My personal AI assistant device era is not off to a particularly smooth start

We're thrilled to see Empire AI in the final state budget. Thank you to Governor Kathy Hochul for making it a reality and ensuring that New York is at the center of building and using AI for the public good. 🚀
empireai.tech/media/press-re…

The latest Second Opinion, for those interested in the topic, is a deep dive and market map on ICHRAs. Stacy Edgar is my co-author in crime. All 4,500 words of this edition is free, so enjoy! Courtesy of my first 300 paid subscribers (💗 you guys).

We all need to be paying…

Here is Oscar data from the last (partial) eclipse in NY in 2017. Conclusions:
- The medical term for 'staring at the sun too long' is solar retinopathy
- Members were 30x more likely to seek care for solar retinopathy in the month following the eclipse vs. a regular month
-…

U.S. healthcare is full of this type of financial doom loops:
- Set a fantasy, artificial, inflated price
- Invent a business that negotiates a bit of a discount
- Charge for the imaginary cost savings.
Another great example here, Multiplan & out-of-network pricing:…

I loved talking to Harry Stebbings. His combination of brilliance and warmth gets the best out of people

Some notes from augmenting our 'find care' search with LLMs: the Oscar app has long had an omni-search bar that is able to distinguish between reasons for visit, providers, facilities and drugs. Way back in the days we had a SNOMED- and Unified Medical Language System-based…

Did you know that the speed of light c in physics should be pronounced 'k' and not 'zee', because it is derived from the Latin word celeritas (speed), and by all accounts the c in Latin was pronounced as k (like the German Kaiser, emperor, derived from Caesar, pronounced Kaisar)

Some really unhelpful bits in the paper 'The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4' (by Microsoft Research): does GPT-4 'understand' the relation between solution types of stochastic partial differential equations if it is able…

New Kindle didn't connect to the family account, so I had to call an Amazon help line. Let me just say the idea that Amazon will ever be any good at anything serious in healthcare seems laughable after that experience. Harder than submitting a claim via Change Healthcare

This annual chart by Rock Health is always a great illustration why the employer-sponsored healthcare model is such an ineffective idea: nobody wants their employer playing a role in managing their healthcare. (Nobody wants the tech companies either btw.) ICHRA FTW

Surprised David Sacks hasn't congratulated Putin to his hard-earned election victory. What a lack of civility

So Oscar is an insane public markets story.

🔔 IPOd in 2021 with market cap of $7.1BN.

💩 Stock tanked 94%

🚀 Company comeback underway and market cap back to $3.2BN.

Tomorrow I have Mario Schlosser on 20VC to discuss the journey.

What are the must asks?

Awesome that OpenAI is constantly evolving their models. It leads to periods of weird behavior though. Right now, an odd amount of GPT-4 output randomness has crept in at temperature=0. Consider this prompt (see image): it instructs the LLM to execute cellular automata rules on…

The non-determinism of LLMs is sometimes just insane, and a good illustration of how much work remains to be done to make these models useful and reliable problem solvers. Here is a prompt that requires GPT-4 to run a cellular automaton (which btw is impossible for LLMs to do…