FT: “A self-made Chinese billionaire with a fascination for metallurgy is posing a fundamental challenge to a traditional auto industry already struggling to compete with China in the development of electric vehicles and batteries. Bai Houshan, the 59-year-old founder and chair of Shanghai-listed Ronbay Technology, dominates a key part of the global market for cathode electrodes, which are core building blocks in EV batteries and account for 30 to 50 per cent of component costs. With battery chemistries and components constantly evolving in the search for lower material costs and higher energy density, Ronbay has led a shift from cathodes with a lower nickel content to better-performing high-nickel cathode materials.”
: “Compare politics and the market. Unrestrained market competition leads to the production of everything that somebody, however small his minority, is willing to pay for. Unrestrained political competition produces everything that powerful enough groups want and that can be forced onto somebody else. In politics, you win by fighting down to the bottom of the barrel. Nothing is perfect, of course, but imperfect liberty is better than imperfect tyranny. Whether political competition can realistically be “constitutionally” constrained is the crucial issue.”
strategy+business: “Forget the myth of the hermetic genius working in the garage on the next world-changing startup. It’s time to upgrade that thinking and pay more attention to how much entrepreneurial innovation is woven into the fabric of daily life. So says Derek Lidow, a Princeton professor and former corporate executive. Lidow is the author of The Entrepreneurs: The Relentless Quest for Value, which analyzes the factors that give rise to entrepreneurs—and, in turn, the important social changes brought about by their innovations. In a nod to the thinking of the political economist Joseph Schumpeter, Lidow writes that entrepreneurship is “a vastly underappreciated, potent force of social change.” Lidow underlines that entrepreneurs, counter to conventional wisdom, don’t go it alone. His notion of “entrepreneurial swarming” holds that it is often groups of enterprising people who collectively transform society through reinforcing behaviors.”
FT: “Nvidia’s chief executive hailed a new era of computing in which “everyone is a programmer”, as the world’s most valuable semiconductor group unveiled a new supercomputer platform to stay at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution. Jensen Huang warned in a speech in Taiwan that the traditional tech industry would not keep pace with AI’s advances, adding that the technology had dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to computer coding. “We have reached the tipping point of a new computing era,” Huang said,…arguing that AI now enabled individuals to create programmes simply by plugging in commands. “Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer,” he added, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI as “a reinvention from the ground up”.”
AI/ML is still in its infancy. It can make mistakes. Hopefully later versions will be more reliable and error free.
One way to make sure that the results are reliable is to ask a follow-up question,” How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
Once the methods and the data used were declared by the program, there can be a greater degree of confidence in the results from the Chat/GPT programs.