Purnima Gauthron’s Post

NATE SILVER -- "As close to our forecast has ever been in 16 years of doing this." Hex map by number of Electoral College votes per state totalling 538 votes. The US has a winner-take-all system denying representation to any political minorities. The Electoral College gives disproportionate voting power to states, favoring the smaller states with more electoral votes per person. A US #PresidentialCandidate must achieve a simple majority of 270 #ElectoralVotes to #Win. #2024ElectionForecast

WELCOME TO AI's NOT-SO-SECRET STARTUP SAUCE Another day, Another AI Announcement .... Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor, also known as the 'Godmother of AI' has been awarded $230 million in funding to helm her startup called World Labs "a spatial intelligence" company that is developing .... and she read your mind... A Large World Model. It is so predictable to pull off an AI theatre company if you have a name brand and a bunch of connections. Same investors, same producers, same stage managers; different actors and different Acts. But you still need a new story for the play. Make a few genius changes... "Large Language Models" become "Large World Models", and "Language intelligence" becomes "Spatial intelligence". According to Fei-Fei Li - "The 3D physical world is the last piece of the puzzle." Large World Models use 3D data such as images (well what else do you have to train with except stolen images???) to generate "3D Worlds” for 3D humans to interact with and control. Not surprisingly World Labs is already worth $1 Billion without a product. 😂 Let's play this out 5 years from now.....Tier 1 investors like a16z, Sequoia, Khosla, Thrive, Menlo, nVidia, AMD, Intel, Tier 1 investors tentuple their money, tier 2 investors double their money, and Fei-Fei Li and her co-founders becomes billionaires. It's the same. old. tired. script. Recently Fei-Fei Li opposed California Senator Weiner's AI Regulation Bill SB 1047 a proposal approved by majority of Californians. Do read Gary Marcus' open letter addressed to Fei-Fei Li #https://lnkd.in/gCq7xi7X The crux of this post is to state that we have lost all imagination when it comes to addressing real problems. We have already been losing our humanness — and now accelerated by Generative AI which is greatly affecting our evolution from 3D humans to 2D and perhaps even 1D humans in the not so distant future. #AI #GenerativeAI #startups #hype https://lnkd.in/giw3474j

Paid Influencers on Linkedin violating FTC Rules.... Up to 10,000 followers - $250 per post 10,000 - 50,000 followers - $488 50,000 - 100,000 followers - $608 100,000 - 500,000 followers - $2,433 [What do FTC guidelines say about influencers? The FTC guidelines say that influencers must transparently make it known whenever a post or statement they make is in a material relationship with the owner of the endorsed product] The Deep, Dark UnderBelly of Linkedin "Influencers", "Top Voices", and "Most Followed" H/t Dr. Jeffrey Funk and Sarah Adam LinkedIn: your game is up! You're not a trusted professional network anymore. You're a monopoly owned by MicroSoft. You're Tik Tok, X, Instagram, SnapChat, Discord, Truth Social ... the difference being that you present paid Influencer disinformation in a "professional" manner, and often enable those same Influencers to move from "Top Voice" to "Top Influencer" giving members an ego-boost and pay-boost. Total Manipulation. #InfleuncerMarketing https://lnkd.in/g7SrX4Jc

🇺🇸 TAXES AND TARIFF 101 FACTS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 🇺🇸 💹 The Government receives revenue through Individual and Corporate #Taxes and #Tariffs on imported goods to run the country. The burden of tariffs fall on consumers who pay higher prices. Economically Tariffs are considered a Tax. 💹 On December 22 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) into law set to expire at the close of 2025. The TCJA #ReducedTaxRates on both business and individual income. Cuts to individual income taxes meant that most households had more after-tax income, which increased their spending. But the #RevenueShortFall from lower taxes had the Trump administration imposing #Tariffs on imports amounting to an average tax increase of $600 on US households. 💹 Using the year 2017 as a reference....between 2017 - 2024 the Federal Revenue recorded: 2017 $3.32 Trillion 2018 $3.33 T 2019 $3.46 T 2020 $3.42 T 2021 $4.05 T 2022 $4.9 T 2023 $4.4 T 2024 $4.9 T (projected) A quick glance at the above Federal revenues shows minimal revenue increases from 2017 falling off during the brief 2020 pandemic recession and then resuming their upward climb until the fiscal year 2024. 💹 For example in 2023..... the US imported $3.8 trillion worth of stuff. The government collected about $80 billion in tariffs and $4.4 trillion total: $2.2 trillion was in individual income taxes. $1.6 trillion was from payroll taxes (FICA, Medicare), $420 billion from corporate taxes, $80 billion from tariffs, and then a bunch of smaller stuff (estate taxes, excise taxes, etc) making up the rest. SO TARIFFS ($80 BILLION) BROUGHT IN JUST 2% OF FEDERAL REVENUE ($4.4 TRILLION). 💹 Now Candidate Trump has proposed new across-the-board tariffs up to 60% against China and 10% tariffs on every other country including US allies Canada and EU countries, and slashing individual and corporate taxes further. 🗣 Trump to his base - "Chinese tariffs will pay our taxes". This is totally false. How can 60% tariffs on Chinese imports even come close to $1 Trillion?? Besides, Massive Tax cuts + Massive Tariff Increases would be a long-term disaster. To massively increase tariffs on imports would of course be highly inflationary. Gasoline prices would skyrocket, as would electronics. Other countries would probably spark retaliatory tariffs that reduce U.S. exports. The result would be an ugly trade war. 💹 Now one can argue that the 2017 Trump tariff tax (Biden actually kept most of Trump's tariffs) was a promise to bring more manufacturing jobs to the Midwest and South. But after the 2017 tariffs were imposed U.S. firms expanded sales of goods but the increase in sales was largely a result of higher prices and not greater quantities, meaning that the extra trade protection to local industries didn’t translate into higher employment. 👉🏻 Voters in Trump's base of rural uneducated folks are being fully mislead.

🇺🇸 ECONOMICS 101 FACTS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 🇺🇸 💹 Economics is not an easy subject to grasp or to predict. When American voters cite that "the Economy is the #1 concern" it is unclear what they actually mean, or perhaps misunderstand. 💹 It is important to not confuse "inflation" with "price increases." Inflation is the broad decrease in the value of money over a time period, while price increases are for specific commodities. Inflation is generally described as the result of demand outstripping supply, or alternatively, the supply of money exceeding demand. 💹 The Inflation rate (inflation is a rate change over a period of time like a year where $1 buys less than it used to) in the US at the moment July 2024 is about 2.9%, the lowest since the post-pandemic recession. 💹 Whereas Prices of some items are 20.9% more expensive, and others by just 6% since the pandemic, of the nearly 400 items the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks. So when many Americans whine that the price of a daily steak dinner has increased by 20.9% and hence "inflation has gone through the roof", it is ridiculous and false. 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 💹 Generally, economists consider a small amount of inflation – about 2% – healthy for growing, functional economies. Moderate inflation encourages consumers to spend now to avoid higher prices later, which keeps money circulating.... 💹 When Trump "the stable genius" promises that the "prices of food and everything will go down rapidly" it is actually dangerous. This will create a deflationary spiral and could risk a massive recession. If we know it’ll be cheaper to buy something next month, we won’t buy it today. And that would cause businesses to cut prices to go even lower......The way to bring about deflation would be to create a massive recession. 💹 Kamala Harris' price control policy is to hold food companies liable through state laws — 37 states already have equivalent laws— for price-gouging consumers for food, fuel and medicine during climate emergencies, pandemics and disasters. This policy makes more sense. Food businesses in the US are enjoying their highest median profits ~51% of the past two decades. 💹 People in the US have this idea that companies add up how much it costs to produce and market an item, add a profit margin to the top, and that's how much that item costs - which means that if costs go down, the price of the item will go down. But that doesn't happen! Instead the company will look at Sales vs Price curves, so if you put your price to $x, you will sell this many, and then you do the math to find the price point at which company profits are as high as they will go. If the costs go down, that simply increases the profit the company makes. 💹 In the meantime, are there ways to reduce food bills? Absolutely. Americans eat 815 billion calories of food **each day**. That's roughly 200 billion more than needed - enough to feed 80 million people!! #Inflation #2024Election

Desperation ...... Combining 1 Real and 9 Fake AI Images in a Single Montage Is the Latest Devious Way of Pushing Misinformation to Millions. #GenAI #AIGenerated #DeepFakes #UnregulatedAI #2024Election https://lnkd.in/gJmFPW-E

While Generative AI may be exciting and heady we need to to draw a line between a healthy use of AI and an unhealthy mental obsession. Here we have Allie K. Miller the " #1 AI Most Followed AI Voice on Linkedin " with over 1.5 Million Followers talking about only surrounding herself with people who only use AI, and feeling guilty for not using ChatGPT all the time, or for more than 18 hours. (Allie's talk was reposted several times with the same concerns....) I am not writing this to demean Allie Miller in any way. On the contrary I respect her. Allie was a very reasonable , rational voice two years ago, and it's downright sad that the AI frenzy and media attention has turned a good, level-headed young woman into a manic cult member...... or a canary in a coalmine.... that's how it appears to the outside world. Linkedin has been sponsoring Allie to do Generative AI courses for the platform. Recently Allie did an entire podcast on Generative AI Agents on smartphones "talking" ie parroting to each other without any understanding with Linkedin Founder Reid Hoffman whom I have an immense respect for... This is all great but — Linkedin needs to put the mental health of their sponsored Influencers first. To be clear, no professional Influencer on Linkedin in any other profession speaks this way about their work. #AI #GenAI #MentalHealth #AICult On Copy: Reid Hoffman Daniel Shapero Tomer Cohen Gyanda Sachdeva https://lnkd.in/gWqmzAK4

Large Language Models will soon be small potatoes 🥔 🥔 🥔 compared to what our Lab Boys at nVidia and Tesla are cookin' up... 🤖 🤖 🤖 👇🏻 ... (see Jim Fan's video) .... once again wasting a whole lotta human brain power and precious public utility power on creating "Humanoids" in another Science Fair Project which will keep them occupied through 2035 — with some interruptions in climate change. I don't get it .... Where are the real innovations that solve real problems???? (Oh, there is zero evidence that crypto/bitcoin is creating any technical innovation connected to the larger economy...) 🤖 Speaking for myself I frankly don't want a $20K humanoid doing half squats in front of the cooking range in my small kitchen in the Bay Area 🍲 , pouring honey 🍯 🍞 over my toast, etc while PG&E 🔌 stiffs me with a bill for blowing 3700 Watts (these humanoids operate at 3.7 KWh) 🤖 Not surprising that our frat-bro billionaires Elon Musk and Jensen Huang are at the forefront frothing to sell a billion of these AI Robots — not all to warehouses and shipping centers, but to consumers for companionship, cooking, and babysitting (yes, babysitting 👶🏻 ....) Elon Musk’s "promise" of a robot that works in the Tesla factory all day and then comes home to make you dinner adds serious hype fuel to his $25 Trillion in valuation when millions of metallic humanoids start rolling off the Tesla Assembly line.... #GenAI #Humanoids #AIHype #OpenAI https://lnkd.in/gxvMiKDi

Thank you Emily M. Bender for drawing attention to the most appalling application in Generative AI. Each time we turn around it feels like AI surrogates with scalpels keep outdoing themselves for the most disgusting use case medal. ⚕ ⚕ ⚕ ⚕ ⚕ So in a viewpoint article published in JAMA Network last week, three MDs from UCSF ask the question "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?" JAMA Article Link: https://lnkd.in/gXJMNAEj) 👉🏻 Emily Bender's Newsletter post: https://lnkd.in/gmfPvagy "They start with a scenario of an estranged daughter being asked to make end-of-life care decisions for her mother, the mother being unable to communicate and having not provided an advance directive. A painful and difficult scenario to be sure, for everyone involved, healthcare providers included. And yet, once again, just because you have identified a problem doesn't mean "AI" (of any form) is a solution for it...." Fantastically drafted. Do read Emily's rejoinder to the end, like, comment, and repost. Thanks!! #GenerativeAI #Hype #EndofLife https://lnkd.in/gJmpJZuJ