Tuesday 4th June 2024
  • Peter Orszag wants to reimagine Lazard. Will his bankers let him? - FT (No paywall)

    Barack Obama’s economist has brought star power to a faded investment bank, but rank and file have doubts about his plan

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  • Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works

    During a recent summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was stumped after being asked how his company's AIs actually work, pointing to a larger issue.

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  • Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle

    Who produces AI hype? As we discuss in the AI Snake Oil book, it is not just companies and the media but also AI researchers. For example, a pair of widely-publicized papers in Nature in December 2023 claimed to have discovered over 2.2 million new materials using AI, and robotically synthesized 41 of them. Unfortunately, the claims were quickly debunked: “Most of the [41] materials produced were misidentified, and the rest were already known”. As for the large dataset, examining a sample of 250 compounds showed that it was mostly junk.

    A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage — the machine learning version of teaching to the test — was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions. 

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  • Psychedelics Are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard - The Atlantic (No paywall)

    How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they’re tripping?

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  • I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

    Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

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  • Psychedelics Are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard

    How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they're tripping?Tomorrow, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee will meet to discuss whether the United States should approve its first psychedelic drug. The fate of the treatment—MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder—will turn on how the FDA interprets data from two clinical trials that, on their face, are promising. Long-suffering patients who took the drug while undergoing intensive talk therapy were about twice as likely to recover from PTSD as patients who got the placebo with therapy.


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  • The GOP's Single-Message Machine

    This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.After the 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump boasts about groping women, Republicans considered their options—and Trump's candidacy faced a moment of maximum peril. But after Trump's conviction last week, an enraged MAGA establishment moved quickly to enforce new litmus tests.


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  • Trump's Big New Megaphone

    Donald Trump has officially joined TikTok. His first video, posted on Saturday night—his only post so far—is a montage showing the former president making the rounds at a UFC fight in New Jersey. He waves to fans and takes pictures with them while Kid Rock's "American Bad Ass" plays in the background.Trump—who has appeared on WrestleMania, perfected his image on reality television, and commanded the world's attention through a demagogic Twitter account—is made for this. His account already has more than 4 million followers; the account belonging to the Biden campaign, created in February, trails far behind with about 349,000. It is a sign that social media may once again be used for political warfare by a man who poses an existential threat to American democracy; what might be shocking will instead be played for laughs and engagement on a platform that Trump attempted to ban as president.


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  • Research: Why Companies Should Disclose Their Lack of Progress on DEI - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

    Many companies have set goals to increase employee diversity, and many companies have fallen short of meeting their goals. Most leaders would likely prefer to keep this lack of progress quiet, but research shows that there may be benefits to being transparent about it. Specifically, this type of disclosure can signal that you take diversity seriously and are genuinely committed to the goals you’ve set for your organization. That said, taking too long to make progress can dampen any goodwill you might receive from disclosure.

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  • What's next for MDMA - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)

    The FDA is poised to approve the notorious party drug as a therapy. Here’s what it means, and where similar drugs stand in the US. 

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