If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
I'm curious, what actually happens when you're fined some comically large amount of money? Do you just immediately declare bankruptcy and let the courts carve up your assets? Is that usually the end of that or do you still end up having your wages garnished after bankruptcy?
Doesn't make much sense to compare a model that's not fine tuned to flan models that are fine tuned. Makes more sense to compare to something like T5 base where it's probably a lot more comparable.
My (John McDonnell) conversation with Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht are the Co-founders of Generally Intelligent.
We talked about the state of reinforcement learning and what the field needs to succeed in building autonomous agents, the challenge of founding and building a company with a research-first agenda, which AI technical advances are over- and under-hyped, and much more.
Kanjun thinks language models are _still_ underrated!
My (John McDonnell) conversation with Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht are the Co-founders of Generally Intelligent. We got into the state of reinforcement learning and what the field needs to succeed in building autonomous agents, the challenge of founding and building a company with a research-first agenda, which AI technical advances are over- and under-hyped, and much more.
Kanjun thinks language models are _still_ underrated!
Author here, yeah I agree the real world is very complicated. For any given task I'm imagining something like
1. Use some sort of instruction tuning to get the thing "good enough" that it gives decent results 75% of the time and the other 25% a human has to take over.
2. Use the actual usage data as training input. Punish bad behaviors and show the model what the human did to solve the problem.
3. Use this training loop to progressively have the model take over a larger % of the time.
…and I think if you can't get (1) good enough to be worth using it's going to be really hard to get the loop going.
Selling online without negotiated price is a big change. That should make the dealerships really uncomfortable in the long run… he's kind of saying "oh the dealerships could rent out Mustangs" but is that actually realistic?
I keep hearing this business about the US being a reserve currency and it makes no sense.
First off, lots of other currencies are valuable without being reserve currencies. Swiss franc, Japanese yen, etc. Being a reserve currency probably boosts USD a bit but it's not the only pillar holding the thing up that people imply. If you disagree show your model: You have to believe that value for the euro, GBP, JPY, Swiss Franc is determined by thing X, USA does not have thing X and instead depends on being a reserve currency.
Second, what's the alternative reserve currency? Bitcoin? Don't make me laugh. RMB? Even more ridiculous. Euro? Probably the most realistic contender but seems to have major governance problems. As with democracy, the USD is the worst reserve currency, except for all the alternatives.
The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this year at a fraction of the cost.
NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal.
I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians did a much better job in recent decades!) but it leans into its failures and often has bad incentives. SpaceX fails fast, has great incentives, and has achieved an incredible amount on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.
7% is a low interest rate for an unsecured small business loan.
I'm not 100% sure what the FRED chart you cited means by "Effective Loan Rate for Small Business Administration" but those are most likely collateralized.
Not sure where indeed is getting their numbers, but I can assure you levels.fyi are well calibrated. Glassdoor also has weirdly low estimated salaries.
Not to mention that the beneficiaries are by definition college educated, meaning they are currently or will in the future be among the highest income groups in the country!
> Even though rooftop solar might not be the most economical solution to reduce greenhouse gas footprints, I would argue it's very effective.
Inefficient and expensive systems can do harm, regardless of the good intention behind this law. Rooftop solar has substantial embedded carbon and impacts on the grid that could easily outweigh the small benefits. We need a solution that provides the right incentives to use it when it makes sense, and not use it when it doesn't make sense, rather than a hamfisted blanket mandate.