John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
http://loeber.substack.com
Two weeks ago, I put a lot of money into Google. Why? Everyone's worried about ChatGPT threatening Search. But nobody's internalized that Google is best-positioned to win the AI race for trillions of dollars in revenue.
I remember when OpenAI paid its researchers $175K a year
Interesting piece by Matt Levine on the huge AI salaries: “I tell you what, if Meta Platforms Inc. paid me a $100 million signing bonus to come work for their artificial intelligence business, I would be the most dedicated worker they have ever seen until the check cleared!…
The challenge with high-volume public intellectuals is that you only have the time to read a v small percentage of their work, making it hard to judge Take Dominic Cummings: high volume, says a lot of interesting stuff, well situated— but is he generally right or wrong? Not sure
Super interesting
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
“It’s not X, it’s Y” is a tell for LLM-generated prose, but that’s partially because it’s a really common grammatical construction. Surely a lot of handwritten prose is now being misdiagnosed as LLM-generated. A writer can no longer rely on their humanity to seem authentic.
once you see it you can't unsee it. and it's everywhere
GLP-1s are going to turn a lot of people -- millions -- from unattractive to attractive in the next few years. I wonder if that's going to have any large-scale ripple effects, e.g. marriages that were previously matched in terms of looks soon become very lopsided, etc.
How much you like a city really depends on the season. Ice and snow is tough anywhere. Early or late summer will lend beauty to wherever you go. I think a big part of why people fall in love with Europe so much, for example, is that they go there during their *summer* vacations
A distinct memory: I was going to donate some clothes to Goodwill, and I was booking an Uber there. Then it occurred to me that the cost of the Uber was greater than the cost of buying all these clothes new. Modern supply chains are so efficient that they break your intuition
Wrote a quick blog post on the Amazon thing, bugs me how often it comes up in conversations
Today I learned that Treasure Island in the SF Bay is not just man-made, but was built in a year. We used to be able to do things, etc.
committed utilitarian EAs should oppose shrimp welfare on the basis that it makes their entire movement seem silly and seeds opposition, thereby severely limiting the good that EA can do “Do you want to donate some malaria nets? The EAs say it’s good” “The shrimp people? No way”
There's this unfortunate thing where a lot of the most exciting ideas from EA just don't stick with people at all. EA as a movement has probably prevented a major war's worth of human deaths, but people just brush off malaria stats. Yet the shrimp stuff gets attention.
