🔮 Tech’s right shift; predicting complexity; conservatism failure; longevity, synthetic blood & robots ++ #483

An insider’s guide to AI and exponential technologies

Ideas of the week

Smol is beautiful. Back in my horizon scan in January, I said “[s]maller models will be in demand: they are cheaper to run and can operate on a wider array of environments than mega-models.” Now with the release of GPT-4o mini, this argument is even stronger. It is the best-performing cheap model on the market – nearly 30 times cheaper than GPT-4o, with roughly the same performance as the original GPT-4. Since GPT-3’s May 2020 release, prices have dropped an astounding 99%. The lower prices will make running multiple AI agent systems, which iteratively refine tasks through multi-step workflows, much more affordable. As Andrew Ng highlighted, these systems can lead to significant performance gains.

Tech leans right. Musk, Andreessen and Horowitz have confirmed their move to the right, with substantial donations to Trump’s campaign. This practice of buying political influence is common across US democracy despite its perverse impacts:it is a form of rent-seeking, after a…