City Journal: “At the center of Superabundance is the argument that human beings are not a drain on resources—they are, instead, the most valuable resource. Humans have come up with countless ways to live more efficiently and support more human life. A large population is key to this innovation: more people mean more ideas and larger markets to try out those ideas. This dynamic is fostered by the division of labor and development of human capital, possible only in sufficiently large populations. Tupy and Pooley see the price of a resource as more important than its quantity. Quantity is imperfectly known and is thus an inadequate measure of abundance; we know much more today, for example, about where to find and extract fossil fuels than we did even a few decades ago. By contrast, price reflects not only current supply but also beliefs about future supply: a price decline suggests belief that a good is abundant and will remain so.”
How ChatGPT actually works: “Since its release, the public has been playing with ChatGPT and seeing what it can do, but how does ChatGPT actually work? While the details of its inner workings have not been published, we can piece together its functioning principles from recent research…ChatGPT is the latest language model from OpenAI and represents a significant improvement over its predecessor GPT-3. Similarly to many Large Language Models, ChatGPT is capable of generating text in a wide range of styles and for different purposes, but with remarkably greater precision, detail, and coherence. It represents the next generation in OpenAI’s line of Large Language Models, and it is designed with a strong focus on interactive conversations. The creators have used a combination of both Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, but it is the Reinforcement Learning component specifically that makes ChatGPT unique. The creators use a particular technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which uses human feedback in the training loop to minimize harmful, untruthful, and/or biased outputs.”
FT: “Google Search was once one of the wonders of the online world. Its clean, organised pages of results filtered the otherwise unmanageable slog of information on the internet. That was until it became cluttered with adverts. Now the world’s biggest search engine is less encyclopedia, more Yellow Pages. Look up a search term that can also be a product — asthma inhalers, for example — and you will need to scroll past up to four large adverts before reaching non-sponsored results. Search for clothing and the entire first page will be companies hoping to make a sale. Even non-ad results can look like wrong answers, with links full of buzzwords so Google gives them a higher ranking. Google and its parent company Alphabet are caught in the conundrum that faces all businesses reliant on digital ads. Put ads up high and watch as revenues rise while user experience falls.”
Ruchir Sharma: “The next evolution of the information age is dawning, and it will generate new models and winners. One possibility: they will apply digital tech to serving industry — biotech, healthcare, manufacturing — not individual consumers. If it is still hard for frozen imaginations to think of a time not dominated by today’s big tech names, the arrival of tight money makes churn at the top even more likely. Easy money encouraged risky bets on expensive but fast-growing stocks, which in the past decade meant big tech. Now that bias to bigness and growth at any price is fading.”
Arnold Kling: “Network leaders, for their part, should be humble about the promise and limits of their technologies. Networks offer a tremendous opportunity for breaking down barriers to participation and spurring innovation, and they could transform institutions like higher education for the better. But they lack the authority, accountability, and coordinated planning of government institutions. Other institutions, both religious and secular, remain vital for human flourishing. Institutions have their own temptations to avoid. As the virtual world expands, leaders of institutions can become frustrated. Their first instinct is to regard networks as a threat. Journalists, educators, and political professionals may resent the “outsiders” who are amplifying complaints and sparking protests. They will be tempted to try to shut down the opposition. But they would do better to focus on the problems of institutional decay, to work on improving incentives and accountability within their own organizations, and to form better, mission-oriented leaders. If institutions want to be trusted again, they must become trustworthy themselves.”
Sadnanad Dhume: “India’s middle class needs free trade…[It] owes what purchasing power it has to the country’s previous trade liberalization and deregulation. In their paper, Messrs. Chatterjee and Subramanian point out that exports drove much of India’s high growth after the advent of economic reforms in 1991. Abandoning the country’s orientation toward exports, Messrs. Chatterjee and Subramanian say, is “akin to killing the goose that lays golden eggs.” Mr. Modi is right to talk up India. That’s his job. But Indian policy makers shouldn’t drink their own Kool-Aid. For now at least, India needs access to global markets a lot more than most global firms need access to India.”
