A series of interesting links

Clearing out my links backlog

I collect a lot of interesting links via a Chrome plugin called Save to Notion. Basically, when I come across an interesting link, I click the plugin’s icon, and it saves the link to a little database I built in Notion.

Here’s a screenshot:

I haven’t done anything with the tags, because I’m not really sure what should go there. Name and URL are automatically populated by the plugin. All in all a pretty efficient little system. But I’ve just been collecting the links, and not really doing anything with them. So I figured I’d clear out the backlog by putting up a few Substack posts.

That preamble out of the way, here are some of the interesting links:

Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge. Some researchers at Google tested whether Large Language Models (the technology underpinning various generative AI tools like ChatGPT) could diagnose health conditions. From the abstract: “We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today’s models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.”

Music producer Rick Beato is concerned about AI-generated music. He notes that generative AI will usher in an era in which anyone can create music at the press of a button. I think that this is true. It suggests that, with the advent of generative AI, curation will be critical. The cost of creative output is quickly declining to zero. And when costs for anything go to zero, supply of that thing increases, radically. Someone will have to develop good curation tools to help us filter out the gems from the dreck.

What’s up with ChatGPT & the Turing Test? For the uninitiated, the Turing Test is a test of a machine’s ability to convincingly emulate a human being. The idea is: if a human being talking to a machine can’t tell that the machine is actually a machine, and not a person at another computer typing, then the machine has passed the Turing Test. It is a hallmark in artificial intelligence. This piece proposes some ideas as to how one could use ChatGPT to conduct a Turing Test.

Privatizing Infrastructure: Evidence from Airports. This report provides evidence for the claim that privatizing infrastructure, such as airports, tends to improve their efficiency. One can imagine that a privately owned airport has an incentive to provide passengers with a good customer experience. On the other hand, passengers don’t have much choice in the airport they frequent. Airports are not like McDonalds. If you don’t like their quarter pounders, you can walk down the street to buy a whopper from Burger King.