BrianA

Metformin reduces covid length of time and viral load, cuts risk of hospitalization or death by about 50%: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/common-diabetes-drug-lowers-sars-cov-2-levels-clinical-trial-finds

Emerging evidence sars-cov-2 can persistently infect bone marrow, similar to HIV, and create infected platelets, which in turn may be an explanation for long covid: https://www.croiconference.org/abstract/persistence-of-sars-cov-2-in-platelets-and-megakaryocytes-in-long-covid/

Keeping an eye on the latest bird flu/H5N1 news. It is now confirmed to be spreading cow to cow on various farms in the US, to at least 1 person, and also spreading to and killing off related barn cats who drink cow milk. Anyone in the US drinking unpasteurized milk is rolling the dice right now.

COVID-19 Virus Can Persist in the Body More Than a Year after Infection https://polybio.org/covid-19-virus-can-persist-in-the-body-more-than-a-year-after-infection/ "Research published today in Lancet Infectious Disease and supported by PolyBio Research Foundation provides the strongest evidence yet that the COVID virus can persist for months or years after infection. The findings, published by a UC San Francisco/Harvard Medical School team, found that proteins created by the virus were still present for up to 14 months in a quarter of people tested."

Director of the NIH, regarding long covid: "We see evidence of persistent live virus in humans in various tissue reservoirs, including surrounding nerves, the brain, the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, to the lung." "The virus can persist in tissues for months, perhaps even years." https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/faustfiles/109672

An alternative is the concept that creating your own high-earning business becomes easier and easier, with the help of AI. There is already an established trend showing this, and that was before AI has become actually useful recently which will accelerate this. See the chart at this post: You might say: ok, but historically being a business owner isn't a mainstream thing for the "everyday person". But I also believe statistically more new businesses than ever are being created, since the pandemic: https://gusto.com/company-news/2022-new-business-surge-census-data now imagine if all the little annoyances and hurdles involved in starting a business (particularly software-based businesses), just... fade away and get waaay easier with AI employees. Everyone will be doing it.

‘Alarming’ rise in Americans with long Covid symptoms https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/15/long-covid-symptoms-cdc COVID-19 Leaves Its Mark on the Brain. Significant Drops in IQ Scores Are Noted Research shows that even mild COVID-19 can lead to the equivalent of seven years of brain aging https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-are/

I listened to a podcast a couple weeks back with the CEO of Helion Energy, one of the more promising fusion startups, and IIRC he did mention they are using some in house AI stuff to help speed up their development. Also there has been news in the past couple weeks of some bio companies using AI to accelerate, check the news from Insilico. So things are speeding up via AI, some of it is a bit behind the scenes and not always advertised. I think over the next few years this trend will continue, to where it will be just assumed all companies and research is using AI in some way, just like we use the internet today. Anyone not using it will begin to appear a bit backwards. Here's today's AI hype, I apologize if this is too triggering:

I'm not a huge fan of Marcus, he seems to a bit of a "goalpost mover", trying to find new things the current AI can't quite do - but every time a new AI comes out that can do some of what he said they'd never do, he conveniently forgets about it: Goalpost moving is a classic "cope" maneuver used by humans who'd rather not mentally deal with the entire effects of what's just around the corner, or who have staked so much of their social capital on a particular viewpoint they can't admit when it's not going their way. A related "AGI never" person seems to by Yann LeCun, who is getting dunked on deservedly on X today as things he claimed to be far in the future are happening now. Robot cleaning up dishes: that RL is useless, yet today Google rolls out a game-generalizing AI using RL: My take is when I see people like this make predictions over and over that turn out to be wrong, and way off on their timeline predictions, I start discounting their takes.

I'm fully aware of your background Dean (there was also a small mention of your work in a book I listened to recently: A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett), and I do value your input greatly. And you totally called the Cruise failure from your description above - nice work! However I also believe, as I tried to show in that chess chart, that AI capabilities advance over time relative to essential static human capability levels. From levels that are "useless", to "equivalent", to "superhuman". As far as I see, this is happening with self driving car software right now, along with pretty much every other human task such as the software engineering breakthrough today. The only question is what is the trajectory of the self driving capabilities line, and when does it cross over and exceed the average human driver level? My timeline takes into account the recent apparently accelerating improvements in AI (hardware, algorithms, money, people, etc), and I'm making an assumption that acceleration is going to continue happening - leading to a timeline that is a lot earlier than what you seem to have. Or are you predicting the AI capabilities will never cross over the human level of driving?

Automated software engineering just had a big jump today. Getting to the point now where it's just starting to take some Upwork jobs away from humans. The crossover of the capability lines is here, now. Watch how much farther above human level it goes in the next few years. "Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer. Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork. Devin is an autonomous agent that solves engineering tasks through the use of its own shell, code editor, and web browser. When evaluated on the SWE-Bench benchmark, which asks an AI to resolve GitHub issues found in real-world open-source projects, Devin correctly resolves 13.86% of the issues unassisted, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art model performance of 1.96% unassisted and 4.80% assisted." https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548763134964000 article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/cognition-ai-is-a-peter-thiel-backed-coding-assistant?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxMDI0ODc3NCwiZXhwIjoxNzEwODUzNTc0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTQThLNFFUMEcxS1cwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI5MTM4NzMzNDcyQkY0QjlGQTg0OTI3QTVBRjY1QzBCRiJ9.DZvx9NvMMQF0p-rA6xO3KKH0DxcVdAOWKaHXtW-3R6c

Old news, old software, stop looking in the rear view mirror Dean 😄 Here's the latest FSD 12.3 that is just dropping now. Oh look another 0 disengagements drive:

This crossover is coming for every single thing humans think they're the best at. The only question is the timing for each task. There is no going back, no putting AI back into the bag, and there is no technical reason why it would ever plateau or stop at merely human levels of competence on any given task. There is nothing magical about human meat brains, so eventually you throw enough artificial neurons and training at AI that it will exceed us. The economics go from: terrible -> breakeven profitable -> humans are no longer economically competitive. And the transition when it comes, happens fast (a few years). BTW, a potential post-digital-transistors method for running AIs significantly more cheaply was disclosed today: https://www.extropic.ai/future That startup is headed by 2 ex-Google Quantum nerds, so it isn't fully vaporware and may actually get to market.

COVID-19 virus can stay in the body more than a year after infection https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308165037.htm

The statistics I've seen for both Waymo and Tesla (from insurance statistics, so you could say it's 3rd party verified) indicate significantly fewer crashes and deaths per mile driven, compared to human drivers. And that was with the older Tesla software. Isn't that the ultimate goal here, to reduce all the unnecessary human death and disability from terrible human driving? Y'all seem to be wanting to hold the AIs to higher-than-human "perfect" standards. Do you want me to go dig up on youtube all manner of human-driven car crashes and accidents? Cause there's tons more than the AI ones.

Hmm, last I heard Waymo does now have fully autonomous service in an increasing amount of service areas? It was just approved to expand to more areas for example in California. As for Tesla, their latest 12.2 software which completes a rewrite of their system to an end-to-end neural network now can do 45 minute drives in the rain with 0 human interventions, so things seem to be getting pretty close to what was promised?

"scientists theorize the cause could be a previous viral infection" Immune genes are altered in Alzheimer's patients' blood https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240209163442.htm

RSV shown to infect nerve cells, cause inflammation and damage https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240109170510.htm

Evidence of fetal brain damage from maternal covid infection: Study shows infants exposed to COVID in utero at risk for developmental delay https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-shows-infants-exposed-covid-utero-risk-developmental-delay Haemorrhage of human foetal cortex associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/146/3/1175/6985751?login=false

The spike protein now shown to cause neurons and glial cells to fuse together, likely permanently, with the result being worsening neural activity. I've still never been able to get a straight answer as to whether spike protein generated from the mRNA vaccines penetrates the blood-brain barrier, but the continuing widely increasing negative effects being discovered for that protein make me pretty sure I'm going to avoid any vaccines going forward that utilize the entire protein, or any part of it that could cause these types of problems. SARS-CoV-2 infection and viral fusogens cause neuronal and glial fusion that compromises neuronal activity https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg2248

Interesting paper Ron, thanks for posting it. I think for me it reinforces my idea that the immune system is actually a limited resource, and it's best to guard it jealously against using it up, whether that might come from pathogen exposure or "over-vaccinating".

"Researchers have discovered that misreading of therapeutic mRNAs by the cell’s decoding machinery can cause an unintended immune response in the body. They have identified the sequence within the mRNA that causes this to occur and found a way to prevent ‘off-target’ immune responses to enable the safer design of future mRNA therapeutics." https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/researchers-redesign-future-mrna-therapeutics-to-prevent-potentially-harmful-immune-responses N1-methylpseudouridylation of mRNA causes +1 ribosomal frameshifting https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3

Last year there was a big unexplained outbreak of hepatitis in kids, at the time there was strong covid-denialism, instead assigning blame to an adenovirus. Turns out, no, it was indeed covid. T Cell Cross-reactivity in Autoimmune-like Hepatitis Triggered by COVID-19 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949928323000093

SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries, increases plaque inflammation https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/sars-cov-2-infects-coronary-arteries-increases-plaque-inflammation "Additionally, the researchers found that when they compared the infection rates of SARS-CoV-2, they showed that the virus infects macrophages at a higher rate than other arterial cells. Cholesterol-laden foam cells were the most susceptible to infection and unable to readily clear the virus. This suggested that foam cells might act as a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 in the atherosclerotic plaque. Having more build-up of plaque, and thus a greater number of foam cells, could increase the severity or persistence of COVID-19. The researchers then turned their attention to the inflammation they predicted might occur in the plaque after infecting it with the virus. They quickly documented the release of molecules, known as cytokines, that are known to increase inflammation and promote the formation of even more plaque. The cytokines were released by infected macrophages and foam cells. The researchers said this may help explain why people who have underlying plaque buildup and then get COVID-19 may have cardiovascular complications long after getting the infection."