The economics one stands out for not being endowed by Nobel but instead Sveriges Riksbank well after his death (thus it's the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
But it's administered by the Nobel Foundation, etc.
Giving the prize to Obama, whose main achievement at the time was not to be Bush, was a disgrace and did huge damage to the image of the committee. And he did nothing after that that would have deserved a prize.
I must admit that I disagree and believe that AI will only be used more as it improves. There is already a big difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 in terms of hallucinations. If AI can do your tax accounting in 20 seconds with a 95% probability of accuracy (perhaps better than most accountants—after all, who can really understand tax legislation?) and with some clear checksums, who wouldn't use it instead of doing it themselves? In addition, AI is really excellent at inferring meaning from data (and see relations).
For most folks, filing your taxes is already mostly automated and requires a time investment of maybe 45 to 60 minutes per year. Would it be nice to reduce that down to 20 seconds? Sure, but it's not going to materially change anything in the financial life of most people. I'm all for it if it could be done reliably at scale. Outlier cases where taxation is complicated enough that it's possible to engineer substantial and meaningful financial outcomes often count more as business finance than personal finance. I'm sure artificial intelligence will indeed be more disruptive to business and corporate finance. For true personal finance, though, I suspect it may be more predatory than helpful by selling people into bad decisions that sound smart (which banks, etc., already try to do with so-called financial advisors).
Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.
Better idea: the U.S. could adopt the income tax practices of most other countries, where the revenue service tells you what you owe, instead of making you guess. No need for A.I. or Intuit.
Fwiw iirc Intuit has to offer a free version of their tool with the same capabilties but it is so hidden from everybody behind so much stuff that its hard for people to reach there.
Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.
For the 95% of people who get all their income from W2/1099 compensation, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts and who either take the standard deduction or whose only itemised deductions are dependents, mortgage interest, and SALT, there's really no need for filing tax returns at all. But the tax accounting and tax software industries lobby to prevent it.
In the current AI = LLM world, why have a language model do taxes? Why not just have AI help you adapt your non AI tax planning platform to local tax laws by reading and comprehending them at scale, a language task, instead?
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After endlessly tweaking the SQL generators[1] that I am working on, I would recommend setting a "reasoning" output string to activate step by step thinking and better responses. Even better if you can add output "reasoning strings" more relevant to the specific task you are trying to solve.
Many prominent Stoics advocated the use of “negative visualizations” for a number of reasons. One argument for using negative visualizations was that by imagining potential misfortunes, one could prevent and avert them. Another argument was that they believed misfortune strikes hardest those who believe life is a bed of roses:
> “But no matter how hard we try to prevent bad things from happening to us, some will happen anyway. Seneca therefore points to a second reason for contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. If we think about these things, we will lessen their impact on us when, despite our efforts at prevention, they happen: “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who “expect nothing but good fortune.” Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that “all things everywhere are perishable.” If we fail to recognize this and instead go around assuming that we will always be able to enjoy the things we value, we will likely find ourselves subject to considerable distress when the things we value are taken from us.”
A third argument put forward by the Stoics is that the use of negative visualizations makes you realize what is truly valuable to you and appreciate it:
> They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
And a fourth argument is the one you highlight, that thinking about death makes us realize how precious life is:
> Why, then, do the Stoics want us to contemplate our own death? Because doing so can dramatically enhance our enjoyment of life.”
(All quotations are from the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William B. Irvine”, which comes highly recommended.)
Thank you! I'm glad you found the observation insightful. It's important to delve deep into the core of an issue to truly understand its implications and potential solutions. If you'd like to explore this further or discuss any other aspects, feel free to share your thoughts!
You're absolutely right, based on the tenor of the previous message exchange, it is likely that brap is indeed sarcastically responding to gryfft. Do you want me to explain the mechanics of this interaction?
The most powerful Macbook Pro currently has 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and 128 GB of RAM (and a 16-core “neural engine” specifically designed to accelerate machine learning). Technically, it is a laptop, but it could just as well be a computer optimized for AI.
I think the point is that laptops are more limited than other form factors. I’m reading it as a response to the comment that MacBooks are computers optimized for ai and only technically a laptop (which is a pretty ridiculous statement imo). Apples architecture happens to be very good at a lot of compute heavy tasks, especially where total available GPU ram and low latency handoff between the CPU and the gpu are concerned. This happens to be very well suited to LLM workloads.
Apple m3/m4 silicon is certainly good in some ways, but the bottleneck is often a lack of CUDA software support and price (could buy >4 times the GPU raw performance on a dual rtx 5090 desktop.) =3
The key features of the m3 ultra is 512GB of shared GPU/CPU ram, and ultra fast LAN over peripheral cabling.
Once an NVIDIA card caches a model into its VRAM, than it doesn't get hit with the memory data copy cost over the bus.
Yet as many people have noticed, who cares if the m3 ultra takes four times as long if the faster alternative simply won't fit the larger models. YMMV =3
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