Friday, March 24, 2023

24: ChatGPT

Heralded by the Kremlin as a show of support from its most powerful friend, Xi’s visit to Moscow featured carefully staged pomp and ceremony, but the spectacle was also marked by plenty of demonstrative bonhomie between the two autocrats........ Xi and Putin referred to each other as dear friends, promised economic cooperation and described their countries’ relations as the best they have ever been. ....... Putin said on the Kremlin's website: "We are working in solidarity on the formation of a more just and democratic multipolar world order, which should be based on the central role of the U.N., its Security Council, international law, the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter." ....... but asserted the close partnership between China and Russia did not constitute a “military-political alliance.” .......

The West sees China’s peace plan as a ploy to buy Putin time to regroup his forces and solidify his grip on occupied land.

......... China’s 12-point plan has no specific details on how to end the bloody year-long war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced millions to flee. ...... As Xi and Putin ended their talks on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund announced preliminary agreement with Kyiv on a four-year loan package of about $15.6 billion to the shattered country. ....... Separately, the United States intends to speed up delivery to Ukraine of 31 Abrams battle tanks to the autumn ......... Kyiv had clamored for tanks as well as other sophisticated Western military hardware as the conflict has slowed to a war of attrition with both sides suffering heavy losses. .

China’s Xi tells Putin of ‘changes not seen for 100 years’ China’s President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin bid each other farewell following talks in Moscow. ....... with Xi acknowledging Beijing and Moscow had signed an agreement bringing their ties into a “new era” of cooperation. .



Can We Slow This All Down, Please? Regulators did nothing, even though Silicon Valley Bank’s woes had been widely noticed. Bank managers failed at the basic work of hedging against the risk of interest rates rising. Midsize banks, including Silicon Valley Bank itself, successfully lobbied Congress and the Trump administration to be exempted from the regulations attached to too-big-to-fail banks. Venture capitalists sparked a needless panic that annihilated an institution central to their own industry. The Federal Reserve ignored inflation for too long, and the whiplash of its response has become a risk factor all its own. ....... “The idea of persistent low rates has wormed its way into everything: investor thinking, market forecasts, inflation expectations, valuation models, leverage ratios, debt ratings, affordability metrics, housing prices and corporate behavior.” He went on to say that “by truncating downside volatility, forestalling business failures and postponing the day of reckoning, such policies have persuaded investors that risk has gone into hibernation or simply vanished.”.......... Silicon Valley specialized in providing banking to start-ups that had little or no revenue but were nevertheless flush with cash, much of it coming, indirectly, from the Fed’s huge increase in the money supply. Deposits at Silicon Valley Bank grew from $62 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021. And the bank attempted to act conservatively. It squirreled that cash away in what was, in an era of low interest rates, understood as the safest, surest of investments: U.S. Treasuries and other long-term bonds. ........ “A disconnect between finance and the real world lies at the heart of all great bubbles.” .........

The financial economy we’re in was built atop low interest rates.

....... John Maynard Keynes didn’t have much patience for the myth of the rational market. Picking stocks, he wrote, was akin to a game “in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from 100 photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole: so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces that he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.” .......... “One remarkable detail about the S.V.B. debacle is that, in a few hours last Thursday, about $42 billion (one-quarter of S.V.B.’s deposits) left the institution, mostly through digital means.” ........ the Fed’s 2022 stress tests didn’t include interest rate risks. It, too, was fighting the last war. ........... Banking is a critical form of public infrastructure that we pretend is a private act of risk management. .......... the lesson of the past 15 years is that there are no truly private banks

A.I. Is About to Get Much Weirder. Here’s What to Watch For. The Vox writer Kelsey Piper talks about the increasing pace of A.I. development, how it’s changing the world and what to do about it. ....... GPT-4 passes the bar exam in the 90th percentile ........ GPT-4 — it is extremely powerful. .......... since at least 2019, you had people saying this is going to overnight — not today, but in 10 years, overnight — transform our world. We are going to be able to automate any work that can be done remotely. ......... the most concrete version of this is that right now, all of the work done on improving A.I. systems is being done by humans. And it’s a pretty small number of humans. And of course, one of the jobs that they are trying to automate is their job, the job of making better A.I. systems. And when they succeed at that, if they succeed at that, then you can, instead of having hundreds of people working on building better A.I. systems, you can have thousands. ....... You can have a million because you can just make a copy of an A.I. system. That’s like its fundamental economic potential, is that you can make a copy of it. You can make an A.I. system that is as good at writing as you. And then you can have 1,000 of them writing about all different topics. You can make an A.I. system that’s a really good programmer and then you can have all of the programmers working with or possibly replaced by that thing............

at the point where we figure out how to make A.I. researchers out of A.I.‘s, then things will move real fast.

........... we live in a sci-fi world increasingly, but one of the things that I know is striking to a lot of people in this world was when GPT-3 really proved able to code, even though it hadn’t really been trained to do so. ........ then the idea that you would have an A.I. that codes A.I., that’s not a giant leap. That’s simply finishing the sentence in a slightly different way. ......... there is so much commercial incentive to make an A.I. system that can code. Programmers are really expensive. They’re scarce. It’s hard to hire them. ....... there are people right now trying to develop A.I. systems that can develop A.I. systems, because there’s people trying to develop A.I. systems that can do every human job. ........ And they did not, according to them, train GPT-4 specifically to pass any tests. But like GPT-3 and 3.5, it absorbs a lot of language from the internet. It begins to create statistical correlations, for lack of a more precise way of saying it, between terms. And out of that emerges a kind of thing that seems to act in the real world, like understanding. .......... when you try to give GPT-3.5 the bar exam, it is in the 10th percentile of people. When you give it to GPT-4, it’s in the 90th percentile. GPT-4 passes the LSAT at the 88th percentile. GPT-3.5 is at the 40th percentile. ............ it sort of calls into question what intelligence is, right? Like, what is going on in our brains when we think? .......... you can just feed something the entire internet and then make it really, really good at pattern recognition and then prompt it, and it does that. ........ We wouldn’t call a calculator intelligent, even though it gets the right answer if you try to multiply 37 by 25. And frankly, most human beings can’t do 37 by 25 in their mind. ......... these things don’t know why they’re saying what they’re saying.

Putin said a Chinese proposal to end the conflict could be used as the basis of a peace settlement, but the West and Kyiv were not yet ready. ....... The United States has been dismissive of China’s peace plan and said a ceasefire would lock in Russian territorial gains and give Putin’s army more time to regroup.

Netherlands and Japan Said to Join U.S. in Curbing Chip Technology Sent to China A new agreement is expected to expand the reach of U.S. technology restrictions on China issued last year.........



ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! . .



ChatGPT as muse, not oracle What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? Could they serve as on-demand conversation partners for helping us to develop our best thoughts? As a creative muse? ....... how might LLMs work as a tool for asking questions and spurring human creativity? ....... ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested specific challenges, drew connections to related work, and inspired me to think about new corners of the problem. ....... I used some prompting tricks which include frequent cherry-picking among multiple options as the conversation progresses ......... I started out this conversation with a pretty vague idea, and you immediately asked me for a specific example. Next you might tell me about a related idea from your own background knowledge, or push back on my point, or ask a more incisive question. As we go, I’ll develop a clearer view of what I myself mean when I say to use LLMs for asking questions, not providing answers.





Is GPT-4 Worth the Subscription? Here’s What You Should Know the cap was set at 50 messages for four hours. When I returned on Monday morning, the site was glitchy and the cap was lowered to 25 messages for three hours.

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