Prescient, really. Almost all of us knowledge workers today work in factories where the production lines are invisible. It's why we struggle so much with concepts (like work-in-progres inventory or product development flow) that are relatively easy to understand when there is a physical factory to look at.
As some of you probably know, I spent a number of years working with GE, which included plenty of time at the legendary GE Research lab in Niskayuna. So it was a special thrill to see this piece connecting Answer.AI to the long history of R&D labs. Our ideas about R&D are kind of out of fashion in our current age, but I hope this says more about the age than it does about the quality of the ideas. Happy to answer questions in this thread, if there are any fellow R&D-lab-enjoyers here.
I've never been a big fan of patents as they've historically applied to software. But this is a public policy issue, not something an individual company can fix. So I've always been content to follow patent best practices, even when they aren't the most logical.
In terms of tech transfer, Jeremy has quite a bit of experience with collaborating with the best academic labs, especially in machine learning, so I expect we will do a lot of that kind of partnering.
Makes sense. We have to work within the system as we find it. Would be great to see the system evolve in a way that would support efforts like yours though!
Eric Ries here, happy to answer questions about Answer.AI or any of the related themes Jeremy talked about in the announcement post: rapid iteration, R&D, startup governance, long-term thinking, etc.
Excited to see what comes out of this new lab. And if you're interested in joining the cause, please do get in touch. Both Jeremy and I are on this thread and generally reachable.
How do you look at hiring "experienced people" vs. "enthusiastic interns" on something like this? More generally, how quickly do you think the team will grow, and what the ratio should be between the "old" and the "young"?
Very hard to guess how it might all shake out. I would say that both Jeremy and I have an almost fanatical belief in the power of uncredentialed outsiders. So I would guess we will be more looking for curious open-minded generalists more than any specific age or experience level. I do expect we will grow headcount rather slowly, but that doesn’t mean we will launch infrequently
Puja has a few talks on such things, many very related and worth listening to imho. But most relevant: she's been working on a mechanism design to use quadratic funding in an existing hierarchy to move funding power from funders to on-the-ground researchers who best predict "breakthrough research" areas -- i.e. at which intersections. This idea of "breakthrough innovation" is objectively measured and rewarded as "research that becomes highly cited, and which draws together disparate source citations that have never before appeared together."
So the idea is that in successive funding rounds, funding power slowly accrues in the people who best predict where research innovation will appear. Even if that turns out to be *gasp* grad students.
(I'm particularly interested to see Polis, a "wiki survey" tool I've been using since 2016, be used as one of the signals in such a system. It can help make the landscape of beliefs and feelings that ppl bring to the process more legible, especially at the collective level. Which is important, because high-dimensional "feeling data", when placed out-of-scope in other systems, are often a reason why we get trapped in local minima of innovation that inhibit the recombination of ideas.)
I was going to link to Polis after I read the first part of your answer, but I see you’ve beaten me to it. And in so doing you’ve pretty much answered your own question. Thanks!
I am probably a bit too enthusiastic about applications of Polis-like's (in the "when you have a hammer" sense), but there's a bit more to the system's mechanism design than just Polis -- it's just one signal of many during a full-day event format.
I expect some form of the system she describes to be the basis of much research funding in the coming years (following prototypes in more nimble cryptocurrency/governance communities)
There's an upcoming pilot with real funding in late Feb, that I'm excited to be supporting on! If you have time to watch her video, and find it interesting, you should def get in touch with her after that
Hi Eric, I’m a professor of human centered design in the Netherlands and I help train design students to prototype and design new AI user experiences. Could you share some ideas for AI experiences that you don’t have time to pursue but wish other people would explore?
We’ve prototyped many different tools before. However, the space is frankly disorienting because there is so much opportunity. Any suggestions to inspire engineering students to develop useful explorations?
Sure, just some ideas at random, but the most important advice is just to try new things and see what feels good:
- dashboards or other reports that call you when something changes, so you don't have to log in to see what's changed
- extremely personalized settings that remember exactly who you are and what you like to do with the interface, to the point that it basically uses it for you
- rapid prototyping interfaces, doing things like "make it real" demo
- extremely simple apps that use AI in the backend to do amazing things. how about a camera app that just sends everything it sees to GPT4-v. think how much easier that would be than loading up a translator app, taking a picture of a menu, uploading the picture, etc. just figure out what I might want to do based on the fact that I took a photo
- artistic/musical/creative apps that require only your phone and that you can noodle on while you have 5m of idle time. maybe the AI works on it silently in the background and then the user gives notes or feedback whenever they have time. end product is a pro-level artistic work that reflects the user's taste level but the AI's mastery of technique
If you're visiting london and feel inspired by the "make it real" demo, ppl in that circle routinely demo at Maggie Appleton's rad Future of Coding events[1] (and many other talented people building UIs and interfaces).
I expect quite a bit of partnering to make sense, though nothing concrete to share at this time. We explicitly designed this to be non-competitive with the best companies in the field (who have the things they do well covered).
I get that you're just being snarky here, but I've often wondered about comments like this. When did being virtuous become an insult? I actually think the ancient view of virtue is due for a bit of a comeback. Increasingly, investors and employees both want to know which companies are actually purpose- and mission-driven and which ones are not. I don't see the harm in giving them a way to signal that, as long as it's real.
I also don't understand the "liquidity" part of your comment either. LTSE is a participant in something called the National Market System which guarantees that every stock listed on every National Securities Exchange has the exact same level of access to liquidity.
Because pretending to be virtuous for personal gain is not in fact virtuous. Companies will push social issues while its in vogue and convenient and when its not they will abruptly stop - or at least that's what many seem to believe.
Investing in green energy for your corp is virtuous(some would argue).
Running ads about how you support BLM/LGBT/etc(no real cost to this) while pretending not to know about the environmental destruction and human rights abuses your products create around the world(would require actual action) is virtue signaling.
From what I’ve been able to gather, Liquidity just means being able to get out of a bad decision at little to no cost.
Basically no one wants to hold risk anymore, but still have growth… which is the fundamental flaw in the markets that continues to rear its ugly head in exotic derivatives
Liquidity only eliminates the type of risk that is associated with liquidity. Having less liquidity risk does not in any way mean you're more likely to lose money in general.
Less liquidity means there's a larger bid-ask spread: if you're in a rush to either buy or sell, there's a chance you'll pay a premium for a quick trade. If you're not in a rush, you probably won't pay this premium at all.
Saying that liquidity reduces is a fallacy that was believed quite heavily pre-2007.
Liquidity does not reduce risk, it has no effect on risk because it has no effect on outcomes. If you invest in a stock that goes bankrupt, there is no way to get out of that decision with no cost.
Equally, someone is only willing to supply that liquidity if they get something in return. So in those worst cases, you will usually not have the liquidity that you think because someone needs a return for taking the elevated risk in those situations (and again, that risk doesn't go anywhere, liquidity just shifts that risk to someone else).
Look at the market, is there really a deficit of risk-taking? I think there is a deficit of understanding of the risks but there is a massive excess of risk-taking in pretty much every asset class.
I also wouldn't associate illiquidity with return either, that is quite wrong. The decentralized market-making model that we have minimises costs and maximises liquidity but this is just a net gain for investors (due to the clear demarcation of types of risk-taking within the system). There is no real illiquidity premium, and the societal gain from higher liquidity is just a pure gain for the system (again, I am not saying it reduces risk, it does not but it does reduce costs, increase transparency, and produces a system that is robust relative to bank-led financing systems common in Europe, for example).
> Look at the market, is there really a deficit of risk-taking? I think there is a deficit of understanding of the risks but there is a massive excess of risk-taking in pretty much every asset class.
There's a deficit of risk-taking in a crisis (and maybe an excess of risk-taking in "normal" times). In the old days crises would be softened by market makers who were willing to act as de facto prop traders and buy at the bottom for their own account - an extremely risky trade ("falling knife") but an extremely lucrative one if you get it right. Nowadays the algorithmic herd just exits the market when times go bad, and if you did do the trade and make a killing then you'd get your trades broken ("clearly erroneous") and have to fight a lawsuit and it just wouldn't be worth it.
Shifting risk is not productive — it may be in some “economic” model, but by the hand of the market it is waste heat - and only compounds the probability of edge cases.
People shave off a return for holding the hot potato! Not one factory is built, not one wage increases, and not one investment made save for the HFT yacht.
This gets at my problem with the secondary market in general and why I believe dividends should be the only repayment terms for equity… it would align with the tax favors bestowed in our current market
Pretending you have virtue is not being virtuous. It is the opposite of virtuous. The "ancient view of virtue" was concerned with the internal, not external. Whether you say something is true, whether you say are virtuous has no bearing on reality. The ancients did not know about performativity.
And the suspicion here is well earned. Being purpose and mission driven is usually just code for: the CEO likes to take big piles of your money, set it on fire, and then hop on CNBC and tell people how setting fire to your money makes them virtuous. Anyone who feels they need to signal their virtue, to me and use that as a pretext for getting my money, is likely someone who I should not trust with my money (so far, as someone who saw this over and over working in the investment business, this suspicion has never been unfounded). It is far easier to work with someone who says they will act in their own self-interest than someone who claims they have no interests at all (and btw, this is where things mostly go wrong: managers who say and believe there are disinterested whilst only following their own self-interest...something like LTSE sounds very much another mechanism for managers to shed accountability).
