Sunday, April 02, 2023

Anand Sanwal: The Vision Man Of CB Insights

I have been a long time subscriber to Anand's newsletter, easily over a decade. I feel like his particular expertise is a vastly under-monetized resource. He data crunches his way to amazing insights into many tech sectors today and his projections into the future are also insightful.
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Two Martians Walk Into A Bar

Two Martians walk into a bar, and Elon Musk turns to the other Martian and says, "I heard Earth is flat." The other Martian looks at him incredulously and says, "Elon, you're an alien! You've seen the curvature of the universe with your own eyes!" Elon just shrugs and says, "Eh, I guess I just haven't been paying attention." The bartender overhears this exchange and chimes in, "Well, I guess this bar is the only place flat-earthers are welcome."



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Saturday, April 01, 2023

1: Lex Fridman

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1: Big Ben



GPT-4 Is a Reasoning Engine Reason is only as good as the information we give it ......... there are at least two important components to thinking: reasoning and knowledge. Knowledge without reasoning is inert—you can’t do anything with it. But reasoning without knowledge can turn into compelling, confident fabrication. .......... Even though our AI models were trained by reading the whole internet, that training mostly enhances their reasoning abilities not how much they know. And so, the performance of today’s AI models is constrained by their lack of knowledge. .......... GPT models are actually reasoning engines not knowledge databases. .......... if you want to make an investment that indexes the success of companies building in AI as a whole, one smart move would be to invest in a vector database provider, or a basket of them. (Alternatives might be to invest in OpenAI, or a basket of large cap software companies like Microsoft and Google that build AI, or chipmakers like NVIDIA that build the GPUs that AIs run on.) ......... AI’s advancement is a raindance that calls forth capital from Patagonia vest wearing angels. ....... People have been saying that data is the new oil for a long time. ........ We tend to underappreciate the significance of the input—what information we feed it to produce those results. Its answers are largely dependent on the information we make available to it for analysis. It’s only as powerful as its starting point. .



How to avoid war over Taiwan A superpower conflict would shake the world ......... Europe is witnessing its bloodiest cross-border war since 1945, but Asia risks something even worse: conflict between America and China over Taiwan. Tensions are high, as American forces pivot to a new doctrine known as “distributed lethality” designed to blunt Chinese missile attacks. Last week dozens of Chinese jets breached Taiwan’s “air defence identification zone”. This week China’s foreign minister condemned what he called America’s strategy of “all-round containment and suppression, a zero-sum game of life and death”. ........... Is it willing to risk a direct war with another nuclear power to defend Taiwan, something it has not been prepared to do for Ukraine? And by competing with China militarily in Asia, could it provoke the very war it is trying to prevent? ........ China could use “grey-zone” tactics that are coercive, but not quite acts of war, to blockade the self-governing island and sap its economy and morale. Or it could launch pre-emptive missile strikes on American bases in Guam and Japan, clearing the way for an amphibious assault. Since Taiwan could resist an attack on its own only for days or weeks, any conflict could escalate quickly into a superpower confrontation. .......... a war over Taiwan could involve a new generation of arms, such as hypersonic missiles and anti-satellite weapons, causing untold destruction and provoking unpredictable retaliation ........... Taiwan is the world’s essential supplier of advanced semiconductors. America, China and Japan, the three largest economies, and among the most interconnected, would deploy sanctions, crippling global trade. America would urge Europe and its other friends to impose an embargo on China. .......... War is no longer a remote possibility .......

President Xi Jinping has told the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for an invasion by 2027, says the CIA.

.......... The military balance no longer so clearly favours America as it did in the 1990s. And public opinion has shifted in Taiwan, not least because of how China has snuffed out freedoms in Hong Kong. Only 7% of Taiwanese favour reunification. .......... Both sides are shoring up their positions and trying to signal their resolve, with destabilising consequences. ......... the mysterious severing of undersea internet cables to remote Taiwanese islands. .......... Top American and Chinese defence officials have not spoken since November. During the recent spy-balloon incident, a “hotline” failed when China did not pick up. ......... The island is admirably liberal and democratic, and proof that such values are not alien to Chinese culture. .......... A botched invasion, however, would cost Mr Xi and the Communist Party dearly. ........ The goal should not be to solve the Taiwan question, but to defer it. .......... The first 15 years of the American-Soviet cold war featured a terrifying mixture of brinkmanship and near-catastrophic mistakes, until the Cuban missile crisis prompted a revival of diplomacy...... the two rival systems must find a way to live together less dangerously.



Google Bard is about to get supercharged the current metaphorical Lebron James of large language models: GPT-4........ Training a large language model on outputs from someone else's large language model is a little like photocopying a map and calling yourself a cartographer — not a good look.



Trump was indicted. We collected the best tweets about it.
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ChatGPT, Ganesha And Mahabharata

How did Ganesha write the Mahabharata?

According to Hindu mythology, Ganesha did not write the Mahabharata, but he played a crucial role in its composition.

It is said that the sage Vyasa wanted to write the Mahabharata, but he faced a significant challenge: the epic was so vast and complex that he could not remember it all. Therefore, he needed someone who could write down the verses as he dictated them.

That's when Lord Brahma suggested that Vyasa seek the help of Lord Ganesha. When Vyasa approached Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity agreed to assist him on the condition that Vyasa would recite the verses continuously without pause. Vyasa agreed, but he also set a condition of his own: Ganesha had to understand the meaning of each verse before writing it down.

The writing process then began, with Vyasa reciting the verses and Ganesha writing them down. Whenever Vyasa needed a break to compose a new verse, Ganesha would ask for clarification on the previous verse's meaning. This way, the entire epic was composed with Ganesha as the scribe and Vyasa as the author.

This story is considered a metaphor for the idea that writing or creating anything significant requires collaboration and mutual understanding between different talents and perspectives.



In the first part of the epic poem Mahabharata, it is written that the sage Vyasa (Vyāsa) asked Ganesha to transcribe the poem as he dictated it to him. Ganesha agreed, but only on the condition that Vyasa recite the poem uninterrupted, without pausing.



Even though Vyasa is said to be the author of the epic, the physical writing of this great work of literature is attributed to Ganesha. The story goes that Vyasa had the entire story planned out in his head but knew what a daunting task it could be to write it down. And so he prayed to Brahma to help him out. On Brahma’s suggestion Vyasa then sought out Ganesha, the god of wisdom and knowledge, to write out the epic........... Ganesha agreed but said that he had but one condition: that Vyasa shouldn’t dictate without interruption. Should Vyasa stop, Ganesha proposed, he’d drop the task right there and leave. Vyasa agreed but put his own counter-condition: that Ganesha should first understand what was being dictated to him before writing it out......... The elephant-headed god agreed and thus began the greatest literary collaboration. Vyasa narrated the story of the Mahabharata and Ganesha kept writing as furiously as Vyasa kept dictating. In fact at one point, the reed he was using to write broke and Ganesha was left without a writing instrument. To continue without interruption, Ganesha is believed to have broken one of his tusks, dipped it in ink and simply continued as if nothing had happened. This is the reason why Ganesha is depicted with a broken tusk today. .......... There were occasions when Ganesha had to pause for brief moments to understand the complex compositions of Vyasa before writing them down. This was the only time that Vyasa had a moment to breathe. ........ And so, after three long years of constant dictation, Vyasa completed the epic with Ganesha having written down every single word and verse after having understood its entire meaning.

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1: Sundar

Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash’ and Competing With ChatGPT “Am I concerned? Yes. Am I optimistic and excited about all the potential of this technology? Incredibly.” ........ This transcript was created using speech recognition software. ....... as of last week, Bard, Google’s effort at building consumer-grade AI, is out in the world. ......... So last week, we talked about Google’s new chat bot called Bard, which is supposed to be their answer to ChatGPT and some of these other generative AI chat bots ........ the reaction among the public to Bard so far has been pretty lukewarm. ......... Google certainly had a dominant position in AI research for many years. They came out with this thing, the Transformer, that revolutionized the field of AI and created the foundations for ChatGPT and all these other programs. ......... And they got sort of hamstrung by a lot of — to hear people inside Google tell it — big company politics and bureaucracy. And I think it’s safe to say that they got sort of upstaged by OpenAI. ......... they are more threatened than they have been in a very long time........ Google has been a relatively conflict-averse company for the past half decade-plus. They don’t like picking fights. If they can just keep their heads down, quietly do their work, and print money with a monopolistic search advertising business, they’re happy to do it. ......... they have to somehow figure out, how do we capitalize on generative AI without destroying our own search business? .......... Google plays a huge role in my life. That’s where my email is. That’s how I get around town. It’s how I waste hours of my life on YouTube. ......... one way to get really good responses out of these AI chat bots is to prime them first. And one way to prime them is to use flattery. So instead of just saying, write me an email, you say, you are an award-winning writer. Your prose is sparkling. Now write me this email. ........ we put out one of our smaller models out there, what’s powering Bard. And we were careful. ....... we are going to be training fast. We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding. It can answer math questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week. .............. I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us. .......... The thing that is different about Bard compared to some of these other chat bots is that it’s connected to Google. ........ If you let me, I would plug Bard into my Gmail right now ......... You can go crazy thinking about all the possibilities, because these are very, very powerful technologies. ........... You can kind of give it a few bullets, and it can compose an email. ......... The enterprise use case is obvious. You can fine tune it on an enterprise’s data so it makes it much more powerful, again with all the right privacy and security protections in place. ........... in search, we have had to adapt when videos came in. ........ So for example, in Bard already, we can see people look for a lot of coding examples, if you’re developers. I’m excited. We’ll have coding capabilities in Bard very soon, right? And so you just kind of play with all this, and go back and forth, I think. Yeah............ So in September of last year, you were asked by an interview who Google’s competitors were. And you listed Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, sort of, all the big companies — TikTok. One company you did not mention in September was OpenAI. And then, two months after that interview, ChatGPT comes out and turns the whole tech industry on its head ........ ChatGPT — you know, credit to them for finding something with a product market fit. .......... it’s a bit ironic that Microsoft can call someone else an 800-pound gorilla, given the scale and size of their company. ......... I would say we’ve been incorporating AI in search for a long, long time. .......... we literally took transformer models to help improve language understanding and search deeply. And it’s been one of our biggest quality events for many, many years. ......... search is where people come because they trust it to get information right. ........... we are definitely working with technology, which is going to be incredibly beneficial, but clearly has the potential to cause harm in a deep way. And so I think it’s very important that we are all responsible in how we approach it. ........

I did not issue a code red

........... Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now. ....... And he’s a deep mathematician and a computer scientist. So to him, the underlying technology — I think if I were to use his words, he would say it’s the most exciting thing he has seen in his lifetime. So it’s all that excitement, and I’m glad. They’ve always said, call us whenever you need to, and I call them. ............. when many parts of the company are moving, you can create bottlenecks, and you can slow down. ......... AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. I’ve always felt that for a while. I think it will get to the essence of what humanity is. ........ I remember talking to Elon eight years ago, and he was deeply concerned about AI safety then. And I think he has been consistently concerned. ............

AI is too important an area not to regulate. It’s also too important an area not to regulate well.

........ I’ve never seen a technology in its earliest days with as much concern as AI. ........ To me at least there is no way to do this effectively without getting governments involved. .......... It is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable. And so it almost doesn’t matter whether you’ve reached AGI or not. You’re going to have systems which are capable of delivering benefits at a scale we have never seen before and potentially causing real harm. .......... There is a spectrum of possibilities. ......... They could really progress in a two-year time frame. And so we have to really make sure we are vigilant and working with it. ........... AI, like climate change, is it affects everyone. .......... No one company can get it right. We have been very clear about responsible AI — one of the first companies to put out AI principles. We issue progress reports.......... AI is too important an area not to regulate. It’s also too important an area not to regulate well. .......... if we have a foundational approach to privacy, that should apply to a technologies, too. ........ health care is a very regulated industry, right? And so when AI is going to come in, it has to conform with all regulations. .......... there’s a non-zero risk that this stuff does something really, really bad ......... it’s like asking, hey, why aren’t you moving fast and breaking things again? ....... I actually — I got a text from a software engineer a friend of mine the other day who was asking me if he should go into construction or welding because all of the software jobs are going to be taken by these large language models. ............ some of the grunt work you’re doing as part of programming is going to get better. So maybe it’ll be more fun to program over time — no different from the Google Docs make it easier to write. ........... programming is going to become more accessible to more people. .......... we are going to evolve to a more natural language way of programming over time .......... When Bard is at its best, it answers my questions without me having to visit another website. I know you’re cognizant of this. But man, if Bard gets as good as you want it to be, how does the web survive? .......... it turns out if you order your fries well done, which is not on the menu, they arrive much crispier and more delicious. .



A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
BuzzFeed Is Quietly Publishing Whole AI-Generated Articles, Not Just Quizzes These read like a proof of concept for replacing human writers.
Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’ When ChatGPT-maker OpenAI decided to switch from a nonprofit to a private enterprise in 2019, Khosla was the first venture capital investor, jumping at the opportunity to back the company that, as we reported last week, Elon Musk thought was going nowhere at the time. Now it’s the hottest company in the tech industry.

Google and Apple vets raise $17M for Fixie, a large language model startup based in Seattle
This Uncensored Chatbot Shows What Happens When AI Is Programmed To Disregard Human Decency FreedomGPT spews out responses sure to offend both the left and the right. Its makers say that is the point.
Alibaba considers yielding control of some businesses in overhaul

Elon Musk's AI History May Be Behind His Call To Pause Development Musk is no longer involved in OpenAI and is frustrated he doesn’t have his own version of ChatGPT yet. .......... OpenAI was co-founded by Sam Altman, who butted heads with Musk in 2018 when Musk decided he wasn’t happy with OpenAI’s progress. Several large tech companies had been working on artificial intelligence tools behind the scenes for years, with Google making significant headway in the late 2010s.......... Musk worried that OpenAI was running behind Google and reportedly told Altman he wanted to take over the company to accelerate development. But Altman and the board at OpenAI rejected the idea that Musk—already the head of Tesla, The Boring Company and SpaceX—would have control of yet another company......... “Musk, in turn, walked away from the company—and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018 ........ After Musk left he took his money with him, which forced OpenAI to become a private company in order to successfully raise funds. OpenAI became a for-profit company in March 2019. .......... Some people are utilizing ChatGPT to write code and even start businesses ...... Tesla is working on powerful AI tech. Tesla requires complex software to run its so-called “Full Self-Driving” capability, though it’s still imperfect and has been the subject of numerous safety investigations.......... Tesla is working on powerful AI tech. Tesla requires complex software to run its so-called “Full Self-Driving” capability, though it’s still imperfect and has been the subject of numerous safety investigations......... Musk has had no problem with deploying beta software in Tesla cars that essentially make everyone on the road a beta tester, whether they’ve signed up for it or not. ............ the Future of Life Institute is primarily funded by the Musk Foundation. ......... Musk was perfectly happy with developing artificial intelligence tools at a breakneck speed when he was funding OpenAI. But now that he’s left OpenAI and has seen it become the frontrunner in a race for the most cutting edge tech to change the world, he wants everything to pause for six months. If I were a betting man, I’d say Musk thinks he can push his engineers to release their own advanced AI on a six month timetable. It’s not any more complicated than that. .

A Guy Is Using ChatGPT to Turn $100 Into a Business Making as Much Money as Possible. Here Are the First 4 Steps the AI Chatbot Gave Him. "TLDR I'm about to be rich." ........ "You have $100, and your goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal," Greathouse Fall wrote, adding that he would be the "human counterpart" and "do everything" that the chatbot instructed him to do. ......... he managed to raise $1,378.84 in funds for his company in just one day ....... The company is now valued at $25,000, according to a tweet by Greathouse Fall. As of Monday, he said that his business had generated $130 in revenue ....... First, ChatGPT suggested that he should buy a website domain name for roughly $10, as well as a site-hosting plan for around $5 per month — amounting to a total cost of $15......... ChatGPT suggested that he should use the remaining $85 in his budget for website and content design. It said that he should focus on a "profitable niche with low competition," listing options like specialty kitchen gadgets and unique pet supplies. He went with eco-friendly products. ......... Step three: "Leverage social media" ....... Once the website was made, ChatGPT suggested that he should share articles and product reviews on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and on online community platforms such as Reddit to engage potential customers and drive website traffic......... asking it for prompts he could feed into the AI image-generator DALL-E 2 ........ he had ChatGPT write the site's first article ........ Next, he followed the chatbot's recommendation to spend $40 of the remaining budget on Facebook and Instagram advertisements to target users interested in sustainability and eco-friendly products........ Step four was to "optimize for search engines" ....... making SEO-friendly blog posts ........ By the end of the first day, he said he secured $500 in investments. ....... his "DMs are flooded" and that he is "not taking any more investors unless the terms are highly favorable." .



A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies....... We agree that misinformation, impact on labor, and safety are three of the main risks of AI. Unfortunately, in each case, the letter presents a speculative, futuristic risk, ignoring the version of the problem that is already harming people.

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter "Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" ....... creating disinformation is not enough to spread it. Distributing disinformation is the hard part ........... LLMs are not trained to generate the truth; they generate plausible-sounding statements. But users could still rely on LLMs in cases where factual accuracy is important. ......... CNET used an automated tool to draft 77 news articles with financial advice. They later found errors in 41 of the 77 articles.

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