Quick hack for optimal decision-making ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ The US middle class shrinking

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3 fascinating topics this week:
1️⃣ the 37% Rule for Decision-Making,
2️⃣ the latest breakthrough in AI, and
3️⃣ insights into the shifting of the US middle-class

Thing 1 - The 37% Rule for Decision-Making

I haven't heard of this method 'till this week, so I gotta share...

23 min video about number 37 that covers this method as well

It's a bit of a missed opportunity not to make the video 37 min long, but I digress...

Here's the gist

It works for decisions where you get to check out options one at a time and when you decide, you can't change.

Examples:
- picking a spouse (although, yes, you could become a statistic if you want, but that's not the point)
- stopping at the nicest hotel on a road trip

1. Check out the first 37% of your options to get the lay of the land.
2. Pick the next option that beats everything you've already seen.

Why 37%?

It's the sweet spot that models of optimal decision-making have blessed us with. If that isn't a great reason...

Derek covers the math at length in the video.

Not every choice can be boiled down to logic - sometimes, what feels right matters more than what looks right on paper. So take it as a guideline instead of a rule.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• New opensource LLM from Databricks beat Mixtral

DBRX outperforms established open source models on language understanding (MMLU), Programming (HumanEval), and Math (GSM8K) - image from Databricks blog

• Hume introduced the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), the first conversational AI with emotional intelligence - understands your tone of voice, which adds meaning to every word and uses it to guide its language and speech
• LLM agents can achieve superhuman performance on fact-checking when they can access Google
• xAI announced Grok-1.5
• OpenAI is working on a Voice Engine

Thing 3 - The US middle class is shrinking...

...because they moved to higher income. And low income shrunk too.

I came across some income stats from the U.S., and got interested because guess what?

From 1967 to 2019, more and more households are bringing in the dough, with those earning $100k or more a year jumping from just under 10% to over a third.

Meanwhile, the middle is getting a bit squeezed, not because they're earning less, but because many have climbed into higher earnings.
And the number of folks on the lower end? That shrunk some 30% too.

TL;DR - it looks like Americans are doing better. The green is flowing more, and it's something to cheer about.

Or is the inflation not priced in all the way yet or something?

Cheers, Zvonimir