P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #404
Back on AI
my story 🚀
⛷️ We’ve been preparing our winter clothes this week in anticipation of next week’s big family ski trip. We’ll be skiing Wolf Creek, at the southern tip of the Colorado Rockies.
On average, Wolf Creek receives 430 inches of snow each season, making it the snowiest ski area in Colorado. This season, Wolf Creek appears to be reasserting its claim to that mantle.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all who are celebrating this week!
i’ve been thinking 💭
Humans (especially this human) tend to underestimate the effects of compounding, and the potential of scale. You know I’ve already been a believer in the “AI revolution” happening all around us. This week my position has moved a couple notches toward the “oh wow” direction. Sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to ideas. I am not sure why I’m warmer this week than last, but it may have something to do with my latest readings (some of which are certainly linked below). I think 2025 is going to be another breakout year for AI technology. Who will be the first among us to hire a true AI agent for a job? (If you’ve already done this, please write to me).
fun facts 🙌
How language shapes the way we think. “There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes.” ~ learn more
UK beer baron keeps a collection of vacant historic pubs. “Founded in 1758, Samuel Smith Old Brewery is one of the largest family-owned brewery and pub operations in the UK.” … and … “Since the 1970s, Humphrey Smith has acquired scores of pubs and historic properties around the UK. But time after time, he has left the buildings empty. Why has he allowed his empire to moulder?” ~ learn more
Waymo’s insurer feels really good about their safety. “Today, we’re sharing our new cutting-edge research with Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, analyzing liability claims related to collisions from 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo. … It demonstrates that … the Waymo Driver significantly outperforms both the overall driving population and the latest generation of human-driven vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).” I’m only assuming that Swiss Re is actually on the hook for self-driving claims — I actually have no idea. If any of our insurance geek subscribers have details, please write in. ~ learn more
The oldest forest in the world. “Van Straeten is a paleobotanist at the New York State Museum, and in 2018, he and his team made a remarkable discovery right here in our region: a 385-million-year-old forest, the oldest in the world. Fossils of the forest's root system were uncovered at the bottom of a disused quarry in Cairo, NY, and predated the previously oldest known tree fossils, found in Gilboa, NY, by about five million years.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Scaling test-time compute. The new dimension of AI scaling is here. “Rather than relying on ever-larger pretraining budgets, test-time methods use dynamic inference strategies that allow models to “think longer” on harder problems. A prominent example is OpenAI’s o1 model, which shows consistent improvement on difficult math problems as one increases the amount of test-time compute…” ~ learn more
Up to $3,500 per task. This knocked my socks off. “The new model is good at reasoning in mathematical and programming domains. It scores really well on a particular benchmark called ARC-AGI, which is above the average human. Spend more money on it, up to $3,500 per task, and it approaches the performance of a STEM graduate.” ~ learn more
NVIDIA’s Jetson Orin Nano. Watch Jensen Huang pitch the company’s new $249 consumer AI device from the comfort of his kitchen. For real, watch it. ~ learn more
AND check out the Truffle-1. “Truffle is driven by: > A Mixture of Models (MoM) acting like a CPU; > An application stack that looks like OpenAI Gym Environments; > A 64GB Orin in a glowing case … Local AI also means Infinite Inference Time Compute. Imagine being able to think for 6 months on a hard prompt but paying $0 in inference cost.” ~ learn more
Counting the OOOMs. Hard not to be awed reading this. Teaser: “AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
The not-so-fake citizen. “I was labeled a “fake citizen” because while I had written an article all about it, I hadn’t actually done anything about it. Fair point, actually.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Compounders of off-brand Zepbound lose a product line. The official FDA shortage is over, and compounders have 60-90 days to stop violating Eli Lilly’s patent protection. “The ruling also previews what will happen when semaglutide — the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s (NVO -17.43%) Ozempic and Wegovy — comes off the administration’s drug shortage list.” ~ learn more
The “New Ozempic” falls short. If you wondered why the NVO stock (see above) was down almost 20% yesterday, look no further. “[Its] experimental diabetes and weight-loss drug CagriSema fell short of expectations. The drug did not achieve the projected 25% average weight loss anticipated by the company and analysts. Instead, patients in the phase 3 clinical trial lost an average of 22.7% of their body weight after 68 weeks on the medication.” ~ learn more
A special HSA edition of 5HT. This is really good. “Let’s start with the good. The idea behind HSAs is a fundamentally good one. Introduced in 2003 as part of the Medicare Modernization Act (which also defined the guidelines for high deductible health plans, or HDHPs), HSAs were meant to improve on medical savings accounts, which were only available to people who were self-employed or employees at small businesses.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Will the unions impact Amazon? There’s threats of strikes at 7 facilities this week (or now?). “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters said unionized workers at facilities in New York City; Skokie, Illinois; Atlanta, San Francisco and southern California will join the picket line to seek contracts guaranteeing better wages and work conditions.” If you’re wondering, Amazon is almost entirely non-unionized. “A spokesperson for Amazon said the Teamsters union had for more than a year claimed to represent thousands of Amazon employees and drivers. "They don’t, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative," said spokesperson Kelly Nantel.” Spicy! ~ learn more
Cannabis companies piling into hemp THC-infused beverages. They sell legal weed in so many places now. I even saw a vending machine in Austin. The regular kind of weed is still very much banned in Texas, but this new stuff is unregulated… ~ learn more (free login required)
under the microscope 🔬
The most enigmatic structure in cell biology: the Vault. This is pretty cool to look at — click thru just for animation. “Often missing from science text books due to the mysterious nature of their existence, it has been 40 years since the discovery of these giant, half-empty structures, produced within nearly every cell, of every animals, on the planet.” ~ learn more
Watch ‘ant-like’ robot swarms conquer obstacles and transport heavy loads. “Scientists in South Korea have developed swarms of tiny magnetic robots that work together like ants to achieve Herculean feats, including traversing and picking up objects many times their size.” ~ learn more
Life from non-life. “Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow, has proposed intriguing ideas about creating life-like systems using inorganic materials, particularly metal-based structures. His research focuses on the idea of "chemistry-first" approaches to synthetic biology, where the goal is to create life-like behaviors in non-carbon-based systems.” ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
Phthalates with your ghee. A group called Mamavation commissioned a study at an EPA-certified lab. “100% of ghees analyzed by our laboratory had traces of phthalates. This is a total of 7 detections from 7 ghees products. Ranges of phthalates were from 105 parts per billion (ppb) to 2,702 ppb.” ~ learn more
Grubhub paying big fine for icky behavior toward all. The FTC went after them for harming the whole trifecta — consumers, drivers and restaurants. “The settlement includes a monetary judgment of $140 million against Grubhub, which is partially suspended based on the company’s inability to pay the full amount. Grubhub will be required to pay $25 million, nearly all of which will be used to refund consumers harmed by the company’s conduct. If Grubhub is found to have misrepresented its financial status, the full judgment would become immediately due.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
You have no idea what thermodynamic computing is. Neither do I, but this might catch your attention: “Energy efficiency, while being about 1000x faster than today’s GPUs, you know, you can get up to 100 million X more energy efficiency…” Extropic CEO Gill Verdon presenting for 13 minutes is worth the watch. ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
El Salvador plans to sell or shut its crypto wallet. Recall that they’re the country to made Bitcoin official currency and rolled out a national wallet app to drive adoption. Now it seems they’re trading that wallet app as a condition for a $1.4 billion loan from the IMF. ~ learn more