Very sorry to haunt your mailbox twice in one day, and sorry for any typos below, but you really might want to read this thread, in equal parts hilarious and horrible.
Basically, it turns out that Trump’s tariff rates derived from a simple formula that James Surowiecki inferred correctly:
It gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective). The White House denied it, and said Surowiecki was an idiot. And gave their own formula:
Oops! And it gets better:
And, wait for it, the whole thing was probably recommended to them by an LLM:
§
In Taming Silicon Valley, I warned that LLMs would be used for dumb things that would affect lots of people.
I rest my case.
Gary Marcus recently updated his bio on X. It now reads “Built two Al companies, wrote six books, tried to warn you about a lot of things.”
At least the US has a surplus on Dumb. The biggest surplus.
I saw that tweet last night and thought that if GPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude all gave the same answer it must be because of the training data. So I asked both GPT and Claude to give citations for the formula without using web search. Both cited Peter Navarro's work. So it's more likely the Trump team just poisoned the training data than that they got the formula from the LLM.