Large language models based on transformers, like chatgpt, gpt3 etc are all the rage. However, a lot of people misunderstand what they do. These models can generate correct looking text/image/videos and other kinds of media. Basically, it is Gmail autocomplete on steroids (a very high dose though!). What that means is that given some hints, chatgpt/gpt3 can generate well formatted, large form text which, due to very large training dataset, looks and even reads like human written text. This doesn't mean the model really understands what it is spitting out. Let me explain.
We have seen variants of this, such as dalle-2 and stablediffusion that can generate images and videos basis given text input. Now these images do not have much meaning but are very creative in nature. They are most of the time not even "correct" but the point of these models in not to be correct. They are "generative models". That means they generate new things basis given hint/nudge. Think of these models as left side of the brain. Very creative but possibly not much logic. Same is the case with the text output. However, I would admit that it does feel very very real in the first sight.
Now let's come to the point as to what these models can do well: tasks which require reading text, watching videos or images and then rewriting them in a different form can 'possibly' be handled by these models. It can write essays, do deep search over very large corpses of text, write SEO friendly articles, generate a whole website, which are as good as human generated ones. Therefore, jobs which depend on such skills, have danger to be disrupted by these LLMs.
In future, such models, can be made to consume tabular data and generate decent presentations and graphs...may be even videos. They can explain a given picture or even be made to watch a video and then write a summary of it.
However, they are not really good at understanding the meaning of a given text and neither it is good at logical reasoning. It probably cannot extrapolate well, yet. Neither it can think of edge cases, fraud angles, etc. It definitely cannot make decisions basis cost benefit analysis. Basically any task which requires mixture of left brain and right brain such as decision making, empathy in business environment, thinking about user experience etc.
Therefore, I am pretty certain that it won't take away jobs that require more than just consumption of knowledge and spitting it out in a different form. At least, not yet!
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Large language models and job disruptions!
Sunday, August 29, 2021
How to choose the best health insurance for yourself
I joined an online insurance brokerage firm, called Coverfox recently and realised how complicated insurance policies are to understand. Choosing the right health insurance policy is a daunting task but it is very important to choose the right one. It can literally destroy your economic health along with physical health if you choose the wrong one for yourself. To choose wisely and reduce surprised, you must understand a few basic things which differentiates these policies.
Here we go:
1. Room rent charges - Room rates are generally fixed at nearly 1% of the Sum Insured (SI). This means if your SI is 5 lakh, the insurer won't pay more than 5k/day. This is a problem if you are in Mumbai as the average room rent for a single room is around INR8-10k/day in all major cities. ICU room charges are generally capped to 2% of SI; which means if your SI is 5 lakh, the insurer will not pay more than 10k/day. Most of the time, ICU charges are more than INR10K/day
Solution: Look for policies which do not have room rent limit or increase the SI according to the city you live in.
2. Proportionate charges - This means that most of the other charges which are not room rent would be charged according to room rent limit above. Imagine if the surgeon cost was 20K and room cost was 7K while your policy covers only up to 5K for room rent. In this case, surgeon charge would also be proportionately covered i.e. you would need to pay 5/7th of the surgeon and other costs! This means instead of covering the full 20K of the surgeon cost, it would only cover INR14,285/- of the surgeon cost. In other words, the whole bill gets adjusted proportionately basis the above room charge adjustment!
Solution: Higher room rent plans also saves one from proportionate charges. Since sometimes hospitals anchor some expenses according to the room chosen, it is important to choose room rent limit wisely! We also published a video to understand this better
3. Co-Pay - Co-Pay is a cost sharing model. If your admissible claim amount is say 2 lakh, for a Co-pay of 20%, then you have to put up 40k of this amount. This reduces the liability for the insurance company with a sharing of cost model. If SI is 5L, and Co-pay is 10% then be ready to pay INR50K in case the bill goes above that limit.
Solution: Choosing co-pay reduced the cost but also increases the liability. Understand and buy.
4. Waiting period - Waiting period means that many diseases which is pre existing cannot be covered as expenses unless the policy has been in effect for X number of years. Generally waiting period of pre-existing diseases ranges from 3-5 years. Though there are policies which have less waiting period. Therefore make sure to buy less waiting period (2 years) policy and do NOT stop paying the premium in between.
Solution: Choose policies with lower waiting period
5. Most Group medical policy doesn't adequately cover risks - Employer insurance policy is called Group Insurance. Group Insurance policies are structured differently than Individual retail medical insurances and in most cases cover less than what your own individual policy covers. This is why one must always have a retail policy along with company medical insurance.
Solution: Buy a retail health policy for yourself irrespective of whether you have a medical cover from office or not
6. Quitting your job to startup ? Port out - One very important thing to understand for people who are quitting their jobs to startup: When and if you are quitting your job after working there for 3-4 years, your waiting period gets reset even if you buy a new policy immediately. Raise a request with the group policy TPA to port (migrate) your existing Group Insurance policy to an Individual one BEFORE YOU QUIT. Solution: Port your policy before you quit your job to a retail health policy to save waiting period gap
7. Family floaters policies - A family floater is a single policy that covers multiple members of the same family. So say for a family of 3 (1 kid, husband and wife), the total SI could be 5 lakh, which can be claimed by any of the 3 members. The eldest person in the policy is the primary policyholder by design On demise of the primary policyholder, the policy ceases to exist for all other members, and they have to buy a new policy at the existing market rates. Therefore, it would be prudent to buy a separate retail policy for yourself as parent and one policy with spouse and children. In the unfortunate and sad event of demise of one parent, children can still be covered under other policy.
Solution: Buy separate policy for dependents when going for family floater
8. Cumulative Bonus(CB) - Sum Insured increases by some amount for every claim less year, that is, you are rewarded for being healthy. Many Insurers reward you a 5% CB for every claim free year though I did see policies going as high as 20-25% CB. It is important to buy a cover with higher CB as it gives progressively higher cover every year as costs and risks increase.
Solution: Buy higher CB policies (20-25%)
9. Buy a Top-up - Top-Up is a great little gem. Top-up cover means that once the bill of hospital goes over the cover limit, top-up kicks in and covers the rest! Imagine that one has a retail health insurance with cover of INR 5 lakh. Now that person gets hospitalised for a medical emergency, and total expense comes to around 8 lakh. This person would have to cough up this remaining INR3 lakh out of their own pocket. If this person buys a top-up cover (of say 20 lakh with deductible of 5L) then the remaining amount would get covered by this top up plan. This deductible top-up means that whatever expense on incurs above this deductible limit, in the hospital, would get covered by top-up. Only limit of top-up is that it can be only used once. However these are very small in amount typically between 500-1500 per annum. Solution: The advantage of top-up is that it increases your cover at a very lower cost.
10. Cashless hospitals network - Ensure that all major and preferred, (by you) hospitals around you are covered under your policy's network. If the hospital isn't a part of cashless hospitals, it means you can't avail the "cashless" mode- that is, the Insurer directly settles your medical bills with the Hospital. In absence of this facility, one would need to pay out of their own pocket and then go for claim reimbursement.
Solution: Always go for policies that have cashless mode and check for hospitals around you that are included in that network.
So go ahead and choose the right insurance policy. Goes without saying that, Coverfox insurance can help you with the same.
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
Thoughts about making of skynet!
Without simple menial jobs, people would start becoming dependent on minimum guaranteed income and "free" health care schemes. However, people need more to survive. They need a purpose, a goal. I feel this would open up possibilities of a revolution by have nots against the affluent. A big global revolution. With tools of social media, all it needs a good leader and a spark.
One thing that Terminator movie's script writers did not think about (or deliberately missed out on) is existence of humans in Skynet. And a large number of them, working hard to perfect the machines' AI and material science.
Machines won't destroy the world, humans would. Like always!
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
What is this black money and will demonetisation help in curbing it ?
What is this Black-Money ?
In my view (and in admittedly layman terms), black-money is money earned by a person on which she has evaded tax. Black-money is the money that you have that the Income Tax department or other government tax agencies do not know about. This could be the money a grocery shop owner earns in cash and never declares in his income statement (or for that matter he never even files an income statement), bribe money that a police man earn on the road, crime money that a drug peddler takes from their customers, crime money that a bank robber has etc.
How is black money created ?
As soon as your clean-tax-declared money (referred to as white) is out of ATM, it has a fair chance of becoming black. For instance, suppose you have all whites and you take this cash out of ATM and buy groceries worth INR2000 from the local grocery shop. Let us assume that grocery shop owner has a margin of 20% and he makes a net of INR 200 as profit (after expenses). The grocery shop owner does not declare this income to IT department in his tax returns. This money is not accounted at all and is now his black money. He would pay this cash now to buy more goods, he would pay his employees who in turn would spend this in cash and money remains black.
Moreover, a large percentage of rest of the INR1800, can potentially become black money. If the wholesaler he buys from doesn't declare taxes, the manufacturer the wholesaler buys the goods from doesn't pay taxes or the landlord of his shop takes all his rent in cash, it all would be classified as black.
Can this money turn in white ?
Sure it can turn into white. The grocery shop owner goes with his family for an outing and spends this cash in a large multinational coffee chain. This coffee shop chain then declares the GST/VAT they collect, pay tax of the corporate profit they make, the landlord gets paid by cheque who then declares the rent from the coffee shop as income and the employees of this chain get paid in their bank accounts who in turn have to pay income tax. All this money is white and would remain white till it remains with honest people who pay taxes or are forced to pay their taxes systemically.
What about fake currency, drug money etc ?
Black money includes fake money, terror money, corruption money and crime money but the proportion of simple tax evasion money is huge. Let us get some numbers. The amount of money in circulation in India is around INR 17, 54, 000 crores. This amount is about 14% of the GDP! This is a very high figure and in developed world it is around 5%. Fake currency in circulation is estimated to be around INR 400 crores or roughly 0.02% of total currency in the economy. Drug and crime money is higher but in the similar order of magnitude.
Let us be clear about this, amount of black money (tax evasion) is huge in Indian economy and curbing it can make Indian government really cash rich and in turn make India really prosperous in long term.
What about demonetisation ? Will that curb black money ?
Tax evasion happens because money goes unaccounted and public, in general, do not believe in paying taxes unless forced to. Large firms have very strict rules regarding payment of salaries. This includes cutting taxes at the source. This leads to very less leakage from this source.
However any small business or local shops & establishments who take cash from people, do not pay any tax at all or pay tax on a tiny percentage of their income. A lot of self employed people who earn in cash simply don't pay any tax. Farming and agriculture industry is tax free by government. Small scale industries are big tax evaders. Therefore, we can see here that there is a huge chunk of people in our country who simply do not pay taxes or pay on a small percentage of their income.
Demonetization, simply wouldn't solve this problem. It is akin to using bomb to kill a swarm of mosquitoes over a swamp. Sure, the mosquito population would dwindle in short team, but unless the swamp is cleaned, mosquitoes would come back in short amount of time.
Friday, April 03, 2015
Is the app-only economy going to kill the internet ?
Let me take a step back. Internet, in my view, is the ultimate manifestation of the hippy culture. Everything was free:
- Access to internet is free after you have paid your ISP. Almost everything that has been digitized is available on the internet for free. You could change ISPs and everything still worked.
- There was hardly any government control over the internet. They wished. However, it is designed in such a beautiful way that there are very few central systems. This makes the internet very tough to control (unless of course you are China).
- The real estate on the internet was also very cheap. You could buy a domain name in $10, a cheap server in $5 and go online with your site.
- There was no limit on number of sites you could visit. These sites could not steal your data. They could store some of their own data at your end but not steal much. Once you close the site, they cannot send you any popups or notifications. They cannot run in background and monitor your activity. Track your location, speed, acceleration etc.
- Better still, you could write blog posts which millions could read and cost you zilch. There were these things called RSS feed, which made it even unnecessary to go to sites to read content on them. You could just subscribe to RSS feeds.
- In fact, you could link to other people's property and it was encouraged. People who visited your site, could easily hop to any other site you linked to. You did not have to pay anything for it.
- HTML was written in a way that made even sloppy code work. HTML was so dead simple that anybody could make a site in it. No lock-in. Almost all code written for one browser worked in all browsers. There were tonnes of browsers. This sloppy code could render on almost any device and browser. Again no lock-in. You could look into the html, css and javascript code of any site. It was free for all. Internet was the ultimate open source.
- Internet fast speed lanes, internet.org, anti net neutrality deals. Enough said.
- Apps do share the internet. However are themselves in control of one company which makes it, one company which distributes it.
- Apps have already made it impossible for a part time hobby dev to produce and maintain 3-4 different apps. Hardly anybody I know, knows obj-c and java both very well.
- Apps have made it difficult to have more than 20-30 of them on your phone. More than that and your phone would be left with no space. Once these select 20 are there, you are locked into them. They steal your data and periodically push you notifications! A we just love them.
- We first managed to kill RSS. I remember there was a huge campaign one time which demeaned RSS. Google then killed reader for no apparent reason. Is the internet world a puppet show ?
- Apps cannot link to other apps. You cannot link to particular page of particular app in a generic way unless the other app wants it and allows it. There exists no generic way to do it. The standard way could be that you talk to the other app dev, sign a contract with them and possibly even pay them. Linking is dead.
- Apps are not free. They are locked in to a platform. If you want to port your code, you would need to rewrite the whole code base. (hybrid apps don't seem like they are happening)
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Lets recall 1991
Cinema halls were places which were dark and damp, frequented by anti social elements,
Even old technology by US or other western countries standards was not available in India like computers or mobile phones.
We had Maruti, Ambassadar & Fiat premier padmini for cars. Going anywhere by road was considered a huge pain as roads were in piss poor state. NHAI did not exist back then.
Going abroad for a holiday was never heard of. I remember when my father went to london we all (about 50 people) went to see him off.
Calls to US/UK were not even in reach of rich. Though if you knew a telephone dept. employee you were lucky. Mobile phones were not there.
If your landline phone went dead and was repaired in 1 month, it was considered to be a good service.
Cancer treatment was available in only Bombay.
Trunk calls in normal mode used to take 12 hours. Lightening one was 30 mins (?) and used to cost four times.
Opening a bank account and getting the damn passbook updated was a half day long task in itself.
Domestic air travel was not heard off. Tickets were super expensive for kind of earnings those days. Travelling even in 2nd or 3rd AC was considered a luxury. Getting a ticket in railway was difficult. Very difficult. Online was not a word.
Novels or other non text-books were not available easily. There were some like mills & boon etc which you could buy in 2nd hand or get issued from library. I always used to think that one day if I have money I will buy lots of books.
Information was hard to come by. I remember my father renting Newstrack to watch news about babri mosque demolition. You had to believe on what radio used to tell you. I remember how we used to wait for 8:30 news at night.
Cinema halls were dark, damp places that used to be frequented by anti social elements. Entertainment industry was very very small and it was hard to find. Mall as a concept did not exist at all.
Bharat bandh or state bandh were very frequent. Riots were very frequent too.
In all, I feel we have come a long way.
I am not saying we live in a rosy world and sure some places in India are really backward, however we have more light than darkness. We have ubiquitous telephony, accessible & cheaper air travel, much better service in terms of railways and other ticketing. Malls and multiplexes has made long tail cinema possible and profitable along with mainstream commercial cinema. Internet is still not as ubiquitous as we would like to but we are moving towards it with a very fast pace. We have much less incidents of riots and bandhs. Sure, UP has riots and it is not going to end there anytime soon. However much of India is does not witness as much communal violence as we used to witness in those days. Polio is eradicated. Banking is much more ubiquitous and accessible than it was before.
Miles to go before we can call ourselves a developed nation, but surely we are not moving in the wrong direction.
Monday, March 31, 2014
ngrep
1. Capture all requests on port 80
sudo ngrep -q -W byline '' 'dst port 80'
2. Capture all http get requests on port 80 and headers
sudo ngrep -W byline -q -t '(^GET .* HTTP)' 'port 80'
3. Capture all GET requests on port 80
sudo ngrep -W byline -q -t '(^GET .* HTTP)' 'port 80'|grep -E '^GET /.*'
4. Capture all GET/POST requests and responses (not in sync)
sudo ngrep -W byline -q -t '(^GET .* HTTP)|(^HTTP/1.1)'|grep -E '^(HTTP/1.1)|(GET /)' -B1
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Dilemma of growth vs environment
Forests have become breeding ground for maoists who continue to make sure people in those areas live in extreme poverty and continue supporting maoism. People are opposing nuclear plants after getting influenced by Greenpeace. How many people died in Fukushima outside the plant ? None! Millions die everyday due to lack of medicines, healthcare, clean drinking water and all this cannot be delivered to people with energy. We have an option of either using nuclear energy which is relatively clean or use thermal which is heavily polluting. We do not stop flying just because a plane crashed.
Similarly, we enforce coastal regulatory zones (CRZ) in cities like Mumbai and do not allow to build drains and water treatment plants as these will result in some mangroves getting cut. In Mumbai, metro line 2 is not being made as the coach depot has green hurdles. What is the use of CRZ in Mumbai ? People say that mangroves help Mumbai from flooding. Why not just make sure we have enough infra to take care of storm water? Other large cities manage it. I am sure Mumbai can manage without mangroves too.
I don't think we can continue to live in these city villages & forests and dream of growth. We cannot have both at the same time.
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Bitcoin is #fail and how RBI was right about it
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-mt-gox-bankruptcy-bitcoins-20140228,0,2153477.story#ixzz2vAHPXj6B
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26446142
- VCs being in digital form are stored in digital/electronic media that are called electronic wallets. Therefore, they are prone to losses arising out of hacking, loss of password, compromise of access credentials, malware attack etc. Since they are not created by or traded through any authorised central registry or agency, the loss of the e-wallet could result in the permanent loss of the VCs held in them.
- It is reported that VCs, such as Bitcoins, are being traded on exchange platforms set up in various jurisdictions whose legal status is also unclear. Hence, the traders of VCs on such platforms are exposed to legal as well as financial risks
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Not subsidizing petrol is good
- not subsidize 3% (rich) population's leisurely drives
- better spend that money in building public transport
- build better healthcare facility
- bring down fiscal deficit
- provide money out to poor via NREGA
- pass food security bill and provide out food security
- take steps to reduce pollution by making driving more expensive and public transport more effective
- dissuade people from driving cars to de-congest city roads
- encourage car pooling and this is one way of doing it
- encourage innovation of alternate fuels in the country and prohibitive costs of petrol is a good way of doing that