Medical Roundup #1

Saving up medical and health related stories from several months allowed for much better organizing of them, so I am happy I split these off. I will still post anything more urgent on a faster basis. There’s lots of things here that are fascinating and potentially very important, but I’ve had to prioritize and focus elsewhere, so I hope others pick up various torches.

AI #46: Meet the New Year

[NOTE: I forgot to post this to WP/LW/RSS on Thursday, so posting it now. Sorry about that.]

Will be very different from the old year by the time we are done. This year, it seems like various continuations of the old one. Sometimes I look back on the week, and I wonder how so much happened, while in other senses very little happened.

2024 ACX Predictions: Blind/Buy/Sell/Hold

My 2023 ACX predictions showed a clear lack of confidence in taking on the market. I won 30 markets for an average of +185 each, and lost 12 for an average loss of -185 each1. When one goes 30-12, hitting a 71% mark versus the about 58% average price initially paid, that is worth noticing. It is possible that I generally benefited from 2023 being a year where not much happened outside of AI, but I think it’s time to know what we really think.

2023 Prediction Evaluations

It is that time of the year. One must ask not only whether predictions were right or wrong, whether one won or lost, but what one was and should have been thinking, whether or not good decisions were made, whether the market made sense.

The main subject will be the 2023 ACX Predictions, where I performed buy/sell/hold along with sharing my logic. The numbers quoted are from mid-February 2023, first Manifold, then Metaculus.

AI Impacts Survey: December 2023 Edition

Katja Grace and AI impacts survey thousands of researchers on a variety of questions, following up on a similar 2022 survey as well as one in 2016.

I encourage opening the original to get better readability of graphs and for context and additional information. I’ll cover some of it, but there’s a lot.

AI #45: To Be Determined

The first half of the week was filled with continued talk about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which I covered in its own post. Then that talk seemed to mostly die down,, and things were relatively quiet. We got a bunch of predictions for 2024, and I experimented with prediction markets for many of them.

Note that if you want to help contribute in a fun, free and low-key, participating in my prediction markets on Manifold is a way to do that. Each new participant in each market, even if small, adds intelligence, adds liquidity and provides me a tiny bonus. Also, of course, it is great to help get the word out to those who would be interested. Paid subscriptions and contributions to Balsa are of course also welcome.

I will hopefully be doing both a review of my 2023 predictions (mostly not about AI) once grading is complete, and also a post of 2024 predictions some time in January. I am taking suggestions for things to make additional predictions on in the comments.

Copyright Confrontation #1

Lawsuits and legal issues over copyright continued to get a lot of attention this week, so I’m gathering those topics into their own post. The ‘virtual #0’ post is the relevant section from last week’s roundup.

Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed

Developments around relationships and dating have a relatively small speed premium, also there are once again enough of them for a full post.

The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of you are indeed still single. So the debate continues.

AI #44: Copyright Confrontation

The New York Times has thrown down the gauntlet, suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Others are complaining about recreated images in the otherwise deeply awesome MidJourney v6.0. As is usually the case, the critics misunderstand the technology involved, complain about infringements that inflict no substantial damages, engineer many of the complaints being made and make cringeworthy accusations.

That does not, however, mean that The New York Times case is baseless. There are still very real copyright issues at the heart of Generative AI. This suit is a serious effort by top lawyers. It has strong legal merit. They are likely to win if the case is not settled.

AI #43: Functional Discoveries

We get innovation in functional search. In an even more functional search, we finally get a Nature paper submitted almost two years ago, in which AI discovered a new class of antibiotic. That’s pretty damn exciting, with all the implications thereof.

OpenAI continued its rapid pace of shipping, pivoting for this week to safety. There was a paper about weak-to-strong generalization. I see what they are trying to do. It is welcome, but I was underwhelmed. It and Leike’s follow-up post continue down a path for which I have high skepticism, but the new concreteness gives me more hope that the flaws will be exposed early, allowing adjustment. Or I could be wrong.

OpenAI also had the beta release of Preparedness Framework. That was more exciting. There was a lot of great stuff there, much better than I would have expected, and having a framework at all is a big step too. Lots of work remains, but an excellent start. I took a deep dive.

I was on not one but two podcasts that came out this week, both Clearer Thinking and Humans of Magic. Both contain some AI talk but spend the majority of their time on other things.