Truth Machines Go to War
Also Grok sales, QQQ competition, Altman alignment and VCs doing laundry.
Last weekend, Bloomberg Weekend had a great story by Christopher Beam about how linguists are annoyed at Kalshi. Kalshi is a prediction market where you can bet on sports and various other events, including “mentions markets,” where a contract pays $1 if Jerome Powell says a certain word at a press conference or whatever, and $0 if he doesn’t. But what are the boundaries of a word? Are singular and plural nouns the same word? Past and present tense verbs? Participles? Etc., all these boring disputes. Kalshi has some rules to resolve these questions, and linguists have criticisms:
Arguably what Kalshi needs is not a team of linguists but a team of philosophers: It offers a huge variety of contracts that pay off if some event occurs, but the boundaries of “event” and “occur” are not always crisp. Beam notes: