Those of us who have been using Google search for 22 years are /already/ like 100 years older than our biological age. Every year lived with Google at your fingertips is like 5 lived within the limits of paper books. In many ways, I feel older than my father, who is 83. I know the world in much richer, machine-augmented ways than he does, even though I don’t yet have a prosthetic device attached to my skull. I am not smarter than him. I’ve just data-aged more than him.
And:
But when Magnus Carlsen defeated Vishwanathan Anand in 2013, something weird and new was on display. I’m not a chess player, but from the commentary I read, it seems like not only was Carlsen more of a raw talent than Anand (same as Kasparov vs. Karpov) but he was also “older” in a weird way, despite being nominally 21 years younger. Carlsen is young enough to have been effectively “raised by AIs” — the most sophisticated chess AIs available on personal computers when he was growing up in the aughts. His playing style was described as kinda machine-inspired, pushing hard all the way through the end, exploring unlikely and unconventional lines of play where human tradition would suggest conceding.
Host – Roge Karma (Ezra Klein on holiday)
Guest – Katharina Pistor
Capital is actively created by legal system
Landlord rights originating in feudal era have carried over to modern economy, and been applied to more and more assets
Legal precondition: the right to own something defines Capital
Capital has 4 attributes that allow holders to generate / protect wealth over time
1. Priority – competing claims, some have better rights than others
2. Durability – protect and separate certain assets
3. Convertibility – how financial assets attain durability, you can convert riskier assets into safer assets in crisis times
4. Universality – legal techniques will be enforced against the world; state will help protect you
Land and property rights are conflated, but think about all the open land that existed throughout history
When we want to MONETIZE the land, we need to allocate rights and exclude others, and then you can sell it, mortgage it
England took 200 years to enclose its land, turning land into capital through a complicated process
Distinction is between creation of wealth in front end, and distribution of wealth in back end – she’s focused on creation of wealth (the pre-distribution)
That creation process already has the DNA of a certain social structure – but it’s separate from back end, from re-distribution
Creation of capital of all types – whether land or today’s complex financial instruments – it’s all the same legal DNA
Land was most important source of wealth until 19th-20th century
IP rights is a newer type of asset – patents, copyrights, trademarks – these are legal inventions, enforceable IOUs
But the same general process (that applied to land) was applied to IP
But these same legal processes are responsible for a lot of inequalities and historic injustice
Corporations are separate legal persons
Creatures of the law, separate from its founders and management
Corporations live longer than humans
Limited liability rights
Broadens access to capital
Incentivizes risk taking
But in recent times, limited liability has changed in how its applied
When company fails, workers and creditors will lose
Sometimes this is abused – eg, a corporations can create another corporation – but if this subsidiary goes under, legal shield protects the main corporation
Lehman when it failed – had 200+ legal entities 60 entities in Delaware alone, 30 in UK
Why? Raise more debt finance, play tricks to funnel profits and shelter liabilities
eg, main entity shareholders get all profits and dividends, but the subsidiaries take the losses (ultimately the creditors)
If he interviews job applicants who say their goal is movies or some other thing, instant rejection – YouTube should be THE goal
$100K is around max prize giveaway that most captures attention – above that, diminishing returns
First time in western social media you can go viral on all platforms with same content (short viral video)
Viral videos is a teachable skill
Lex: crucial part of your success is idea generation – others don’t put enough ideas on paper
Every 6 months, you should look back and be embarrassed by your old videos – otherwise you’re not learning enough
Need to be endlessly learning – will go on walks and call people to learn stuff
If new channel, what should you do?
“Just fail”
Your first 10 videos will not get views
Just start uploading Make 100 videos and improve something every time – better script, better editing, better thumbnails
Maybe by 101st video you’ll have some views and can get serious
No such thing as a perfect video – every little thing can be improved
Create best ideas – then determine if they’re doable (don’t let practicality stop you)
eg, when they gave away a $10M island, really had to find creative methods to find a worthwhile island
It’s about intuition – you know your viewers the best, you spent most time on your content, trust your gut
His typical viewer: “a teenager boy that plays video games”
But if 30% of his viewers are women, and a video gets 100M views, that’s still 30M women (!)
Elon said “We want to limit the amount of regrettable minutes people spend on Twitter”
Lex: “I follow the thread of curiosity”
Lex: “I’m against centralized censorship and shadow banning”
Beast: agrees shadow banning should be transparent, you should let people know
Antarctica video
-during summertime the sun never goes down
-named a mountain that wasn’t named
-lucked out with warm weather
Process eg, Stand in circle for 100 days
-figure out idea, act on inspiration
-need independent crew for those 100 days
-need 10 cameras rolling all times – trailer, cameras, house
Process, 100 adults v 100 kids
-did 100 boys v 100 girls, people loved it, wanted to do more
-lots of shooting problems eg, room with bad acoustics
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Earlier on, if video did bad, he’d be devastated, cry over it
Now he’s much better about it, just figure out how to improve and move on
Earlier on, spent 24 hours on deserted island – but didn’t like the footage
So scraped it, went back and spent another 24 hours LOL
Videos where weather is very hot, or filmed on water – he suffers a lot more (gets sea sick)
“Once you get over fear that you’ll wake up one day and be irrelevant”
Some creators go a little mentally insane during this process
Subscribers is vanity metric – doesn’t really correlate with views
If goal is to be super successful entrepreneur, you either need be WORKING or recharging / resting to recover
Need to find balance
Used to overwork and hate rest / downtime
Optimal day – going down list of his 8 companies, go thru biggest pain points for each (eg, Beast Burgers, Beast Charity, etc)
Delegated most day to day to his teams
For younger first time biz owners
-whenever he hires from traditional industries (eg, Disney) – they just don’t get it – YT is its own new thing
-doesn’t wanna get trapped in bubble of what works today
-shouldn’t start experimenting only when you plateau / start declining – could get even worse
–imperative to experiment while you’re still growing / winning
Beast Burgers
-just started as an experiment, didn’t plan to run a restaurant chain
Always wanted to do Feastables, hasn’t been any innovation in American snacks in a long time
“Feastables is just crushing”
Wal-Mart – didn’t think they’d do this kind of revenue
Had to stop promoting for awhile due to supply chain issues
Expect to 10x in 2023
Hosts: Daniel Whitenack (Data scientist), Chris Benson (Lockheed Martin)
All about ChatGPT
Chris – feels collaborative, like having a partner
Lots of structuring in the output – bulleted lists, paragraphs
Humans get things wrong / incomplete all the time – yet we’re holding AI to a higher standard
Shifting to more open access – maybe in response to open source AI products like Stable Diffusion
Chris – expect to see more “fast followers” to ChatGPT soon
TECHNICALS
GPT language models – it’s a “causal language model” not a “mass language model”
Trained to predict next word in sequence of words, but based on all previous words Auto-regressive – predicts next thing based on all previous things, and so forth
That’s why the text develops as if a human were typing
Few shot learning – can change answer style based on your questions and prompts
Zero shot = input that a model has never seen before
Few shot = provide a small number of inputs / prompts to guide the model
ChatGPT – trained with “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF)
Human preference is key part of this
How does it scale?
Human feedback is expensive 3 steps:
1. Pre-train a language model (aka a “policy”) – not based on human feedback
2. Gather human preference data to train a reward model – outputs prediction of human preference
3. Fine tune (1) based on (2)
eg for ChatGPT,
(1) is GPT3.5 (for ChatGPT)
(2) outputs data based on (1), add human labels of preference, and train a “reward model”
GPT3 is 100B+ parameters ChatGPT reward model is 6B parameters
For (2), goal is to reduce harm by adding human feedback into the loop
For (3), will penalize if it strays too far from (1), and score output according to (2)
Try only to make small iterative changes (adiabatic)
What’s next?
Open research questions – (2) architecture and process hasn’t been fully optimized, lot to explore there
Will be new language models coming (eg, GPT4, Microsoft, Google) – trying different (1) and (2)
Chris Albon tweet:
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Sci-fi got it wrong.
We assumed AI would be super logical and humans would provide creativity.
But in reality it’s the opposite. Generative AI is good at getting an approximately correct output, but if you need precision and accuracy you need a human.
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If keep life at safe distance, prevents you from seeing world in truly clear way
Marx – if his predictions were wrong, it may be because he never truly lived a worker’s life
After working in factories, feeling affliction firsthand, ideas grow more radical
People hide behind the abstract
While many out there are truly suffering and starving
We’re also starving in “needs of the soul”
14 of these needs
1. Order – need some order to function, just like food
2. Liberty
3. etc Many of these are in tension with each other – and need balance
Each contributes to peoples’ psychological needs
Biggest need that is sabotaged by modern society – “the need for roots”, like a plant
Any human being that is truly independent?
No, inseparable from society
People get roots from active participation in life of community
Colonialism destroys this culture and solidarity
In her time, France subjugated foreign cultures, tried to replace with French culture
This transplanting is like uprooting a plant, destroying the roots
Codified human rights won’t matter to a person like Hitler
Forced prostitution is wrong and we all agree on it – but it’s far deeper than legal rights
Preferred discussing human NEEDS rather than rights
Separating people from their own culture, roots is de-humanizing
Revolution was the new opiate of the masses – but very little comes out of it
After her factory experience, she discovered a new way to think about ethics
What makes someone sacred?
Is it their body? Their unique personality?
The way forward is a spiritual revolution
Cultivation of a new kind of attention Renounce the ego Receive the world in a more universal, impersonal way De-creating biases, assumptions, that we bring to bear
This is a spiritual transformation
Connect to human beings on a universal shared level, instead of at level of personality or physicality
Similar to Catholic sacrament of Eucharist
This new form of attention is a new lens to see the world
Become an antenna for God to communicate with
An experience to feel closer connection to the universe