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Not Normal, Optimal

Reports of blood work generally include guides for normal ranges. For instance, for LDL-C, in the US, a score of < 100 (mg/DL) is considered normal. But neither the reports nor doctors have much to say about what LDL-C level to aspire for. The same holds true for things

Smallest Loss That Compute Can Buy

With Chris Alexiuk and Atul Dhingra The most expensive portion of model training today is GPU time. Given that, it is useful to ask what is the best way to spend the compute budget. More formally, the optimization problem is: minimize test loss given a FLOPs budget. To achieve the

Why Are the Prices the Same?

Many times within a narrow product category like breakfast cereals, ice cream tubs, etc., the prices of different varieties within a brand are the same. The same pattern continues in many ice cream stores where you are charged for the quantity instead of the flavor or the vessel in which

Cracking the Code: Addressing Some of the Challenges in Research Software

Macro Concerns 1. Lack of Incentives for Producing High-Quality Software. Software’s role in enabling and accelerating research cannot be overstated. But the incentives for producing software in academia are still very thin. One reason is that people do not cite the software they use; the academic currency is still

When Is Discrimination Profit-Maximizing?

Consider the following scenario: There are multiple firms looking to fill identical jobs. And there are multiple eligible workers given each job opening. Both the company and the workers have perfect information, which they are able toacquire without cost. Assume also that employees can switch jobs without cost. Under these

Generative AI and the Market for Creators

Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers

Hidden Code: Why Do Companies Open Source Code and Publish Papers?

Hardly a day passes without a major company announcing the release of a new scientific paper or code around a powerful technique. But why do so many companies open source (via papers and code) so many impactful technologies almost as soon as they are invented? The traditional answers—to attract

Tipping Lemons: Market Failures in Tips

Say that people can be easily identified by characteristic C. Say that the average tip left by people of group C_A is smaller than !C_A with a wide variance in tipped amounts within each group. Let’s assume that the quality of service (two levels: high or low)

Bad Service: Missing Functionality in Web Services

A host of cloud services are missing the core functionality needed to build businesses on top of the services. Powerful services on mature platforms like Google Vision, etc., have a common set of deficiencies—they do not allow clients to send information about preferred latency and throughput (for a price)