Scott Cunningham

Professor of policy and planning, @StrathPolIR. Liveable cities, bureaucracies, agglomeration, geospatial data, Technological Forecasting & Social Change

[Alexander B. Howard @digiphile]

If adopted in the 119th Congress, new rules will instruct offices, officials, & staff to continue to integrate AI into the operations & functions of the US House of Representatives:
https://t.co/SgmAgfMiMz
House adopted AI policy in 2024: https://t.co/tPExKQS0n5

[Ted Werbel @tedx_ai]

Researchers at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab released Forest-of-Thought - an exciting new paradigm of post-training optimization to improve reasoning.

Brief introduction + breakdown of this recently released paper can be found on my blog (link in bio 👆)

[Michael Dnes @MichaelDnes1]

We have a new report out today. Because we’ve found one weird fact that unites all four constituencies that swung Reform for the first time at the election.🧵

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Starting to see the first serious economic analysis attempts to grapple with what AGI might mean. I appreciate that this piece embraces scenarios, we don’t know if or when AGI might happen.

But wow that wages graph is something else.

[Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri @gaveltri]

An updated take on the S-frame. ""An s-frame agenda for behavioral public policy research" | Behavioural Public Policy | Cambridge Core - https://t.co/WChGxUUlt0

[RAND @RANDCorporation]

What's the risk of a large asteroid colliding with the planet? Could a nuclear war wipe out humanity? What about severe climate change?

Sobering new research considers the end of the world—and how to prevent it. https://t.co/ET572a5ROs

[Tsarathustra @tsarnick]

Jensen Huang says AI agents can't do 100% of any job, but they will do 50% of the work for 100% of people, and AI won't take your job; AI used by somebody else will take your job

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

Despite positive reforms in recent years, there seem to be big differences in pricing, without any obvious reason they reflect either “market forces” on the one hand, or any kind of fair arrangement on the other. Please take a look at the piece! (7/7)

https://t.co/VZWMPYJcG4

[David Galbraith @daveg]

As if it wasn’t clear already VW illustrates the giant, ticking time-bomb at the heart of Europe’s economic model.

The European economy is based on two things, industrial production and selling the past.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

General Purpose Technologies benefit people when their potential is translated into useful applications. They create risks that need to be mitigated with new policies, approaches, and solutions.

I would love to see deeper discussions on X in narrow industries & fields about AI.

[Scott Cunningham @cunningham_sw]

Policy, spolicy, governance and governation. (I asked ChatGPT to make a diagram of critical junctures in institutional life.)

[Lista Redes @lista_redes]

Too many options: How to identify coalitions in a policy network? https://t.co/4MpAAtGKqF #sna #ars

[Yi Zhang @YiZhang0520]

We have extended the deadline to March 7, 2024, and the workshop will also offer online options. Welcome your submissions, and looking forward to seeing you in person and remotely :)
@Philipp_Mayr
@ArhoSuominen
@Timy_NJUST

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

This is a paper I post every six months as it is worth rereading; the 18 reasons complex systems fail.

Complex systems fail for complex reasons, and only adaption & learning by organizations, as well as individual "actions on the sharp end" keep us safe. https://t.co/pnNlFLvno1

[Pat Byrne - Glasgow West End @glasgowswestend]

Glasgow you are fabulous. One of top ranking European Cities for Foreign Direct Investment. @STVNews @BBCScotlandNews - giving them wee shout out as no doubt missed this.

[Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rlmcelreath]

Likert scores are not integers and they cannot be subdued by pretense. Stop pretending and meet me in the warm 3rd circle of stats hell and learn about ordered categorical models. Lecture: https://t.co/n8QZ1e46hv

[Sully @SullyOmarr]

Just listened to Bill gates podcast with sam, and it's very clear that OpenAI is purposely sandbagging

Even Bill - who initially did not expect GPT-5 to be much better than GPT-4, mentioned how amazed he was by the demos hes seen.

Right now, everyone thinks chatGPT sucks (including Sam himself) but remember, OpenAI hasn't released a new class of models in ~1.5 years.

This is creating the illusion that models have hit their upper limit, and that progress will continue to be slow

But if you listen to the podcast , its extremely clear how quickly we're going to accelerate from models doing basic, tasks to actually being able run companies.

But personally i think 2024 will be the an even bigger year than the "chatGPT" moment we had.

Literally no one (myself included) is ready for the rate of change we're about to experience as humanity.

Most companies will be eaten by an agi-like software, and yes that includes most apps you use today.

Definitely scary, but there is a sense of calm, knowing that if they're right, all of humanity is in this together.

but i am excited to see what I can build with such technology

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

Genuine question about image generation:
If someone uses a generative AI tool to produce an image that is substantially similar to a copyrighted piece (a drawing, painting, movie screenshot, etc), who should be liable for copyright infringement?
Should it be:
A. the company producing the tool?
B. the (human) creator of the piece?
C. the person or entity posting/publishing the piece?
D. the communication platform through which the piece is distributed?

1. Copyright law protects against unauthorized exact or near-exact copies of a painting, photo, movie, or other visual piece.
2. When a person distributes a sufficiently similar copy of an art piece, it's a violation of copyright regardless of the tools and process used to produce it.
3. The liable person is the person *distributing* the piece, not the artist, and not makers of the tools.
4. Image generation systems are trained to generate images that are on the "manifold" of nice-looking images. Obviously, the training images are on this manifold.
5. Hence, sufficiently detailed prompt will produce images that are substantially similar to images from the training set. It is not at all surprising that a prompt like "The Batman movie, rooftop scene, screenshot, 4k..." will produce an image very similar to an actual screenshot from the movie.
6. Whether using publicly available-yet-copyrighted screenshots and other materials as part of the training set constitutes a violation of copyright is a separate question. As far as I can tell, this question is not legally settled in the US.

[Jadrian Wooten @Wootenomics]

Robert (Bob) Solow was a towering figure in the field of economics and will be remembered for his profound contributions to the discipline.

Here are 2 of his most significant contributions:

[American Economic Liberties Project @econliberties]

"Whether the conspiracy takes place in a server room or a board room shouldn't matter under the antitrust laws."

Just now, @amyklobuchar speaks out against landlords' use of third-party algorithms to effectively fix rent prices--a critical frontier for antitrust enforcement.👇