Hi, I’m Bhuvan.This is my commonplace book.

Visualizing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident

Not bad Here's what I got

The bear case for AGI

At a higher level, I guess I’d say there’s a sort of refusal to think carefully about what models are or are not useful for in a rigorous way which I find personally quite annoying, and instead a reliance on some nebulous notion of being “AGI pilled” as a replacement for serious thought. I think people are very quick to anthropomorphize LLM intelligence because humans communicate through words and we infer the intelligence of…

Research on the wealth effect

Now, you might think that broader participation in the stock market would increase the strength of the wealth effect, with more households exposed to market volatility. But this is not quite right. ++New research++ from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the more widely Americans hold shares, the weaker the effect of a rate change on the real economy, which is the opposite of what you might expect: instinctively,…

I got some links for you

The German chemist Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) famously synthesized two drugs: aspirin, one of the most widely beneficial drugs ever, and heroin, one of the most harmful of illegal substances. These two drugs represent the efforts of late-19th-century chemists to create new substances that could be used as medicines, not just to isolate active ingredients from natural products or to imitate them. One approach toward this end…

Agentic payments are coming to UPI

India is preparing a framework that would let AI agents make small digital payments without approval for every transaction, three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially making UPI one of the world's largest networks with agentic payments. While leading payment companies have launched such frameworks in the U.S., Europe, Singapore and Australia, a rollout on the popular Unified Payments Interface would also put…

Omawrite

Heard DHH mention this on Lex Fridman's podcast

AI is NOT guzzling water!

Posting for reference: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates 2023 US data centre water withdrawal at 66bn liters (17.4bn gallons). With all this investment, that might triple in the next few years. Big number! But total US freshwater withdrawal is 102tr gallons a year. Data centres were about 0.017% of total US water withdrawal. This can be a local planning issue, if you build in the wrong place. But the idea…