iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Arun Sundararajan

Rob Seamans @robseamans.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Potential legislative solutions to this challenge include the Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2023 and the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act. @digitalarun.bsky.social describes these and others in more detail in the article. www.brookings.edu/articles/wor...

brookings.edu

Workforce capacity development and occupational transitions with dignity

Arun Sundararajan explores how digital disruption is transforming work and calls for new systems to support a post-employment economy.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

a fun (long) read from @caity.bsky.social. As Kramer once said, it’s “a story about love, deception, greed, lust and unbridled enthusiasm. yes, that’s what led to Billy Mumphrey’s downfall…”

nytimes.com

How My Trip to Quit Sugar Quickly Became a Journey Into Hell

For my whole life, I’ve been a hard-core sweets junkie. Could a spa help me quit in a week?

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Reposted by Arun Sundararajan

NYU Stern Fubon Center @nyufubon.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Our first Tech Leadership Lab of 2025 is on Wednesday 02/05 at 4:45PM: former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson chats with @digitalarun.bsky.social about guiding Etsy from startup to IPO and beyond, growing revenue 14x 2011-2017, and lessons since imparted to dozens of startups. Sign up: bit.ly/dickersonTLL

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

I wonder what the intersection between people downloading VPNs for the first time specifically to get on TikTok and people vulnerable to a VPN scam is 😊

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

How? By shifting youth thinking from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.” You might disagree with him and see this as a narrative fitted retrospectively to justify today’s position — but its a fascinating perspective nevertheless.

nytimes.com

Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Before we compete with AI for our jobs, we’ll be competing with it for our electricity. This issue will be central to the AI policy debate. Infrastructure power needs are also going to be a critical constraint for many countries seeking AI sovereignty.

whitehouse.gov

Statement by President Biden on the Executive Order on Advancing U.S. Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure | The White House

The United States leads the world at the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI). Cutting-edge AI will have profound implications for national security

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Reposted by Arun Sundararajan

NYU Stern Fubon Center @nyufubon.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Our next Fireside Chat features Markus Herrmann Chen of the China Macro Group. Join us Monday, January 27th at 12:30PM to discuss the #TikTokBan and what the incoming Trump administration could mean for China's tech sector and US-China tech competition. Register now: bit.ly/mhchen

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Absolutely — any legislation that requires “taking the training data out” seems pointless. The transaction costs of opt-out should also be considered. Personal data might be a better candidate than copyrighted data for opt-out — we don’t let copyright holders opt out of other forms of fair use.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

The week’s more visible changes in Meta content filtering obscured these revelations about their training data governance choices. Here’s hoping 2025 brings greater clarity about how broadly the #fairuse doctrine covers copyrighted works being used to train #AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Llama

techcrunch.com

Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims | TechCrunch

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team approval to train on copyrighted documents, according to a new court filing.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

if they do acquiesce to an acquisition, wouldn’t Google/Waymo be another possible suitor? Apart from their user base, Uber and Lyft have deep operational expertise and IP, something that Waymo or Google can’t rapidly replicate, and which seems very synergistic with their existing tech.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Related: an excellent 1/1 NYT oped by Jessica Grose about the virtues of modest levels of solitude, and of “embracing loneliness as a normal feeling that we all experience from time to time, rather than necessarily being pathological.”

nytimes.com

Opinion | Embracing the Joys of Solitude in the New Year (Gift Article)

Being alone doesn’t mean you’re lonely.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

“Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life, so long as one is not bored,” Kierkegaard wrote.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

3/ Is it sufficient to accept superficial fixes that balance out generated content for a vast majority of prompts (like the LLMs and image generators have done) or do we need to delve deeper into understanding the machine equivalent of the gender beliefs of their underlying models?

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

2/ What’s the right metric to measure bias in generative AI models? Do we want them to reflect “base rate” reality, or do we want them to be aspirational? Two colleagues and I looked into this a little a year or so ago in the context of LLM recall of Nobel Prize winners.

arxiv.org

Evaluating LLMs for Gender Disparities in Notable Persons

This study examines the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for retrieving factual information, addressing concerns over their propensity to produce factually incorrect "hallucinated" responses or to ...

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

1/ in an interesting experiment, #sora created a white male-presenting character when prompted to generate an “academic giving a lecture.” what’s surprising is that it consistently did so on 16 consecutive trials. This will likely be “rectified” rapidly, but raises familiar (and hard) questions:

futureofbeinghuman.com

Sora has a bias problem

Sora seems to think all academics are men, and predominantly white men at that. And this is a problem.

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Reposted by Arun Sundararajan

Rob Seamans @robseamans.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

I'm hiring a one-year post doc for research on AI, new tech and Future of Work Ideal candidate has Special Sworn Status and Census RDC experience. Interfolio link: apply.interfolio.com/158246 (NYU's term for "post doc" is "research scientist") AEA JOE link: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

aeaweb.org

American Economic Association: JOE Listings - August 1, 2024 - January 31, 2025

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Triggered by @annagoeddeke.bsky.social's post: "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" (a very cool paper) makes me wonder if government economic policy bodies should include experts from the other social sciences with an established track record of interdisciplinary thinking. Longer version below.

linkedin.com

Arun Sundararajan on LinkedIn: Apart from feeling the usual good cheer, this Christmas Day I’ve been…

Apart from feeling the usual good cheer, this Christmas Day I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite papers in grad school, “The Deadweight Loss of…

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

18 months later, my June 2023 TEDx talk about the challenges that generative AI might pose to human intellectual autonomy is finally online. Would be delighted to hear what you think. (And yes, I know, Google’s LLM is not called Bard any more:)

youtu.be

Can we own our intelligence in the age of AI? | Arun Sundararajan | TEDxGateway

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

What’s something you didn’t do in your 20s that you wish you had done? (Granted, this works better for groups in which there’s a critical mass of people willing to admit not currently being in their 20s, but it engages the younger folks in a mixed-age group a lot more than one might expect.)

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I’m enjoying Wolfgang Streeck’s “Taking Back Control.” I don’t agree with a lot of it, but it’s an interesting read.

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Reposted by Arun Sundararajan

cshirky.bsky.social @cshirky.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I wrote something about the migration from X to Bluesky. (I did not choose the title, and do not like it, but there you go.) www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now.

Users are looking for a more curated experience on a platform that is not constantly trying to get them to interact with brands.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

me holding a silicon wafer at ASML’s headquarters last week. i’d argue that their machines represent humanity’s most incredible engineering accomplishment to date.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

2/ True, some are vertically integrated (Google, maybe Meta), but OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t, and all depend on Nvidia (and thus indirectly on TSMC and ASML). The hardware-software value capture dynamic could also invert. Many economic forces counter data-driven winner-take-all dynamics from LLMs.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

1/ Looking at the premise of the original article linked to — I’m not sure that the “LLM builders” today are going to be the eventual value capture layer. They are sandwiched between the user layer (copilot, retail, advertising) and the infrastructure layer, both of which seem to have more power.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

this is very compelling. i don’t think we really have a good understanding of what has led to the sudden dramatic recent success of fantasists. Part of this might be understanding what has made humans susceptible to them in the past, and perhaps also how fragmented the “chorus” was pre-broadcast TV.

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

so here’s an essay i wrote for the @aspeninstitute.bsky.social recently. our focus on copyright and training data is making us miss the more important IP challenge raised by #AI: making sure people have sufficient ownership over their human capital. www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/a...

aspeninstitute.org

Artificial Intelligence, Human Intellectual Autonomy and the Future of Work

In January 2015, Congress convened the inaugural meeting of its newly-formed Sharing Economy Caucus. Led by Representatives Jerome Nadler and Eric Swalwell, a group of lawmakers, tech CEOs, and a few ...

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Arun Sundararajan @digitalarun.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

writing research papers about seeding a new network effects product is so much more fun than actually doing it as a user..

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