I will soon be joining Anthropic, and so this is my last opportunity to write down some thoughts on the AI lab business model before I can be accused of spilling any inside information.

The outlook for the US stock market looks unusually poor.

I don’t have an answer to this question, but I’ve gathered a few related stats that helped to get my own thinking into order.

The most fundamental technique in statistical learning is ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. If we have a vector of observations \(y\) and a matrix of features associated with each observation \(X\), then we assume the observations are a linear function of the features plus some (iid) random noise, \(\epsilon\):

Countries around the world are going into more-or-less complete states of lockdown in an effort to stop the spread of novel coronavirus. The question I find myself asking is whether the obvious economic cost of this can possibly justify the benefits. I built a model to answer this question and I find that, contrary to my priors, lockdown is actually justifiable under reasonable assumptions.