It slices. It dices. Or, at least, it sees, hears, talks, creates stunningly good images and browses the web. Welcome to the newly updated GPT-4. That's all in two weeks. Throw in Microsoft 365 Copilot finally coming online soon.

Are we back? I’m guessing we’re back. Also it's that much closer to being all over. At some point this stops being a ying-yang thing and more of a we-all-die thing. For now, however? We’re so back.

Are we so back that AGI has been achieved internally at OpenAI? Because Sam Altman literally said that straight up in a Reddit post? No, no, that was an obvious joke, we are not quite that back, why do you people have no chill?

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:54) Table of Contents

(03:27) GPT-4 Real This Time

(10:42) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(12:29) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(14:14) The Reversal Curse

(17:57) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Nice Game of Chess?

(21:55) Fun with Image Generation

(23:02) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(26:11) They Took Our Jobs

(28:20) Get Involved

(29:23) Introducing

(30:08) Talking Real Money

(32:22) In Other AI News

(33:58) Quiet Speculations

(41:12) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(48:05) The Week in Audio

(48:30) Rhetorical Innovation

(56:01) Can You Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone

(56:41) No One Would Be So Stupid As To

(01:01:29) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:09:41) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:13:33) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:16:27) The Lighter Side

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We are about to see what looks like a substantial leap in image models. OpenAI will be integrating Dalle-3 into ChatGPT, the pictures we’ve seen look gorgeous and richly detailed, with the ability to generate pictures to much more complex specifications than existing image models. Before, the rule of thumb was you could get one of each magisteria, but good luck getting two things you want from a given magisteria. Now, perhaps, you can, if you are willing to give up on adult content and images of public figures since OpenAI is (quite understandably) no fun.

We will find out in a few weeks, as it rolls out to ChatGPT+ users.

As usual a bunch of other stuff also happened, including a model danger classification system from Anthropic, OpenAI announcing an outside red teaming squad, a study of AI impact on consultant job performance, some incremental upgrades [...]

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Outline:

(01:25) Table of Contents

(03:49) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(12:05) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(19:25) Level Two Bard

(22:28) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Good Game of Chess?

(24:46) GPT-4 Real This Time

(25:48) Fun with Image Generation

(32:03) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(33:53) Get Involved

(34:40) Introducing

(38:43) In Other AI News

(43:51) Technical Details

(50:27) Quiet Speculations

(56:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:04:40) The Week in Audio

(01:05:13) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:11:23) No One Would Be So Stupid As To

(01:13:49) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:18:35) I Didn’t Do It, No One Saw Me Do It, You Can’t Prove Anything

(01:22:36) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:26:00) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:27:46) The Lighter Side

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The listings will continue until people can afford houses in places they want to live.

New City By the Bay, Who Dis

They want to live in San Francisco, but San Francisco has no interest in building homes. What to do? The city's answer is to spend massively to support its homeless population, causing it to grow, while letting the housing shortage get worse. Some tech billionaires instead propose to go to Solano 60 miles away, and start the initiative California Forever on 55k acres to build a new city. We have our first look at what they are imagining, and it looks like an old school Greek or Italian village. Quite nice actually, skipping straight to the future NIMBY world with one extra town in it is already hugely profitable and helpful.

That still wouldn’t have been my move. I would have gone Chinese megacity on [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) New City By the Bay, Who Dis

(01:33) Housing is Expensive

(08:40) Not Having Housing is Expensive

(10:10) NIMBY vs. YIMBY

(12:52) Building Houses Where People Want to Live

(19:44) Georgist Redux

(25:08) Rent Control

(25:54) Traffic

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Welcome to week three of the AI era. Another long week and another giant post. I intend to take a nice four-day vacation in Mexico starting today, during which I won’t do any writing. I’m sure the pace of things will slow down real soon now. I mean, they have to. Don’t they?

If not, I’m going to have to learn to make some deeper cuts on what gets included.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:28) Table of Contents

(01:52) Executive Summary

(04:05) Market Perspectives

(10:27) They Took Our Jobs

(14:39) In Other AI News

(16:03) Our Price Cheap

(22:11) Bullet Time

(24:12) The Once and Future Face of Sydney

(25:07) Becoming the Mask

(26:02) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(28:03) Fun With Image Generation

(30:42) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(35:52) The War Against Knowledge

(37:58) AI Know What You’re Thinking

(38:56) AI Learns How to Love

(40:38) Llama Would You Publish Your Language Model

(41:57) The Art of the Jailbreak

(43:40) The Waluigi Effect

(52:02) Podcasts Ho!

(54:39) A Modest Proposal

(56:11) There Is No Fire Alarm For Artificial Intelligence But There Are Warning Shots

(56:33) Shallow Trouble at DeepMind

(57:22) Sam Altman Watch

(57:32) Gary Marcus and a Proposed Regulation

(01:06:42) Relatively Reasonable Skeptical AI DontKillEveryoneism Takes

(01:26:06) Bad AI DontKillEveryoneism Takes

(01:49:52) We Reject Violence As We Do The Devil: In All Its Forms

(01:52:01) The Lighter Side

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It works for the AI. Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step was the strongest AI-generated custom instruction. You, a human, even have lungs and the ability to take an actual deep breath. You can also think step by step.

This week was especially friendly to such a proposal, allowing the shortest AI weekly to date and hopefully setting a new standard. It would be great to take some time for more long-term oriented posts on AI but also on things like the Jones Act, for catching my breath and, of course, some football.

And, of course, Happy New Year!

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There were a bunch of discussions recently related to issues surrounding Y-Combinator, related as usual to their annual demo day. It seemed worth splitting them off into a post.

Bidders at Auction Mostly Think Prices Are Too High

YC is in session, so all the usual talk is back.

Paul Graham: As happens every single YC batch, investors complain that the valuations are too high, and the startups raise anyway.

Kush: Is there any specific reason why you think this happens?

Paul Graham: Some investors just cannot grasp the implications of the fact that all the returns are concentrated in the big wins. The top tier investors get it though; you’ll rarely lose one of them over price.

Amal Dorai: Isn’t the dynamic range of YC valuations narrower than the companies themselves? We see pretty much a 2x range that they’re raising in, but [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Bidders at Auction Mostly Think Prices Are Too High

(03:32) You Would Pay For The Ability To Charge More

(04:32) The Best Deals Come With the Best Prices

(08:32) Raise Early, Raise Often, Raise Everywhere

(09:07) Good VCs Get Their Money Back Surprisingly Often

(11:21) If You Want it Done Right

(13:38) You’ll Need the Time to Do That

(15:49) Credits You Will Need More of Are Essentially Money

(16:54) Get Your App Out There Quick

(18:12) No, Quicker Than That

(20:31) All The Startups Are Now AI Startups

(22:36) Man With Moat Unconcerned With Non-Flying Creatures

(25:27) The Investor Database Is a Killer App

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We are, as Tyler Cowen has noted, in a bit of a lull. Those of us ahead of the curve have gotten used to GPT-4 and Claude-2 and MidJourney. Functionality and integration are expanding, but on a relatively slow pace. Most people remain blissfully unaware, allowing me to try out new explanations on them tabula rosa, and many others say it was all hype. Which they will keep saying, until something forces them not to, most likely Gemini, although it is worth noting the skepticism I am seeing regarding Gemini in 2023 (only 25% for Google to have the best model by end of year) or even in 2024 (only 41% to happen even by end of next year.)

I see this as part of a pattern of continuing good news. While we have a long way to go and very much face impossible problems, the discourse and [...]

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Outline:

(01:38) Table of Contents

(03:36) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(06:41) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(08:14) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:04) They Took Our Jobs

(13:37) Get Involved

(14:28) Introducing

(16:05) UK Taskforce Update

(18:38) In Other AI News

(22:41) Quiet Speculations

(30:27) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(30:38) The Week in Audio

(44:06) Rhetorical Innovation

(46:23) No One Would Be So Stupid As To

(47:34) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:01:49) Twitter Community Notes Notes

(01:05:52) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:06:22) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:19:07) The Lighter Side

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It’s that time again. Here’s all the news and items of interest that isn’t something else.

Things that didn’t make it in to try and stand them on their own include whether America or France has better food and various claims related to Y-Combinator, in addition to the usual additional categories of energy, childhood, fertility and housing.

Bad News

All publicity is good publicity, act accordingly and solve for the equilibrium edition.

OnlyFans creators are paying meme aggregation accounts to dunk on their intentionally cringe content. the economics seems to works out really well for everyone involved. saw a creator say ~$200 per post. at 1000s of QTs/RTs, a low conversation rate would still be lucrative.

WeWork may not do so much longer, substantial doubt about staying in business.

37 year old man has $15k in savings, owns his van outright, but has no [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) Bad News

(06:05) Is There a Reliability Crisis in America?

(10:47) Small Problems With Big Tech

(12:10) Google Still Planning to Permanently Delete Inactive Accounts

(13:39) Crypto Might Not Be Entirely Safe

(17:42) Government Working

(22:16) Government Planning

(26:18) Together We Fight Crime

(29:35) How Bad Is Crime, Anyway?

(36:44) The Quest for Mundane Utility

(42:15) Opportunity Knocks

(44:11) Good News, Everyone

(49:19) Money Stuff

(54:33) Our Price Cheap

(57:31) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False

(01:03:54) Prediction Market Hypothesis

(01:05:32) Modest Proposals

(01:05:58) FDA Delenda Est

(01:09:29) In Medical and Health News

(01:15:52) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(01:21:36) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

(01:28:27) While I Cannot Condone This

(01:34:54) The Lighter Side

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It is a fun question going around the internet this past week, so here we go.

In particular, people focused on the question of France vs. America. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the American side are crazy, it is insulting to even consider this a question. Those on the American side like food.

All of this is always just, like, your opinion, man, or at least that’s the story.

Checking the Survey Data

YouGov asked back in 2019, got the following answers across nations, which we were reminded of during current debate on Twitter of American versus French food.

I will quibble, but I was impressed how good this list was for nationally identified cuisine, as opposed to in-country experience.

Where do I see obvious mistakes, ignoring the unfamiliar ones?

Everyone is underrating Brazilian because meat [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) Checking the Survey Data

(03:07) Genius in France

(05:32) I Thought This Was America

(10:46) The Upgrade

(14:31) Conclusion

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By all reports, and as one would expect, Google’s Gemini looks to be substantially superior to GPT-4. We now have more details on that, and also word that Google plans to deploy it in December, Manifold gives it 82% to happen this year and similar probability of being superior to GPT-4 on release.

I indeed expect this to happen on both counts. This is not too long from now, but also this is AI #27 and Bard still sucks, Google has been taking its sweet time getting its act together. So now we have both the UK Summit and Gemini coming up within a few months, as well as major acceleration of chip shipments. If you are preparing to try and impact how things go, now might be a good time to get ready and keep your powder dry. If you are looking to build cool new AI [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) Table of Contents

(03:33) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:57) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(10:07) GPT-4 Real This Time

(11:17) Fun with Image Generation

(11:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(13:18) They Took Our Jobs

(14:36) Get Involved

(14:59) Introducing

(15:48) In Other AI News

(17:25) China

(18:11) The Best Defense

(22:59) Portents of Gemini

(25:30) Quiet Speculations

(26:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(29:16) The Week in Audio

(37:55) Rhetorical Innovation

(49:44) Llama No One Is Stopping This

(59:39) No One Would Be So Stupid As To

(01:02:47) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:12:36) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:17:21) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:24:34) The Wit and Wisdom of Sam Altman

(01:25:40) The Lighter Side

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