Week 52 of 2023- W522023
All the open browser tabs I get to... Back to the Drawing Board
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current or any previous employer. This blog may also contain links to other websites or resources. I am not responsible for the content on those external sites or any changes that may occur after the publication of my posts.
End Disclaimer
“There are a thousand ways to be smart.” -Jeff Bezos
News
Bionic Underwriting?
Chief Algorithmic Underwriting Officers?
What’s going to happen to all the Brokers?
AIML
The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.’s Use of Copyrighted Work
NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances
Emergent abilities and grokking: Fundamental, Mirage, or both?
How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun
Visualizing Expert Firing Frequencies in Mixtral MoE
Advanced RAG Techniques: an Illustrated Overview
Painting
The Concert, Jan Vermeer, Year 1664, Whereabouts unknown,
Stolen from the Gardner Museum March 18, 1990
Crypto
This N.Y.U. Student Owns a $6 Million Crypto Mine. His Secret Is Out.
Cyber
4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever
Markets
‘The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in’- Most Read FT Interview of 2023
The Year’s 10 Biggest VC Funding Rounds
The Man Preparing for a Berkshire Hathaway Without Warren Buffett
Put These Charts on Your Wall … 2023 Edition
Six charts that defined the markets in 2023
Taser maker Axon has a moving backstory. It's mostly a myth
Misc
10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me, Sam Altman
Frailty Transition: Forecasting using Markov Chain Simulation
Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers
The Verge’s favorite books from 2023
Papers
Unrealistic Optimism About Future Life Events: A Cautionary Note
Study Objective: Challenges the perception of "unrealistic optimism" in risk judgments about future life events.
Key Argument: Suggests observed optimism could be statistical artifacts, not indicative of actual human bias.
Focus Areas: Examines statistical reasons, like scale attenuation and minority undersampling, affecting study results.
Critical Findings:
Perfect predictors show seeming optimism due to response scale limitations.
Rare events' statistical representation can lead to apparent optimism.
Implications: Questions the magnitude, mechanisms, and understanding of optimistic bias in risk perception.
Conclusion: Calls for reevaluation of moderators and methodologies in optimism research, highlighting the need for more accurate interpretations of data.
Positional Description Matters for Transformers Arithmetic
Focuses: on the limitations of transformers in arithmetic, particularly influenced by positional encoding.
Key investigations: include classical multiplication, addition extrapolation, and natural language context arithmetic.
Findings: Modified training enhances performance in multiplication and addition tasks.
Suggests improvements: in arithmetic tasks can be achieved by adjusting positional encoding and data formats.
Movie
Oppenheimer: My cinephile + smart friends Venn diagram intersection are generally divided on this movie. I really enjoyed it. These players have been studded throughout my reading for so many years- Oppy, Feynman, Teller, Bethe, Fermi, Gödel, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Vannevar Bush, even Klaus Fuchs, it was great to see how Nolan brings them together and spins all the plates in the air at once. It’s crazy to think that this even happened. Manhattan project was really the Scientific Super Friends of the time coming together to either stave off or accelerate nuclear armageddon.
AI represents another ‘Promethean Point’ similar to the adoption and application Nuclear energy.
There might be a time not to far down the line where an AI Manhattan project of some type is needed.
Some more:
Who’s Who in Oppenheimer: A Guide to 36 Scientists, Soldiers, and Reds
Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer