Author: Joy Buchanan

Zuckerberg wants to solve general intelligence

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Why does Mark Zuckerberg want to solve general intelligence? Well, for one thing, if he doesn’t, one of his competitors will have a better chatbot. Zuckerberg wants to be the best (and good for him). At his core, he wants to build the best stuff (even the world’s best cattle on his ranch).

If AGI is possible, it will get built. I’m not the first person to point out that this is a new space race. If America takes a pause, then someone else will get there first. However, I thought the Zuck interview was an interesting microcosm for why AGI, if possible, will get made.

… We started FAIR about 10 years ago. The idea was that, along the way to general intelligence or whatever you wanna call it, there are going to be all these different innovations and that’s going to just improve everything that we do. So we didn’t conceive of it as a product. It was more of a research group. Over the last 10 years it has created a lot of different things that have improved all of our products. …
There’s obviously a big change in the last few years with ChatGPT and the diffusion models around image creation coming out. This is some pretty wild stuff that is pretty clearly going to affect how people interact with every app that’s out there. At that point we started a second group, the gen AI group, with the goal of bringing that stuff into our products and building leading foundation models that would power all these different products.
… There’s also basic assistant functionality, whether it’s for our apps or the smart glasses or VR. So it wasn’t completely clear at first that you were going to need full AGI to be able to support those use cases. But in all these subtle ways, through working on them, I think it’s actually become clear that you do. …
Reasoning is another example. Maybe you want to chat with a creator or you’re a business and you’re trying to interact with a customer. That interaction is not just like “okay, the person sends you a message and you just reply.” It’s a multi-step interaction where you’re trying to think through “how do I accomplish the person’s goals?” A lot of times when a customer comes, they don’t necessarily know exactly what they’re looking for or how to ask their questions. So it’s not really the job of the AI to just respond to the question.
You need to kind of think about it more holistically. It really becomes a reasoning problem. So if someone else solves reasoning, or makes good advances on reasoning, and we’re sitting here with a basic chat bot, then our product is lame compared to what other people are building. At the end of the day, we basically realized we’ve got to solve general intelligence… (emphasis mine)

Credit to Dwarkesh Patel for this excellent interview. Credit to M.Z. for sharing his thoughts on topics that affect the world.

“we’ve got to solve general intelligence” If a competitor solves AGI first, then you are left behind. No one would not want general intelligence on their team, on the assumption that it can be controlled.

I would like the AGI to do my chores for me, please. Unfortunately, it’s more likely to be able to write my blog posts first.

Joy on The Inductive Economy podcast

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I got to be a guest of Vignesh Swaminathan who is based in Mumbai. It’s fun to have a deep conversation with someone on the other side of the world and share it with the whole internet (and the AI’s).

Apple podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding-economics-through/id1719744197?i=1000652541934

Blogpost with links and timestamps: https://www.inductive.in/p/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding

The first 10 minutes are about Tyler’s GOAT book. Vignesh asked me to name some influential economists who did not make Tyler’s list.

Around minute 12 we talk about the experimental economics methodology.

The middle (minute 15-42) is a discussion of the pipeline into tech and my Willingness to be Paid paper. He adds his perspective on tech jobs in India.

Around minute 42, Vignesh makes a switch over to the Barbie movie and then Oppenheimer. He observes that Oppenheimer is a “brand.” I speculate on careers in Barbieland. We recorded this before Christmas of ’23, right after everyone had seen these summer movies. Both movies ended up in the 2024 Oscars awards ceremony.

I predicted that people will eventually be able to create a custom movie from a verbal prompt, because of the AI content revolution. Here in Spring of ’24 that has already come true. Sora is shocking everyone and even caused Tyler Perry to halt a physical film studio expansion.

Around minute 55, we pivot to Hayek and competition, which leads to a postmortem on Google Plus (RIP).

1:05-1:16 features intellectual property and my IP experiment with Bart Wilson

Ended with rapid-fire and personal questions.

Skimming back through this conversation has me thinking about tech work. The market for IT workers and programmers has evolved since I first started the project that became “Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?”

I like pointing people all the way back to this report on jobs from 1958. Learn to Code has been good advice for a long time, for the people who can tolerate the work. That does not mean it will be true forever, but I would argue that it is still true today.

Silicon Valley as a career might have peaked around 2021. It’s not going away, but it might not be growing anymore in terms of the number of talented people who can be absorbed there. (Might I suggest Huntsville instead?)

The WSJ recently ran a story “Tech Job Seekers Without AI Skills Face a New Reality: Lower Salaries and Fewer Roles”

The rise of artificial intelligence is affecting job seekers in tech who, accustomed to high paychecks and robust demand for their skills, are facing a new reality: Learn AI and don’t expect the same pay packages you were getting a few years ago.

Jobs in areas like telecommunications, corporate systems management and entry-level IT have declined in recent months, while roles in cybersecurity, AI and data science continue to rise, according to Janco’s data. The average total compensation for IT workers is about $100,000, making the position a target for continued cost-cutting.

One reason tech jobs are less attractive than some other professional paths is that the skillset changes. We mentioned this as a drawback in our policy paper. Computers are constantly changing. Vignesh and I discuss the issue of risk. I suggested that companies could pay less for talent if they were willing to offer packages that carry less risk of getting fired.

Nevertheless, tech still has decent job prospects. An unemployment rate of about 5% is about normal for work, even though tech had seen lower rates at the peak of demand. I do not know what programming as a career will look like in 10 years, but I’d say the same about screenwriting and live sports commentary. The LLMs are coming for everything or nothing or something in between.

I’ve been on tour (regionally) with our ChatGPT paper and getting opportunities to query different audiences about their LLM use. Last week I talked to a young man in our business school who is using ChatGPT to write SQL code at his job. I said in the podcast that I would still advise young people in Alabama to learn to code, even if they are not going to move to Silicon Valley. I think coding is more fun in the LLM-age or at least less miserable.

Hanging the curtains back up

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

There were not a lot of successful female writers and academics in the 1970’s. Maybe I underestimate how many there were, but obviously they would have been in the minority. I’m reading a chapter on the anthropologist Mary Douglas who somehow combined raising three children with remaining active in academia. I read a few pages while helping at the Cub Scout camping trip.

In one of her books, Douglas added an apology for professional duties eclipsing domestic ones: ‘All our things have fallen into neglect while I have been writing, floors unpolished, curtains falling off hooks. I am grateful to my family for their patience.’

page 130 of The Slain God by Timothy Larsen

It is irksome to hear this woman apologizing for working
what is essentially two jobs and performing so well at each one. (I wouldn’t want
to put anyone off reading Larsen, who admires her very much.)

I had planned to do this a year ago, but then I ended up
writing papers on artificial intelligence and doing a bunch of related speaking
engagements. (I love it – anyone who wants a speaker on ChatGPT should invite
me out.) Anyway, I’m going to try to do the equivalent of fixing the
“curtains falling off hooks.” The curtains really do fall down. You
could have a well-functioning household and drawers full of clothes that fit
your children… and then if someone is not engaged in constant warfare… it
will all fall apart in about 6 months.



Cowen on Smith at AdamSmithWorks

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I’m at AdamSmithWorks this week with “TYLER COWEN ON THE GREATEST ECONOMIST OF ALL TIME (GOAT)“

To be on Cowen’s short list is a compliment. Of all the thinkers and writers in recorded history, Adam Smith is one of only six writers that Cowen gives serious consideration to. Next, readers will ask, “Did our guy win?”

Tyler’s book will make no one happy because he does not take anyone’s side unequivocally. A huge fan of Adam Smith (and I know several) might have wanted a book about why Adam Smith is designated as the GOAT. I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone who hasn’t read it. What you will get is very interesting and thoughtful, so I hope you’ll read the manuscript* sometime, even if your guy doesn’t win.

*completely free – can get it on your Kindle somehow I heard

My previous posts about Tyler’s GOAT book:

Tyler Supporting Women in the GOAT book 

What We Are Learning about Paper Books  – I did write the AdamSmithWorks post in collaboration with the GPT version of the book, as a first step, along with my own memory of having read the book. And then, secondly, I consulted the book manuscript. The GPT performed fairly well… considering that it’s a GPT. I suppose I thought that interrogating the GPT would save me time. However, I can now say authoritatively that Tyler’s actual writing is so much better than what you will get from the GPT. Among other things, the GPT is much more boring than Tyler’s actual manuscript.

Classroom activities for teaching Monetary Policy

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I got lucky last week. I saw this tweet go by just in time to learn about some activities the I added to my unit on monetary policy.

It’s called the Monetary Policy Unit Plan

https://learn.mru.org/lesson-plans/monetary-policy-unit

I’m not using all of it, but it’s very helpful to see what other instructors have come up with to make teaching monetary policy more fun and more effective. You have to sign up to access it, using your official instructor email address.

It can feel relatively easy to talk to students about their role in the economy as consumers. It is relatively hard to lecture about central banking, because it is less relatable to everyday life. These exercises help us get into the “mind” of a bank.

Thank you to Econiful and Marginal Revolution University for making these resources available. There will probably be an equivalent for fiscal policy produced in the future.

Notes on ChatGPT from Sama with Lex

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This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #419 with Sam Altman 2. Sam Altman is (once again) the CEO of OpenAI and a leading figure in artificial intelligence. Two parts of the conversation stood out to me, and I don’t mean the gossip or the AGI predictions. The links in the transcript will take you to a YouTube video of the interview.

(00:53:22) You mentioned this collaboration. I’m not sure where the magic is, if it’s in here or if it’s in there or if it’s somewhere in between. I’m not sure. But one of the things that concerns me for knowledge task when I start with GPT is I’ll usually have to do fact checking after, like check that it didn’t come up with fake stuff. How do you figure that out that GPT can come up with fake stuff that sounds really convincing? So how do you ground it in truth?

Sam Altman(00:53:55) That’s obviously an area of intense interest for us. I think it’s going to get a lot better with upcoming versions, but we’ll have to continue to work on it and we’re not going to have it all solved this year.

Lex Fridman(00:54:07) Well the scary thing is, as it gets better, you’ll start not doing the fact checking more and more, right?

Sam Altman(00:54:15) I’m of two minds about that. I think people are much more sophisticated users of technology than we often give them credit for.

Lex Fridman(00:54:15) Sure.

Sam Altman(00:54:21) And people seem to really understand that GPT, any of these models hallucinate some of the time. And if it’s mission-critical, you got to check it.

Lex Fridman(00:54:27) Except journalists don’t seem to understand that. I’ve seen journalists half-assedly just using GPT-4. It’s-

Sam Altman(00:54:34) Of the long list of things I’d like to dunk on journalists for, this is not my top criticism of them.

As EWED readers know, I have a paper about ChatGPT hallucinations and a paper about ChatGPT fact-checking. Lex is concerned that fact-checking will stop if the quality of ChatGPT goes up, even though no one really expects the hallucination rate to go to zero. Sam takes the optimistic view that humans will use the tool well. I suppose that Altman generally holds the view that his creation is going to be used for good, on net. Or maybe he is just being a salesman who does not want to publicly dwell on the negative aspects of ChatGPT.

I also have written about the tech pipeline and what makes people shy away from computer programming.

Lex Fridman(01:29:53) That’s a weird feeling. Even with a programming, when you’re programming and you say something, or just the completion that GPT might do, it’s just such a good feeling when it got you, what you’re thinking about. And I look forward to getting you even better. On the programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you think humans will be doing 5, 10 years from now?

Sam Altman(01:30:19) I mean, a lot, but I think it’ll be in a very different shape. Maybe some people will program entirely in natural language.

Someday, the skills of a computer programmer might morph to be closer to the skills of a manager of humans, since LLMs were trained on human writing.

In my 2023 talk, I suggested that programming will get more fun because LLMs will do the tedious parts. I also suggest that parents should teach their kids to read instead of “code.”

The tedious coding tasks previously done by humans did “create jobs.” I am not worried about mass unemployment yet. We have so many problems to solve (see my growing to-do list for intelligence). There are big transitions coming up. Sama says GPT-5 will be a major step up. He claimed that one reason OpenAI keeps releasing intermediate models is to give humanity a heads up on what is coming down the line.

What the Superintelligence can do for us

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These days, when I blog-rant about my everyday life, I have increasingly ended on the thought “AGI fixes this.”

Yesterday, I mused whether AGI would be my personal chef? : Where Can You Still Buy a Great Dinner in the US?

Would AGI help me match my clothes that I no longer want to humans who can use them, to cut down on pollution?: Joy’s Fashion Globalization Article with Cato

Would AGI make no mistakes about weather-related school closure?: Intelligence for School Closing

Can AGI book summer camp for me?

As a millennial woman working through my 30’s, I increasingly see social media posts from my friends like this one:

One of the difficult things about infertility, for my friends going through it, is the uncertainty. Modern medicine seems legitimately short on information and predictive analytics for this issue. So… AGI to the rescue, someday?

All I’m writing about tonight is that I have created a growing to-do list, over roughly the past year, for the AGI. Would something smart enough to do all of the above be dangerous? I wouldn’t rule it out. As pure speculation, it feels safer to have an AI that is specifically devoted to being a personal chef but which strictly cannot do anything else beside manage food. An AI that could actually do all of those things… would be quite powerful.

Here’s me musing about the AGI rising up against us, written after watching the TV show Severance: Artificial Intelligence in the Basement of Lumon Industries

Where Can You Still Buy a Great Dinner in the US?

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Last year, Jeremy wrote “Where Can You Still Buy an Affordable Home in the US?” He pointed out a few metro areas in the US that are not classified as “unaffordable”. All of the biggest cities have nice amenities such as great restaurants but are very expensive.

There is such a thing as an American town that is too small to find a good restaurant. But you don’t have to go all the way to the middle of New York or Chicago to find interesting menus. If you love food and good creative restaurants, there are some smaller cities that can deliver. Parking and hotels should be cheaper, so you can spend more of your money on food. (I don’t have any data on hand with regard to how menu prices in Birmingham compare to menu prices in NYC. Presumably they are lower here where labor is relatively cheaper.)

This list of cities was compiled in 2022. Birmingham, AL is on the list.  “10 Unexpected U.S. Cities With a Surprisingly Good Food Scene” 

I can recommend the following: “The 30 Best Restaurants In Birmingham, Alabama” (Southern Living, 2023)

To get a bit more recent national data: “Surging restaurant prices are making dining out a luxury” (CNN, 2024)

I think I care more about food quality than “service.” Nothing has bothered me about the gradual nation-wide shift away from table service toward placing my order at the counter or from a computer screen.

I don’t do much with them, but Jeremy is an advocate for restaurant apps. If you track deals and order directly through the app, you might save around 10% on low-to-mid quality restaurant food.

On a side note, I’m wondering if and when AI will approach the service level of a personal chef. I wish I could outsource all family meals to someone else. I have experimented with grocery delivery and “meal kits” and recipe apps. Nothing ever feels like a personal chef, although some of those services are nice to have. I feel like a superintelligence could encompass all of the restaurant apps, and grocery delivery and family meal planning together. I wish I could just enter a list of taste and health preferences and then not think about it anymore.

Let parents pay to take kids out of school

Joy Buchanan7 Comments

Elementary school kids can miss a day of school. If they are doing something wholesome and constructive on their day off, no one would claim that it hurts the child who is doing the alternate activity.

Does it hurt other people? There is an ungated section of this Matt Yglesias post concluding that when rich people pull their kids out of school it “… ultimately harms less-privileged children.” For now, assume that is true. We could internalize the externality, like surge pricing on toll roads. Let parents pay a fine to take their kids out of school. The fine would fund programs that help everyone. Let parents pay back into the public good. Charge $25/day which could go toward buying classroom supplies for the inconvenienced teacher.

This flexibility might lead to richer families keeping their kids in conventional schools, which seems like a good thing. No one would have to pay the fine. There is and would still be a system for excusing absences due to unavoidable things like surgery.

Requiring a doctor’s note for excused absences is already a tax. Requiring a parent to miss half a day of work to go take a child to the doctor is more punishing than paying a $25 fine, for many families.

The fine could even increase with the number of missed days. Only super rich families would be able to afford to take 2 children on a 3-week trip. I wouldn’t be able to afford it. But I wouldn’t mind if our school generated revenue off of those who can. Those people would probably donate a new playground in exchange for a plaque.

Is another example where it would be reasonable to charge people to not use something? In a way, insurance companies try to fine people for not using the gym. Running with this example, paid private schools could easily call this a tuition reimbursement for high attendance. Unfortunately, I think it would be politically impossible to implement in public schools.

Videos for Teaching Inflation in 2024

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I’m teaching principles of macro this semester. Making macroeconomics sound important to students is partly about explaining that recessions are painful and significant.

As Alex Tabarrok says, “The Great Depression is Over!”  Maybe Gen Z can appreciate the significance of the Great Depression, but it is history. Gen Z has heard of the Great Recession, but keep in mind that a student who is 20-y-o in 2024 was 4 in 2008. It’s a weird one, but there has been a recession more recently. The Covid Recession is what I like to link to, when possible, in class.

To teach the inflation chapter this week, I’m using video clips that I’ll put up here as resources for others.

To start off the inflation chapter and bring in a more global perspective, I show: “Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hits triple digits”  This 2-minute news clip was produced by Al Jazeera. They talk about lending and policy in addition to retail price increases.

After we have gone through some definitions, I show two clips of an economic forecast that was recorded in 2021. I don’t usually show such long clips in class, but I’m relying on dramatic irony to make it interesting. The students know the path that inflation took from 2020 to 2024, but Dr. Doti in the video does not. I stop the video occasionally to point out connections to our textbook.

Chapman University’s 2021 Economic Forecast Update was presented virtually on Wednesday, June 16, 2021.

Dr. Jim Doti predicts that an unprecedented increase in the money supply after Covid will lead to inflation. He’s not right about everything, but that’s what makes it so interesting. Right after showing students the quantity theory of money equation, I can show them someone trying to apply it from about minute 25 to about minute 35. (don’t start the video from minute 1)

Then, I go back to my lecture and introduce the Fisher effect. Next, we watch about minute 38 to minute 43 of the 2021 forecast because of the direct connection of inflation to interest rates. Partly this just helps illustrate how messy the real world is.

Also, I pull from one of Jeremy’s 2023 posts to illustrate the long run neutrality of money. “The Rate of Inflation is Falling, But Prices are Still Rising (And So are Wages)“