01:02) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(01:57) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(03:22) GPT-4 Real This Time

(05:49) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:38) They Took Our Jobs

(15:33) Get Involved

(15:50) Introducing

(17:13) Altman's Ambition

(22:34) Yoto

(26:32) In Other AI News

(35:04) Quiet Speculations

(41:55) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(43:32) Washington DC Still Does Not Get It

(46:16) Many People are Saying

(48:48) China Watch

(49:38) Roon Watch

(50:48) How to Get Ahead in Advertising

(52:35) The Week in Audio

(56:45) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:01:18) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone

(01:03:13) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:03:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:06:02) The Lighter Side

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[Editor's Note: I forgot to cross-post this on Thursday, sorry about that. Note that this post does not cover Gemini 1.5, which was announced after I posted this. I will cover 1.5 later this week.]

We have now had a little over a week with Gemini Advanced, based on Gemini Ultra. A few reviews are in. Not that many, though, compared to what I would have expected, or what I feel the situation calls for. This is yet another case of there being an obvious thing lots of people should do, and almost no one doing it. Should we use Gemini Advanced versus ChatGPT? Which tasks are better for one versus the other?

I have compiled what takes I did see. Overall people are clearly less high on Gemini Advanced than I am, seeing it as still slightly to modestly behind ChatGPT overall. Despite that, I have [...]

---

Outline:

(01:10) Impressions of Others

(14:28) Pros and Cons

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Another month. More things. Much roundup.

Bad News

Jesse Smith writes in Asterisk that our HVAC workforce is both deeply incompetent and deeply corrupt. This certainly matches my own experience. Calculations are almost always flubbed when they are done at all, outright fraudulent paperwork is standard, no one has the necessary skills.

It certainly seems like the Biden Administration is doing its best to hurt Elon Musk? Claim here is that they cancelled a Starlink contract without justification, in order to award the contract to someone else for more than three times the price. This was on Twitter, but none of the replies seemed to offer a plausible justification.

Claim that Twitter traffic is increasingly fake, and secondary claim that this is because Musk fired those responsible for preventing it. Even if it is true that Twitter traffic is 75% fake, that does not mean [...]

---

Outline:

(00:11) Bad News

(06:48) More on the Apple Vision Pro

(08:19) For Science

(10:45) Climate

(11:11) Variously Effective Altruism

(15:10) The Plan

(17:07) Agency, Cate Hall and Finkel's Law

(21:46) Loop de Loop

(24:46) Government Working

(31:16) California Scrolling

(33:49) Crime and Punishment

(36:45) Good News, Everyone

(47:03) A Difference of Opinion

(51:19) The Lighter Side

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Previously: On the Apple Vision Pro

The reviews are coming in. What say the people, other than the complaining about the two to three hour battery life?

Then later I’ll get to my own thoughts after the demo.

Reviews and Reactions

Ben Thompson reviews the Apple Vision Pro. He continues to find it a technical marvel, but is ultimately disappointed for uses other than entertainment. There is no support for multiple users beyond a highly unwieldy guest mode. There is insufficient width of coverage and inability to support multiple large screens, which is severely limiting to productivity. The eye tracking is a huge improvement over earlier attempts but not ready for such applications.

Ben anticipates that Apple will fail over time to evolve the product to support the things that would enable it to be a killer productivity app, which is what he was [...]

---

Outline:

(00:18) Reviews and Reactions

(06:45) My Own Thoughts After a Demo

(12:37) To Buy or Not to Buy?

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

California Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduces SB 1047 to regulate AI. I have put up a market on how likely it is to become law.

“If Congress at some point is able to pass a strong pro-innovation, pro-safety AI law, I’ll be the first to cheer that, but I’m not holding my breath,” Wiener said in an interview. “We need to get ahead of this so we maintain public trust in AI.”

Congress is certainly highly dysfunctional. I am still generally against California trying to act like it is the federal government, even when the cause is good, but I understand.

Can California effectively impose its will here?

On the biggest players, for now, presumably yes.

In the longer run, when things get actively dangerous, then my presumption is no.

There is a potential trap here. If we put our rules [...]

---

Outline:

(02:48) Close Reading of the Bill

(10:50) My High Level Takeaways From the Close Reading

(11:37) Another More Skeptical Reaction to the Same Bill

(13:01) What is a Covered Model Here?

(15:39) Precautionary Principle and Covered Guidance

(18:07) Non-Derivative

(18:28) So What Would This Law Actually Do?

(20:44) Crying Wolf

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We have long been waiting for a version of this story, where someone hacks together the technology to use Generative AI to work the full stack of the dating apps on their behalf, ultimately finding their One True Love.

Or at least, we would, if it turned out he is Not Making This Up.

Fun question: Given he is also this guy, does that make him more or less credible?

Alas, something being Too Good to Check does not actually mean one gets to not check it, in my case via a Manifold Market. The market started trading around 50%, but has settled down at 15% after several people made strong detailed arguments that the full story did not add up, at minimum he was doing some recreations afterwards.

Which is a shame. But why let that stop us? Either way it is a good [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In a week with two podcasts I covered extensively, I was happy that there was little other news.

That is, until right before press time, when Google rebranded Bard to Gemini, released an app for that, and offered a premium subscription ($20/month) for Gemini Ultra.

Gemini Ultra is Here

I have had the honor and opportunity to check out Gemini Advanced before its release.

The base model seems to be better than GPT-4. It seems excellent for code, for explanations and answering questions about facts or how things work, for generic displays of intelligence, for telling you how to do something. Hitting the Google icon to have it look for sources is great.

In general, if you want to be a power user, if you want to push the envelope in various ways, Gemini is not going to make it easy on you. However [...]

---

Outline:

(00:21) Gemini Ultra is Here

(03:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:38) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(07:12) GPT-4 Real This Time

(09:03) Fun with Image Generation

(09:20) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(14:09) They Took Our Jobs

(15:16) Get Involved

(16:00) Introducing

(16:12) In Other AI News

(20:42) Quiet Speculations

(24:44) Vitalik on the Intersection AI and Crypto

(30:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(30:23) The Week in Audio

(34:25) Rhetorical Innovation

(35:23) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Still Difficult

(35:54) People Are Worried About AI, Many People

(38:04) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(39:54) The Lighter Side

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Previously: Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists

Based Beff Jezos, the founder of effective accelerationism, delivered on his previous pledge, and did indeed debate what is to be done to navigate into the future with a highly Worthy Opponent in Connor Leahy.

The moderator almost entirely stayed out of it, and intervened well when he did, so this was a highly fair arena. It's Jezos versus Leahy. Let's get ready to rumble!

I wanted to be sure I got the arguments right and fully stated my responses and refutations, so I took extensive notes including timestamps. On theme for this debate, this is a situation where you either do that while listening, or once you have already listened you are in practice never going to go back.

That does not mean you have to read all those notes and arguments. It is certainly an option [...]

---

Outline:

(01:32) Actually Based Beff Jezos (ABBJ)

(05:13) Bold Based Beff Jezos (BBBJ)

(13:00) Caustic Based Beff Jezos (CBBZ)

(17:50) What about Connor Leahy?

(19:56) Around the Debate in 80 Notes

(01:39:14) Afterwards

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post is extensive thoughts on Tyler Cowen's excellent talk with Dwarkesh Patel.

It is interesting throughout. You can read this while listening, after listening or instead of listening, and is written to be compatible with all three options. The notes are in order in terms of what they are reacting to, and are mostly written as I listened.

I see this as having been a few distinct intertwined conversations. Tyler Cowen knows more about more different things than perhaps anyone else, so that makes sense. Dwarkesh chose excellent questions throughout, displaying an excellent sense of when to follow up and how, and when to pivot.

The first conversation is about Tyler's book GOAT about the world's greatest economists. Fascinating stuff, this made me more likely to read and review GOAT in the future if I ever find the time. I mostly agreed with Tyler's takes [...]

---

Outline:

(04:01) The Notes Themselves

(17:54) The AI and Future Scenario Section Begins

(21:04) Clearing Up Two Misconceptions

(27:11) Final Notes Section

(33:47) Concluding AI Thoughts

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.