~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (546)

Regarding your post yesterday Are LLMs running out of data?, the National Archives has 13.5 billion pieces of paper and only 240 million are digitized. Some of this is classified or otherwise restricted, but surely we can do better than less than 2%. NARA says they aim to increase this to 500 million by the end of 2026. Even with […] The post Thomas Storrs on elastic data supply...

1. This year’s Spanish Scrabble champion can’t speak Spanish and doesn’t read books. 2. The changing ancestry of Russian tsars. 3. Bankers using drugs, the latest version of the story (WSJ). 4. The importance of the opening of the Suez Canal. 5. Is there a Puritan name resurgence in America? 6. From a reader: Perplexity […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Today on the MR Podcast Tyler and I talk about The Quest to Price Options. First, we run through the amazing history of option pricing theory from Bachelier to Black, Scholes and Merton with stops in between for Einstein, Samuelson, Thorpe and Kassouf. We then look at how understanding options changes how one sees the […] The post The Marginal Revolution Podcast–Options! appeared first...

I quite liked this new book by Tae Kim, offering a 245 pp. history of the company.  Here is a useful review from the WSJ. I can note that recently, a bit before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to visit Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara, receive a tour, see some demos, and (a few days […] The post *The Nvidia Way* appeared first on...

Just wanted to ping you about a tool Joshua Gans and I launched publicly today after a year of trials at universities all over the world (and just a stupid amount of work!) which I think is up your alley. Idea is simple: AI should be 1) personalized to the student, 2) personalized to the […] The post Kevin Bryan and Joshua Gans have...

Let us hope the Biden administration does not do too much damage on its way out the door (WSJ): The U.S. is preparing rules that would restrict the sale of advanced artificial-intelligence chips in certain parts of the world in an attempt to limit China’s ability to access them, according to people familiar with the […] The post Midnight regulations on chip access appeared...

1. Using LLMs to simulate public opinion research.  And o1 doing the math Putnam exam. 2. New international trade survey paper by Pol Antras. 3. What Henry Oliver has been reading. 4. English-speaking Indian households.  And better than most Zakir Hussain video clips. 5. Polarization is declining are you happy now? 6. “China’s gross domestic […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

I do not pretend to know what is going on, nor do I think it is aliens.  I do read: The sprawling Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is the latest military installation to report mysterious drones flying over its airspace, The War Zone has learned. “I can confirm small aerial systems were spotted over Wright Patterson between […] The post The epistemics of drone incursions appeared...

Deming, Ong and Summers have a good overview of long-run and very recent changes in the US labor market. Using a measure of occupational titles the authors find: The years spanning 1990-2017 were the most stable period in the history of the US labor market, going back nearly 150 years. It’s a bit too early […] The post Technological Disruption in the US Labor...

This is one of these “don’t bother reading through everything unless you already know what I am talking about” posts. Scott Sumner has a long rebuttal to o1 on monetary theory, offering many criticisms.  He does not like the quality of the answer given by the AI.  But I view the AI more positively here, […] The post o1 is still doing well on...

I saw him perform maybe…a dozen times?  I was set to go again this spring, and would have kept on going for as long as possible.  His two concerts with Shakti I attended were among the very best of my life.  No video clip can do justice to percussion, unfortunately.  He also seemed so young, […] The post Zakir Hussain has indeed passed away...

1. NoVa Civil War NIMBY buffs vs. new data centers. 2. “We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Ilya and many other experts say yes.  I would not dare to disagree with them about AI per se, but I cannot say I am entirely convinced.  Supply is elastic!  That is a time-honored economic truth.  So perhaps the future for traditional scaling is brighter than many of the experts currently are suggesting.  We outsiders […] The post Are LLMs running out of data?...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: This phenomenon is one reason that many office jobs in Nordic countries seem so pleasant. The workers have nice lunches and the use of comfortable and stylish furniture, which they are not taxed on, though of course their take-home pay may be […] The post Tax arbitrage through your business appeared...

Looking to marry someone with $1m+ of short-term capital gains (LA California) for tax savings (I have $1m+ in losses) and split the savings I (unfortunately) lost a bunch of money this year with some risky gambles and have ~$1.2m of context of capital losses. I would like to marry someone with very large ($1m+) […] The post Marriage markets in everything (tax arbitrage!)...

…Corbet can be just as critical of indie movies as he is of studio-backed ones. “Art-house cinema and big tentpole releases are equally algorithmic,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ remade forty-five times. I know why; it’s an extraordinary film.” Still, he went on, “There’s this kind of faux subtlety, […] The post Very good sentences appeared first on...

1. On taste. 2. The dangers of mirrored life? Eli Dourado is not so worried. 3. How are things going with Fermat’s Last Theorem? And are we documenting mathematics properly? 4. Claims made by some Syrians about free enterprise (speculative). 5. What is the evidence on the five-second rule? 6. Where will the Trump crowd […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

Twenty-four minutes, sixteen minutes for the core talk, self-recommending. The post Ilya’s talk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Old Programmer. What makes you say that … or ... by Roger ZimmermanIlya is the 21st century Geoffrey Hinton. Always loved his ... by jbIn reply to Brent Buckner. Thanks for the links. They look ... by Bill BenzonThanks for the links....

An excellent piece, one of the best I have read all year.  Here is the concluding paragraph: We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves […] The post Jennifer Pahlka on DOGE appeared first...

Evidence from the U.S. military: Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered […] The post The Effects of Gender Integration on...

A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal can (i) simulate the task in a testing environment and (ii) impose imperfect recall on the AI, obscuring whether the […] The post A new paper on the economics...

1. Space flight during the 21st century. 2. Cato-suggested DOGE reforms. 3. AI progress is massive but increasingly non-legible. 4. One of the biggest benefits of travel: “IMO one of the biggest benefits of travel is just acquiring a scaffold to hang future knowledge on. Places that had similar embeddings in my mind before I […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

Fareed Zakaria on Freakonomics Radio: ZAKARIA: You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear. You got a flurry of tweets from every major C.E.O. in America — every major tech C.E.O., every bank C.E.O. — fawning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to […] The post Zakaria on Rent Seeking appeared first...

Unusual, relative to other competitions, that the (undisputed?) top 3 players weren’t competing for the title. The quality of play seemed correspondingly lower than other big tournaments. Ding really is quite an anomaly. Some massive holds despite admitting in interviews to not seeing some pretty straightforward lines. Huge props for him to reach game 14 […] The post On the Gukesh match (from my...