We'll put. My company is current suffering through this...
788 karma · joined June 7, 2014
1) It's plain by quickly looking at the allocation of capital in investment firms, that AUM is not made by performance; it's marketing. At best people invest when they believe a person is connected to inside information. Saying you have an ML advisor is really just a pre-req to these people.
2) Is that allocation stupid? No, it's not, because actually the powers of mathematics and by extension ML are intrinsically limited for investment returns because they are fat-tailed </Taleb>. For example this author quotes a realistic sharpe (0.8), but didn't calculate the standard deviation in his sharpe, which I would bet a large sum was _at least_ 0.8. Ie: he doesn't really know what his sharpe is. This is because equity assets behave like a student-t distributions with a degree-of-freedom parameter ~2 or less </Mandlebrot, /Bergomi, /Gatheral etc.>. Ie: higher moments such as uncertainty in sharpe, literally do not exist or converge and are unknowable. The only exception is if your strategy explicitly cuts off tails.
Once you understand 2) you begin to understand that there's no such thing as a real quant fund (ie a fund which truly makes money predictably using models) which doesn't trade a liquidity limited book that has quite advanced hedging. Wealthy people are aware of this, which is why the author can't market this product.
If you're doing something silly like holding equities without tail risk control, you literally cannot be quantitatively investing. You are just slowly rediscovering what Kelly, Bergomi, Mandlebrot, Bernay's etc. realized with a little deep thought over pen and paper (while clumsily writing boilerplate software.) That markets are entropy machines rougher than a normal distribution, and any gains come directly from information. (see: Kelly: "a novel interpretation of the information rate".)
For a high latency (ms) market data feed, the returns on information are very very small. Markets are efficient.
It has been the goal of the Google cofounders, Carnegie, and great civilizations since antiquity to make something like this.
Are people's thoughts really so moulded by their surroundings, that they cannot recognize a wonder in front of them?
the scientific codes which parallelize poorly often parallelize poorly because they are written in ancient languages with support for whatever supercomputer interconnect bolted on poorly, Whereas TPU's + JAX have beautiful functional abstractions for distributed tensor computations.
Just funding re-writes of all the basic math/physics stack into a language with a PORTABLE parallel functional design and perhaps a compilation layer would definitely get more basic science done than this thing.
It's fun to have big toys sure, it's fun to make big GPU clusters. But if they spent what they spend on this computer, on just funding students to solve problems and toss them a 3090 100000000x more scientific breakthroughs would happen. This machine is 60% paperweight, at best, with a hefty budget for good old fashioned contract pork.
These computer platforms are drastically inefficient on a flop / $ basis. They exist to funnel money into the pockets of the companies who assemble them. They never ever achieve even a tiny fraction of their peak rated flops on any calculation that has any scientific meaning.
Not much! These devices are vanity projects and prey upon people's intellectual blindness in the face of giant numbers.
And that's it! The author of this article is 100% right. Markets are fully aware though, go ahead and try to short any publicly traded QC stock. You can't. There's no shares to borrow and no liquidity on puts...TRUST ME I"M TRYING TO :P
These enterprises will continue to offer regular old data analysis dressed-up with quantum storytelling as a prestige tool. That is also the business model of many many very large companies (consulting etc). So it's possible these companies might even do fine, but not because they will have a computational advantage-- Not with these platforms.
And that's it! The author of this article is 100% right. Markets are fully aware though, go ahead and try to short any publicly traded QC stock lol. You can't. There's no shares to borrow and no liquidity on puts....
Given that we already can produce "an" AI which beats humans at almost every task we come up with (besides synthesis of broad abstract reasoning, a-la Chollet) this is probably the only definition which is meaningful in the sense that it isn't already here.
Why would evading 'alignment' not also be such a task AGI does better? AGI is like the nuclear deterrent. It's a technology thats coming, inevitably, and a thing which is beyond any amount of philosophical navel gazing to control or prevent.
AGI's will not be magical, they will have energy demands, construction costs, and environmental limitations.
I think it will be much more useful to ask how people coexist, and what role they serve in the post-AGI world, than it is to make statements about interperability or alignment, which will definitely seem silly in retrospect. The machinations of an AGI will be as impossible to understand, as human consciousness itself.
Media impact and counter-reaction probably made COVID worse in the US... We need to stop doing public health policy with the news.