What we’re reading (5/20)
“What Does The Dow Hitting 40,000 Tell Us?” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). “Unlike many right-wing commentators, I don’t consider the stock market the best indicator of the economy’s health, or even a good indicator. But it is an indicator. And given the state of American politics, with hyperpartisanship and conspiracy theorizing running rampant, I’d argue that this market milestone deserves more attention than it has been getting.”
“ChatGPT Can Talk, But OpenAI Employees Sure Can’t” (Vox). “what has really stirred speculation was the radio silence from former employees. [Ilya] Sutskever posted a pretty typical resignation message, saying ‘I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next.’ [Jan] Leike ... didn’t. His resignation message was simply: ‘I resigned.’ After several days of fervent speculation, he expanded on this on Friday morning, explaining that he was worried OpenAI had shifted away from a safety-focused culture.”
“Press Pause On The Silicon Valley Hype Machine” (New York Times). “It’s a little hard to believe that just over a year ago, a group of leading researchers asked for a six-month pause in the development of larger systems of artificial intelligence, fearing that the systems would become too powerful. ‘Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?’ they asked. There was no pause. But now, a year later, the question isn’t really whether A.I. is too smart and will take over the world. It’s whether A.I. is too stupid and unreliable to be useful.”
“Oracle’s Deadly Gamble” (Business Insider). “Cerner was a total mess. While Ellison was fixated on the wildly exciting possibilities of marrying Cerner's medical records with Oracle's technology, Cerner was failing at even the most elementary tasks of data management. The company's rollout at the VA, which serves 9 million vets, had been a slow-moving catastrophe. One feature of its electronic records system had caused more than 11,000 orders for medical care to disappear into an ‘unknown queue.’ As a result, thousands of patients didn't receive the treatment their doctors had ordered. VA staffers were left in what one hospital leader called ‘a constant state of hypervigilance and distress’ as they scrambled to retrieve and reenter the missing orders, which wound up harming 149 patients. Even worse, errors in the system's underlying design were contributing factors in three deaths.”
“Ivan Boesky, Convicted In 1980s Insider-Trading Scandals, Dies At 87” (Wall Street Journal). “Ivan Boesky, who went to prison and paid a record $100 million fine for a sprawling insider-trading scandal, becoming a symbol of extravagance and corruption on Wall Street, has died at the age of 87…Boesky’s 1986 guilty plea and his cooperation with federal authorities led to the collapse of Michael Milken’s junk-bond empire and the end of the frenzied debt-fueled takeovers of the era that upended many industries. Boesky’s dramatic rise and fall marked a decade that became synonymous with unbridled ambition and even greed.”
