Sangeet Paul Choudary: “Aggregators are consumer-facing business models, which (1) aggregate consumer demand by (2) building engagement and capturing data at scale through (3) provisioning consumer-facing services. Aggregators succeed through serving consumers at scale, capturing that demand, and then acting as a conduit (and consequently a bottleneck) allowing the rest of the ecosystem to serve these consumers…For Sephora, the primary demand for grooming and beauty drives the secondary demand for cosmetics. For Nike, shoes constitute secondary demand, health and fitness are the primary demand. By serving the primary demand of the customer, aggregators command right of customer relationship and can intermediate the customer’s relationship with third parties which serve this secondary demand.”
WSJ: “In “Empires of Ideas” William C. Kirby approaches the history of the research university by focusing on three settings: 19th-century Germany, 20th-century America and 21st-century China, providing case studies of institutions within each. Mr. Kirby is a distinguished Harvard historian of China with a long record of facilitating international cooperation in higher education, and in this timely book he makes a powerful argument about what it takes to be a leading university dedicated to the creation of new knowledge…Universities are not actually like fine wines or dishwashers, but they are crucial to the public good. Mr. Kirby’s book shows how catalytic is the combination of strong nations and universities that advance knowledge and foster critical and creative thinking. Now more, perhaps, than ever.”
NYTimes: “Over the past 10 years — a period some A.I. researchers have begun referring to as a “golden decade” — there’s been a wave of progress in many areas of A.I. research, fueled by the rise of techniques like deep learning and the advent of specialized hardware for running huge, computationally intensive A.I. models. Some of that progress has been slow and steady — bigger models with more data and processing power behind them yielding slightly better results. But other times, it feels more like the flick of a switch — impossible acts of magic suddenly becoming possible.”
