Fifty years ago today, on March 23, 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history.

No person may operate a civil aircraft at a true flight mach number greater than 1 except in compliance with conditions and limitations in an authorization to exceed mach 1 issued to the operator under Appendix B of this part.

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The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence. This is demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction), its range of topics on which it has gained expertise (such as literature, medicine, and coding), and the variety of tasks it is able to perform (e.g., playing games, using tools, explaining itself). A lot remains to be done to create a system that could qualify as a complete AGI.

From a group of Microsoft researchers. They are correct.

The post Baby AGI is Here appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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1. ChatGPT for me.

2. Early GPT-4 paper from Microsoft.

3. The new art of moviemaking (ho hum!).

4. A scrip for my five-year-old to talk to GPT.

5. Interestingly, 9.4 percent of humans were more creative than the most creative GAI, GPT-4.

6. Plug-ins are here.  Every day, people!!!  Here is the initial list.

7. How to chat with a long pdf.  Video.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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A Washington Post poll finds that 41 percent of Americans support a federal ban of the popular short-video app, while 25 percent say they oppose it. And 71 percent are concerned that TikToks parent company is based in China, including 36 percent who say they are very concerned.

Here is the WaPo article.  A single poll on this issue is not dispositive, but still it suggests to me that if our politicians force the sale of TikTok to an American company that would not be an electorally unpopular move.

You can see the broader pattern here:

1. Change starts with the states, many of which have been restricting the use of TikTok on government phones.  Then the momentum spreads to the federal government.

2. American companies end up heavily favored (yes the competitors gain, as a side issue who will Elizabeth Warren allow to buy TikTok?  Certainly not Meta.)  Market concentration rises.

3. National security considerations, or ostensible national security considerations, win out.

4. For all the talk of polarization and gridlock, both parties get on board.

5. TikTok is the Girardian sacrifice to the American national vision, which in any case proceeds with rampant surveillance.

6. We then move on to the next thing.

Welcome to American history people!

As you may recall, I do not favor a ban on TikTok, but a forced sale, at the very least, now seems likely.

The post Do Americans want to ban TikTok? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The SEC allowed Coinbase to go public in 2021, he [Brian Armstrong] wrote, including after reviewing its disclosures that clearly explained our asset listing process and included 57 references to staking.

Here is the full WSJ article.  Rule of law people, or rule of men (and women)?  Which is it?

Here is the full Brian Armstrong tweet storm.

The post Regulatory sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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1. Some roots of the Swedish music miracle.

2. Fast ihr ganzes Leben hat eine 104 Jahre alte Britin im selben Haus verbracht nun soll dieses neue Bewohner bekommen.

3. Man Bun Magnus plays a very nice game.

4. Pending major changes in UK clinical trials system and regulation.  Could prove significant.

5. Is Freud making a comeback? (NYT)

6. Arlington ends single-family-only zoning.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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In The New Madness of Crowds I argued that SVB failed because Greater transparency and lower transaction costs have intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach. A piece by Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen in the WSJ now adds to to the other side of the problem. Depositors were working on twitter time, the regulatory apparatus was not.

Depositors were draining their accounts via smartphone apps and telling their startup networks to do the same. But inside Silicon Valley Bank, executives were trying to navigate the U.S. banking systems creaky apparatus for emergency lending and to persuade its custodian bank to stay open late to handle a multibillion-dollar transfer.

As Matt Levine summarizes:

Instead of hearing a rumor at the coffee shop and running down to the bank branch to wait on line to withdraw your money, now you can hear a rumor on Twitter or the group chat and use an app to withdraw money instantly. A tech-friendly bank with a highly digitally connected set of depositors can lose 25% of its deposits in hours, which did not seem conceivable in previous eras of bank runs.

But the other part of the problem is that, while depositors can panic faster and banks can give them their money faster, the lender-of-last-resort system on which all of this relies is still stuck in a slower, more leisurely era. When the user interface improves faster than the core system, it means customers can act faster than the bank can react, wrote Byrne Hobart. You can panic in an instant and withdraw your money with an app, but the bank cant get more money without a series of phone calls and test trades that can only happen during regular business hours.

Its not obvious whether the right thing to do is slow down depositors, at least in some circumstances, or speed up regulators but the two systems cant work well at different speeds.

The post The Great Digital Divide: Panic at Twitter Speed, Respond at AOL Speed appeared first on...

Upon arrival, Spinozas morning routine had been:

1. Ask to go outside to pee.

2. Come back in and eat his kibble.

3. Possible option of belly scratching.

In that order.

His current routine, upon my waking, is:

1. Demand to have belly scratched.

2. Pretend to go outside, but return immediately for his kibble.

2b. Eat his kibble.

3. Go outside to pee.

4. Demand slice of cheese (cheddar).

5. Return and demand, through the medium of whining, that I pull on the rag doll-like play toy in his mouth.

Given GPT models, social scientists should be working intently on theories of what I call two-way training.  Are they?

Here is my previous post on canine Coasianism.

The post The evolution of my canine custodianship appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is part of the summary:

Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didnt industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?

HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.

If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldnt be a Gospel. It would probably be Pauls Letter to the Galatians because Pauls Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, the...

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation across various domains, including medicine. We present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, on medical competency examinations and benchmark datasets. GPT-4 is a general-purpose model that is not specialized for medical problems through training or engineered to solve clinical tasks. Our analysis covers two sets of official practice materials for the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), a three-step examination program used to assess clinical competency and grant licensure in the United States. We also evaluate performance on the MultiMedQA suite of benchmark datasets. Beyond measuring model performance, experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of test questions containing both text and images on model performance, probe for memorization of content during training, and study calibration of the probabilities, which is of critical importance in high-stakes applications like medicine. Our results show that GPT-4, without any specialized prompt crafting, exceeds the passing score on USMLE by over 20 points and outperforms earlier general-purpose models (GPT-3.5) as well as models specifically fine-tuned on medical knowledge (Med-PaLM, a significantly better calibrated than GPT-3.5, demonstrating a much-improved ability to predict the likelihood that its answers are correct. We also explore the behavior of the model qualitatively by presenting a case study that shows the ability of GPT-4 to explain medical reasoning, personalize explanations to students, and interactively craft new counterfactual scenarios around a medical case. Implications of the findings are discussed for potential uses of GPT-4 in medical education, assessment, and clinical practice, with appropriate attention to challenges of accuracy and safety.

Here is the full paper by Harsha Nori, Nicholas King, Scott Mayer McKinney, Dean Carignan, and Eric Horvita.  Ho hum, people, ho hum!

Via Ethan Mollick.

The post Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Many people are upset at my rather anodyne remarks from earlier in the week.  Thus I have a simple question: what are the best cost-benefit studies of urban investments in bicycle lanes and other bicycle-friendly policies?  They have to take into account the opportunity cost of the land for bike lanes, the cost of cycling deaths and injuries, and the costs of slower vehicular traffic.  Counting those variables in addition to the rather considerable benefits of cycling is hardly a genius-level move, right?

Funny that, I cant seem to find such a study!  But I am not an expert.  I am sure there are many such studies, so I am opening comments to all of you, so that I may pull in the appropriate references.  I will then read the best study or studies, and report back.

And if by some freak chance of nature no such studies can be found, what should we infer from that?

Addendum: And people (commentators), I dont need the blah blah blah.  Dont need the mood affiliation.  Dont need the abstract citation of individual gross benefits.  Just the cost-benefit studies, please.  I am sure you will oblige.

The post What is the best cost-benefit analysis of cycling investments? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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1. We propose the nose as central to faces and their perception.

2. Musa al-Gharbi on why conservatives are happier.

3. Some observations on Chinese management.

4. Bryan Caplan revalued GPT.  And EleutherAI open source stuff.  And Prismer open source stuff (every day, people!).  And Adobes Firefly AI now in beta.  And @getlindy.  And Little gods for older people, how AI will transform being old.

5. Infovores interview with Hollis Robbins.

6. The Feds new treatment of collateral.

7. Hokusai sells for $2.8 million.

The post Wednesday assorted links app...