Wow, I obviously do not agree with that, and since you're trying to put words in my mouth and false dichotomies, I think that's the last question of yours I will be answering.
You're attacking a strawman. No one is claiming that you can pull off that multiplier at arbitrary amounts arbitrary amounts of times. And 7 months is plenty of calendar time for those arbitrages to disappear, given the attention on the area and the rapid rate of development. (Warren Buffett can't pull off his early trades now either, doesn't mean he was stupid or grifting in taking early investment.)
> And even if it is good enough, once you're shelling out thousands of dollars a year in research costs, does that give you any remaining alpha?
That's precisely why you would want to make a startup to get investment now rather than self-fund and bootstrap. That alpha isn't going to last forever, especially because everyone has access to the frontier LLMs, which keep getting better, and will eventually beat your fancy harness or specialized finetune.
And also, perhaps more importantly, so you can start developing an alternative to prediction markets and become the new PM; as Scott notes, with superforecaster AI, it's unclear why you really need Kalshi or Manifold or anyone else, with all their fees and overhead. Leave them to the degens, and carve off the socially useful part to do much more efficiently - tokens are cheaper than transactions! This is the big prize, but you need to start now before someone else does it better or commoditizes it.
That's what makes the contest interesting. Anyone can write an interesting 1k words about an interesting picture. But can you write an interesting 1k words about an uninteresting picture? Remember what G. K. Chesterton said...
(So far, judging from this page, it is easier to write an interesting debate about whether the rules require exactly 1k words and what is a 1k word entry, exactly, than about the picture. So far so good! We wouldn't want it to be too easy, after all. Gotta earn that $1k.)
Ensembling is not compute or parameter-efficient, so compression per se is a terrible application. (This is related to why people train ever larger LLMs like 1 10t-parameter LLM, rather than 100 GPT-3-scale LLMs.)
> No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.
Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.
Regrettably, I am not an expert or insider, and cannot generate that particular content. All I can point to is the void at the heart of articles like this, where supply and demand and greed somehow cease to exist.
The phrase 'production committee' appears only once in OP, with no discussion of the implications or how they work or how they change things compared to TV network monoposonies. Disappointingly superficial. It just repeats a lot of random salary or wage or working hour statistics and anecdotes without ever - puzzling for a piece in the Economist! - asking how this market operates, why it keeps going like this, and why rational self-interested actors avoid raising animator salaries or investing more in them or even increasing headcount, under circumstances like the current boom, which Econ 101 would predict results in a corresponding boom in animator populations and salaries...
> 6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".
Huh? Kaguya-hime was in 2013, 7 years before 2020 (after a notoriously protracted development). You really think Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli were releasing that post-COVID? (Isao wasn't even alive in 2020.)
I expect the author is aware of that: where do you think he got the graph from if there's only 'gated copies'? But Sci-Hub links are unstable even if you don't mind linking them.
One thing I'm not following is how the side/order bias is being handled. OP measures a IMO very large bias towards left-hand treats, but it is unclear how that is handled (ahem)? Skimming https://github.com/adamwespiser/best-dog-treat/blame/main/an... doesn't help me understand if it is being modeled as a covariate to adjust for the bias or if it was dealt with by construction (eg. by always offering pairs twice, swapping hands), or what?
Incidentally OP if you want to make it more adaptive, you can just fit the B-T model each time, and grab a posterior sample of what the best pair is, and test that, which turns out to be Thompson sampling. I did this for fun with blind taste-testing of mineral waters: https://gwern.net/water
As so often, a thinkpiece exemplifies the problem.
You include a bunch of random AI-generated images to go with your AI-generated prose. The images are cluttered and filled with pointless, fictional detail which convey nothing beyond the prose and which anyone could vaguely predict, and yet take up something like 2/3rds of the vertical space of the article body. And that is generous, because your items are padded by LLM writing, that is to say, verbosely filled with needlessly superfluously repetitive redundant redundancy. And that's where it's not filled with crowdpleasing but dubious rhetoric and assertions (all present, of course, without any sources or backing).
Consider with a critical mind a random assertion like
> For many people, the first experience of healthcare is no longer treatment but paperwork. Intake forms, insurance verification, privacy acknowledgments, and consent agreements often precede any human interaction related to care. The administrative system introduces itself before the clinical one. This changes the shape of the experience. What should begin with care often begins with bureaucracy, shifting attention away from the person and toward the process.
Really? Recently, peoples' first experience of healthcare was treatment? What wondrous era was this? How could 'intake forms' not, by definition, 'precede any human interaction related to care'? Why should it begin with care? 'Ready, fire, aim!' etc. When did all this happen, exactly?
And it's all like this. Engagement farming - that OP is worthless won't stop people from falling for it and chiming in with whatever pet peeve they have, no matter how many other people have commented about it or how tiresomely predictable some complaint about, say, smartphones will be.
About me: https://gwern.net/me
What I've written recently: https://gwern.net/changelog