Finding an article about AI in a major news publication that sticks to facts and makes sense has become an event worth celebrating, so here is a recent one by Tatum Hunter of the Washington Post.

Feeling sad for Twitter app developers and, considering there will be some delay between the fit hitting the shan and it spreading all around, even sadder for the inevitable hardship of anyone who depended on a Twitter audience for their livelihood. Castles out of sand…

Further evidence that T cells are the best cells.

The headline: ChatGPT appears to pass medical school exams, educators rethinking assessments.

The article:

• They were mock, abbreviated exams,
• done incorrectly, ⊕ There are no open-ended questions on the real USMLE.
• which it didn’t actually pass,
• and which were reported in a pre-print. ⊕ Which isn’t a complete knock against the study per se, but even a glance at it shows that some questionable choices have been made regarding the scope — there were only 376 publicly available questions instead of more than a 1,000 on the real exams — and the methods used to ensure the publicly available questions hadn’t already been indexed by the ChatGPT training algorithm.

To be clear: this is my complaining about misleading headlines, not saying that predictive AI wouldn’t at some point be able to ace the USMLE, that point not being now, for reasons stated above. And let’s not even get into whether having a high USMLE score means anything other than the person achieving a high score being a good test-taker (it doesn’t).

And with that, the Twitter chapter of my life has closed.

May 2008 to January 2023. Not a bad run, considering.

Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History newsletter has enabled paid subscriptions today, and if there is one science-oriented Substack worth paying for, it’s Adam’s. I’m sold.

It is hard to watch an animation like this (a plot of England’s population versus GDP from 1270 onwards) without a sense of awe, followed by slight discomfort for what could come next.

I have seen many people sharing links to Maciej Cegłowski’s (excellent!) case against colonizing Mars.

Of course, Werner Herzog said it first, and more succinctly. Good luck with that, indeed.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

Some beautiful charts in this Pew Research overview of their 2022 findings. What they show is not as beautiful, but you can’t win them all.