David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But it does know it has a slight edge, so it should trade on it even though it can’t explain why. Well, speaking of models, I’ve been trying to nail down an answer to this question. Do you think RenTech was the birthplace of machine learning? This is such a tough answer to tell. We actually emailed some friends who are very prominent AI researchers and AI historians and asked this question. The answer we got back is unsurprising. They said, we don’t know because they don’t share anything. It’s like the principles certainly came out of the same math community that spawned machine learning. But is what RenTech has figured out over the last couple of decades in Google’s Gemini model and in ChatGPT…? No it’s not, because they don’t contribute any research back. It may be the case that actually RenTech has beat everyone else to the punch, and they have a strong AI or something that is actually much more sophisticated than all the AI we have out in the world today, and they’ve just chosen that they’d rather keep it locked up, captive, and make a bunch of money. It could just be the case that Renaissance is just taking in as much unstructured data as it possibly can, and they were just a decade or two ahead of everyone else in realizing that you can have unstructured, unlabeled data, and if you have enough of it, you can make it, in the case of an LLM, say things that sound right or sound true. Or in the case of these trades, be right more than 50% of the time.…

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