I donated:
$100 to Zvi Mowshowitz for his post “Covid-19: My Current Model” but really for all his posts. I appreciated how Zvi kept posting Covid updates long after I have energy to do my own research on this topic. I also appreciate how he called the Omicron wave pretty well.
$100 to Duncan Sabien for his post “CFAR Participant Handbook now available to all”. I’m glad CFAR decided to make it public, both because I have been curious for a while what was in it and because in general I think it’s pretty good practice for orgs like CFAR to publish more of what they do. So thanks for doing that!
I both agree that the race dynamic is concerning (and would like to see Anthropic address them explicitly), and also think that Anthropic should get a fair bit of credit for not releasing Claude before ChatGPT, a thing they could have done and probably gained a lot of investment / hype over. I think Anthropic’s “let’s not contribute to AI hype” is good in the same way that OpenAI’s “let’s generate massive” hype strategy is bad.
Like definitely I’m worried about the incentive to stay competitive, especially in the product space. But I think it’s worth highlighting that Anthropic (and Deepmind and Google AI fwiw) have not rushed to product when they could have. There’s still the relevant question “is building SOTA systems net positive given this strategy”, and it’s not clear to me what the answer is, but I want to acknowledge that “building SOTA systems and generating hype / rushing to market” is the default for startups and “build SOTA systems and resist the juicy incentive” is what Anthropic has done so far & that’s significant.