Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages OpenAI’s latest model. Full disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company.  Razib and Yakovenko first review what makes the last few years special, the rise of large-language-models on top of neural network architecture of transformers. Yakovenkoi discusses how far they’ve come since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in the fall of 2022, and how people have been using the underlying technology to develop applications atop it. Despite predictions of mass unemployment, Razib points out that two years later America is at full employment, and only niche fields like translation have been impacted. In contrast, Yakovenko points out that most software developers use artificial intelligence in some form to aid in their daily engineering work, noting the possibility that the AI revolution is integrating itself seamlessly as a utility for preexistent jobs. They also discuss the fact that though AI is a booming field, only one brand-name company has so far emerged in the industry, OpenAI. Though they agree that the current hype cycle is now abating, it is clear that the major investments in the field like data centers will continue from major players as AI-driven applications like self-driving cars become more and more mainstream.

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Yasha Mounk. The founder of Persuasion, a contributor to The Atlantic and a professor at Johns Hopkins, Mounk now has his own Substack, where he hosts his weekly column and podcast. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.  Razib and Mounk first discuss Mounk’s immediate reaction to the 2024 election, and how the Democrats might pick up the pieces going forward. Mounk believes that the argument in his book The Identity Trap, neatly captures many of the problems for the party. Democrats leaned in on the inevitably of racial polarization in an age of progressive depolarization. Razib also asks Mounk for his retrospective on the COVID-19 epidemic, in which he was a commentator who argued in The Atlantic for more stringent habits and then later, for an opening up. They also discuss how the Public Health establishment COVID interventions threw the whole field into disrepute, and what it tells us about the nature of expertise. Then Razib asks Mounk about European nations and their future. In particular, whether their low productivity and fertility rates combined with mass migration doom them to a future of irrelevance and national dissolution. Mounk highlights the unfortunate case of the UK in particular, though he notes that his home nation of Germany is finding itself in a precarious situation with China competing with its manufacturers and Russia cutting off its gas supply. Finally, Razib closes by asking Mounk whether he is still as worried about American democracy in the wake of the 2024 Trump win as he was in 2016.

  Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist Anatoly Karlin. Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California’s Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to American military and cultural power. With the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he joined a chorus of Russian warbloggers cheering on the inevitable conquest. And then, like Richard Hanania, he did an about-face on the Russian invasion, reversing many of his views. Today Karlin is a digital nomad, and aligns firmly with American cultural and technological progressivism. He endorsed Kamala Harris and promotes what he terms a “Biosingularity.” His Substack is  “Elite Human Capital,” a term popularized by Hanania. Arguably Karlin has gone further than Hanania in endorsing the new American global order, underpinned both by the US’s technological and cultural dominance. Razib and Karlin talk about how he came to invert so many of his views, while at the same time remaining fundamentally committed to the transhumanist project, like combating aging. They discuss the contrast between Russia and the US, and how Karlin came to see Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and stand against the West as folly. Karlin also discusses his peripatetic lifestyle,  the new friends made and those lost due to his conversion to what he would have previously called “globalism.”

  During the Ice Age our ancestors often painted the horse in caves On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity’s most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world’s subsistence economies, the horse in its military roles was a luxury good, with Chinese emperors sending delegations to Central Asia in search of “heavenly steeds.” But while dogs have been humanity’s sidekick for at least 20,000 years, and cattle and caprids for about 10,000 years, the horse is a relatively new addition, tamed on the Central Asia steppe only some 5,500 years ago. But despite their late entrance, horses quickly proved economically critical, opening up trade routes, increasing farming productivity and remaining weapons of war down until the last futile Polish cavalry charges in 1939 against invading Nazis. The horse’s role as a loyal steed was not inevitable; repeat attempts to domesticate tropical zebras have failed, while most other Eurasian megafauna, from moose to elephants, remain wild. The horse is part of the “secondary products revolution,” with high-fat milk and manes that can be refashioned to adorn human helmets, but just as importantly it was a pre-modern information technology revolution. Mongolian cavalry-messengers were able to cut a year-long trek across Eurasia down to a month. And between about 300 AD and 1500 AD, mounted cavalry dominated the Eurasian continent, driving the emergence of new empires and hastening the collapse of old ones. Since its domestication on the Pontic steppe in 2500 BC, which may have saved the species from extinction, the horse has played a critical part in world history, only really finally passing into obsolescence on the farm, the road and the battlefield in the past century and a half.