ClaB retweeted
New working paper: Can AI forecast treatment effects in economics from pre-registration documents?
Answer: Yes. 1/
I suspect AI could find fatal errors in the vast majority of empirical papers published in top journals, if AI had access to the underlying data. Authors of papers using data with restricted access (micro) are the lucky ones.
Errors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman marginalrevolution.com/margi…
ClaB retweeted
European Commission sounds the alarm (now !!!) about the number of oil refineries closing in the region over the last 20 years. "We need to counter this trend," says EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen. "This crisis is a wake-up call." Quite.
ClaB retweeted
Dario reveals the people who called his GPT-2 fears "pseudoscience" in 2019 are now all applying for jobs at AI labs
"I personally was super freaked out by [GPT-2]. I looked at it and I said, my God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything. This is the defining economic and scientific moment of the modern age. We just don't know it yet. This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity."
"Maybe 10% of the people around me had exactly the same reaction, and it was often the smartest ones. 90% of the people around me, because GPT-2's capabilities in any particular area were not that impressive, it could translate languages, summarize a document and write a few lines of code here and there. It was the broadness and the generality."
"But people would look at it and say, in any particular area, that doesn't seem so smart. And so many people just shrugged and they just dismissed it."
"I just look at it and I say it's the same thing over and over again. The limitations of the models, six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. 12 months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly."
"It's everything we saw with GPT-2; we're seeing it over and over again in wider and wider swaths of the world. And the world is gradually finally being convinced."
Daniela Amodei: "I remember at the time there were some very well-respected computer scientists and AI and ML leaders who basically bullied some of the researchers who worked on [GPT-2] on Twitter and were like, this is stupid. We don't know why you guys are even talking, this model is so incapable."
"It was like you were sort of a quack if you believed this was a really significant moment."
Dario: "That's all been memory-holed. All the researchers who were like, oh, this is pseudoscience, it doesn't make sense, all of them are applying for jobs at the LLM companies."
"We never say it out loud to any particular one, but we look at them and they're like, we remember what you were saying in 2019. You have no credibility on this matter."
ClaB retweeted
I am sure some more internal combustion engine vehicles and e-fuels will fix this
Good Morning from Germany, where Mercedes is also being hit hard by the China shock. It joins BMW & VW in cutting its outlook, now targeting a car margin of just 2–3%, vs up to 5% before. Shares tumble 5.4%, taking this year’s loss to more than a third. Germany’s Big Three are now worth just €106bn combined. Tesla alone is worth €1.4tn, more than 13 times as much. China, once their profit engine, has become a major liability.
ClaB retweeted
I have made a good-faith effort to learn from MMT and I can report that I learned nothing. If I was supposed to learn that a country that issues its own currency can inflate away its debt, I already knew that. (And I worry about that.)
ClaB retweeted
A larga maggioranza gli elettori della provincia dell'Alberta hanno bocciato la proposta di avviare il percorso che potrebbe portare all’indipendenza dal Canada
History and movies tell us that activating emergency powers isn’t a good idea, but we keep forgetting
ClaB retweeted
Germany's Chancellor Merz:
Germany and France reached an understanding on future policy toward the automotive industry.
To put it very simply: The ban on combustion engines is now history.
Sarebbe divertente usare l’AI per quantificare la monumentale mole di balle scritte negli anni dal campo sovranista su economia ed euro. Dico «divertente» e non «utile» perché il debunking è già stato fatto ed è servito a poco.
ClaB retweeted
Several German industrialists have mentioned to me similar levels of sick rates, so that losing basically an entire month a year of production is becoming normal-like doubling vacation time without any planning
One of them said he was desperate to close his German plants.
Why are Euro auto brands losing to China? Well... let's look at costs, productivity, employee output, etc. Hard to compete with this.
"Using VW’s auto plants as a proxy, labor costs, labor productivity, sick leave rates, unit costs and electricity costs in its China plants are a fraction of what they are in Europe, so no one should be surprised at the market share shifts on the right. Even the imposition of 17%-35% tariffs has done little to slow European imports of Chinese EVs."
ClaB retweeted
Inverse correlation between employee cost and productivity:
Why are Euro auto brands losing to China? Well... let's look at costs, productivity, employee output, etc. Hard to compete with this.
"Using VW’s auto plants as a proxy, labor costs, labor productivity, sick leave rates, unit costs and electricity costs in its China plants are a fraction of what they are in Europe, so no one should be surprised at the market share shifts on the right. Even the imposition of 17%-35% tariffs has done little to slow European imports of Chinese EVs."
ClaB retweeted
Probably the correct take on “AI can solve math now”
Well worth reading: proofsandprompts.com/2026/10…
