Everything net
Everything relevant to the thought
... Over the years I’ve tried several times to find a version of Austrian business cycle theory I found plausible and I’ve always come away scratching my head. Thread… Here’s my basic understanding of the model: the economy has some industries that are capital intensive and others that are not. ...
... When the central bank makes interest rates artificially low, it makes capital investment cheap and skews the economy toward capital intensive sectors. But that cheap credit hasn’t actually created any real resources, so you end up with increased spending on both capital and consumer goods. ...
... So far this is an entirely conventional account of how business cycles work. But now things get weird. In the Austrian theory, a recession is a process of resource re-allocation from capital-intensive to capital-light industries. ...
... In the Austrian theory, it’s important that central banks don’t interrupt this process by pushing interest rates back down to unnaturally low levels, because that interferes with this necessary re-allocation process. Ok so let’s think about 2006 to 2009. ...
... The period through the end of 2007 arguably fits the austrian model. There was arguably over investment in residential home construction. In 2006 and 2007 the home building industry was contracting while other industries were still growing. But in mid 2008, the situation changed. ...
... Instead of re-allocating workers and other resources from home building to other sectors, you suddenly had almost every industry laying off workers—even ones that were not capital intensive and did not see strong growth in the 2000s. ...
... I can’t figure out how to explain this period with an Austrian model. I don’t see why anyone would consider this kind of mass unemployment necessary or how it set us up for stronger growth later. ...
... The central question of macroeconomics is explaining why economies sometimes have periods of elevated unemployment, where not just one industry shrinks but almost all of them do at once. ...
... If that were true, then 2009 would have been a time when low-capital industries were aggressively hiring laid off construction workers. That did not happen on any significant scale. Even industries far from housing laid off workers or at least froze hiring in late 2008 and 2009. ...
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... In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. ...
... We find that all three theories specifically relate conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans. ...
... With this insight, we turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of each of the three functional theories. ...
... Given this apparent trend, we use the motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a unified model. ...
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... Meaning that an economy has a long run potential level of output that it will return to regardless of what policy the central bank pursues. This makes no sense to me. ...
... People who graduate from college during a recession have lower wages a decade later. https://t.co/y3JaNHffTX During recessions governments and businesses often cut back on R&D. ...
... Or believe that the Spanish economy suddenly lost all capacity for productivity gains in 2008? ...
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... These are also largely global industries, so they won't be constrained by US labor supply. As @DavidBeckworth has argued, there's no reason to think anything has fundamentally changed about the deflationary nature of durable goods industries. ...
... It might take another year or two, especially for car companies waiting for computer chips. But they'll get there. And when they do we should see durables prices start to trend back down again. A bunch more charts that explain the economy here. https://t.co/gtVBWwesGH ...
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... From 1987 to 2011, manufacturing productivity grew dramatically faster than productivity for the economy as a whole. But since 2011, manufacturing productivity has flat-lined, while other sectors continued improving. I wonder what explains this. https://t.co/4OQx10B56Y ...
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... Major disruptions in businesses will start to appear around 2024 - i.e. profitable (by free cash flow) and hyper-growth companies relying on large-scale neural networks as their main tech strength. ...
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... It's powered by LLMs. The value it brings is being testified widely. ...
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... This is how humans reached this level of intelligence. In some sense, language and its syntax provides the programming language for brains and reduced the need for specialized neural circuitries. ...
... To reach the same level of intelligence without a vastly larger number of neural circuitries in artificial neuron networks, they need to be able to do the same thing. . ...
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... More precisely, LLMs model the concepts in natural languages using the language (albeit in a different syntax). Obviously, LLMs don't need to learn the concepts from scratch, they already have encoded words. ...
... To perform cognitive tasks, LLMs need to learn the specific relationships between specific concepts, and those relationships can be connections between a group of words, e.g., "swan", "black", "is", here "swan" and "black" are two concepts while "is" is the relationship between them. ...
... Thus to truly encode a specific relationship, LLMs need to have connections embedded with syntax. e.g. it needs to encode the relationship between "black," and "swan" as "swan is black". i.e. A language phrase encodes the relationship. ...
... Thus one might be able to say that LLMs model the world in language. It might be a totally different gramma from natural language, but a syntax nonetheless and it's quite possible that this syntax is inspired by the syntax in natural language. ...
... The ability to model concepts using words, phrases and even sentences combined with syntax is critical. [It might be the reason we humans reached our level of intelligence](https://www.themind.net/hypotheses/8yof9E9YTYu4vHQI4qgBcw). ...
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... The only other company with a commitment to AI at a similar level was FB. Its pivot to Metaverse means that AI will not be (and probably never has been) its core strategy. Microsoft is never about cutting-edge innovation. Apple has never obtained a deep understanding of AI. ...
... Amazon is too pragmatic and revenue-driven for making AI it's core. ...
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... Because this self-supervised learning process mimics the brain's learning mechanism: make predictions and learn from prediction errors. ...
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... As widely believed, human has genetically encoded ability to learn and use syntax. This might greatly improve AI's linguistic faculties. ...
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