What we’re reading (6/21)
“Nvidia’s Success Is The Stock Market’s Problem” (Wall Street Journal). “The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies is down 17% from its November 2021 peak and has made no progress at all this year. In the S&P 500, which includes the biggest companies, the average stock is about where it was at the start of 2022, and more than half of the current constituents are down since then. Worse still, only 198 have managed gains this month, even as the index reached new intraday highs on 11 out of 13 trading days.”
“OpenAI Competitor Anthropic Announces Its Most Powerful AI Yet” (CNBC). “OpenAI competitor Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most powerful artificial intelligence model yet. Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including.”
“Transcendence: Generative Models Can Outperform The Experts That Train Them” (Zhang, et al.). “Generative models are trained with the simple objective of imitating the conditional probability distribution induced by the data they are trained on. Therefore, when trained on data generated by humans, we may not expect the artificial model to outperform the humans on their original objectives. In this work, we study the phenomenon of transcendence: when a generative model achieves capabilities that surpass the abilities of the experts generating its data. We demonstrate transcendence by training an autoregressive transformer to play chess from game transcripts, and show that the trained model can sometimes achieve better performance than all players in the dataset. We theoretically prove that transcendence is enabled by low-temperature sampling, and rigorously assess this experimentally. Finally, we discuss other sources of transcendence, laying the groundwork for future investigation of this phenomenon in a broader setting.”
“New York Governor Signs Bill Regulating Social Media Algorithms, In A US First” (CNN Business). “Big changes are coming for New York’s youngest social media users after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed two bills into law Thursday clamping down on digital platforms’ algorithms and use of children’s data. The unprecedented move makes New York the first state to pass a law regulating social media algorithms amid nationwide allegations that apps such as Instagram or TikTok have hooked users with addictive features. Hochul’s signature comes days after US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels to be applied to social media platforms, fueling a debate about social media’s potential impact on the mental health of users, particularly teens.”
“America's Middle Class Is Shrinking” (Newsweek). “America's middle class, traditionally considered the backbone of the nation and its economic engine, has been shrinking for the past 50 years, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. A study based on government data released by the Washington-based nonpartisan fact tank in late May found that the share of Americans living in middle-class households dropped from 61 percent in 1971 to 51 percent in 2023. During the same time, the share of Americans living in lower income households rose from 27 percent to 30 percent, while that of individuals living in upper income households rose from 11 percent to 19 percent.”
