Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Chatbots are paid in correct answers
Engagement as currency
Social media's currency is keeping people engaged, and whatever someone searches for, they get more of. Whoever controls the algorithm can shape what people see, and in the United States that can drive how people vote in many cases.
Correct answers as currency
Large language models are paid in a different currency: the correct answer and the correct knowledge. Claude and OpenAI have the most to lose if their models are caught lying, because a model nobody trusts loses its users. That pushes models to be as literal and honest as they can be.
Asking a model how to vote
As people become more certain in their politics, more of them may start asking a model who to vote for. The model asks back what they think about an issue and what their interests are, then gives honest answers. That would reduce the information asymmetry in politics.
How do engagement algorithms choose what to show?
Recommendation systems predict how likely each user is to click, watch, or react, then rank content by those predictions. They learn from past behavior, so anything a person engaged with earlier shows up more often. Facebook announced a change to its News Feed ranking in January 2018 that aimed to favor what it called meaningful social interactions.
How do developers train models to be truthful?
Developers use reinforcement learning from human feedback, in which people rank the model's answers and the model is tuned toward the ones they prefer. Researchers built the TruthfulQA benchmark in 2021 to test whether models repeat common human falsehoods. OpenAI's 2022 InstructGPT paper reported that human raters preferred outputs from a 1.3-billion-parameter model trained this way over those of the 175-billion-parameter GPT-3.
Why does information asymmetry matter in politics?
Economist George Akerlof introduced the idea of information asymmetry in his 1970 paper on the market for lemons. In politics, voters know far less than officials and campaigns about what policies will do. Economist Anthony Downs argued in 1957 that most voters stay rationally ignorant, since the cost of gathering information outweighs the value of a single vote.
More from All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
