Skepsis #51: The world will change even faster
Some good reads and links for the week; more on AI, technology, lifehacks and raising exceptional children.
OpenAI releases GPT-4
A lot has happened over the past few months in AI, and now that speed of change is bound to accelerate further with the launch of GPT-4, which is looking really impressive. It's several times more capable across a wide range of tasks, and it's trained with many more parameters. But the biggest noticeable improvement is that the model now also supports both visual and text-based input. This means you can, for example, ask detailed questions about complex images, and ChatGPT can write intelligent responses. Or you can input a rough paper sketch of a website and get ChatGPT to create the HTML and CSS code for it. GPT-4 still has a lot of the same fundamental limitations and issues as previous models (like hallucinations), but I'm still not worried it will take all our jobs anytime soon. In any case, we have some very interesting times ahead of us, for better or worse.
What happened to SVB?
What many people feared could turn into another Lehman Brother's-style banking crisis seems to have been averted due to swift action from the Fed. The main reason behind the bank run is that SVB owned a lot of long-term fixed-rate treasury bonds (which drop in value when interest rates rise), meaning that they couldn't really sell these assets to cover the increasing amount of withdrawals from customers (that increased sharply all of a sudden).
When interest rates go up, the price of long-maturity fixed-rates bonds (for example, 10-year Treasury bonds) goes down. So the fact that interest rates went up meant that a lot of banks saw the value of their assets drop, making them more vulnerable to runs. That was why there was a chance of the SVB panic spreading beyond the tech sector. And that is why the government acted so forcefully
Setting aside the specifics of the SVB situation, I think this is an interesting lesson about how the world economy is changing with increasing inflation and interest rates in ways that many companies and people seem completely unprepared to deal with.
Lifehacks
The blogger Alexey Guzey shares a list of life hacks in the style of Kevin Kelly that has been making the rounds recently; here are some that resonated with me:
seek ground truth and poke reality. don’t settle for proxies or for winning arguments.
lots of alpha in low status
people think that others have same motivations as them
feeling stupid now is better than feeling stupid in 10 years
risks are less risky than you think. take as many as you can.
be sus whenever you want to read & research instead of figuring something out yourself. it’s usually avoidance caused by fear.
the richest people lose the most money, the most connected people get rejected the most, the most successful people fail the most
Technological change over the long run
Speaking of AI improving faster and faster. It's easy to get myopic, given how we tend to take the current state of things for granted and think that “things have always been this way”. But when you take a step back and look at how fast the world has changed over the past decades and centuries, you can't help but realize just how much the world is bound to change in the future at a faster and faster rate.
The great AI debate
Sam Harris speaks to computer scientist Stuart Russel and scientist Gary Marcus about AI, the alignment problem, and the potential risks of general artificial intelligence (AGI). One of the most interesting and challenging conversations I've heard about this topic so far. It will leave you pondering these questions for days - as you should.
Childhoods of exceptional people
What did the childhoods of many exceptional people look like, and what are some common themes that emerged from that? Given a few dozen or so exceptional writers (Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy), mathematicians (John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing), philosophers (Bertrand Russell, René Descartes), and composers (Mozart, Bach) among others, the author Henrik Karlsson reaches the conclusion that what seemed to have mattered for them was a combination of: access to other exceptional people/role models from an early age, plenty "free time" to explore their curiosity wherever it takes them, 1-on-1 tutoring and apprenticeships and of course the fact that they were also very gifted and talented individuals from the start.
Stay safe out there,
/Phil