WSJ: “From how we shop and work to how we connect with others, the pandemic greatly accelerated our adoption of some key technologies. Americans aren’t going to go back to the way things were before…We’re now entering what might be called a “hybrid” era of tech-based conveniences, in which consumers modify their behavior to reflect a changing balance of cost against time and effort saved. For example, ordering food from apps is more popular than ever, but more people are opting to save themselves a few bucks by picking it up rather than having it delivered. The implications of these shifts are all around us, and represent a profound change for many parts of our economy. To put it in terms a social psychologist might appreciate, habits are hard to acquire, but also hard to extinguish. The biggest barrier to adoption of new technology is typically our own ingrained ways of doing things. But that same stubbornness and inertia means that once we’re forced to adopt new tools and ways to get our needs met, we aren’t about to abandon them.”
Bloomberg: “Home to more than 5,000 listed companies, India offers global investors a wide range of options. Consumption, financial services, infrastructure, digitalization and health care are among sectors seen benefiting the most in the coming years from the demographic composition. “The great thing about India is that with 1.4 billion people, you can go into any industry, there’s a market domestically,” Mark Mobius, founding partner of Mobius Capital Partners, said at an event in Hong Kong…When asked about what he likes in India, the veteran emerging-markets investor mentioned infrastructure – companies that do building materials, health care and Internet-related businesses like mapping companies…With a median age of just 28 versus 38 in China, India is forecast to become the world’s largest “young consumer market” by 2030, according to the Brookings Institution. A rapid rise in disposable incomes is seen boosting demand for everything from vehicles to mobile phones and luxury items.”
The Generalist: “When Adobe acquired his startup Behance for $150 million in 2012, [Scott] Belsky struggled to see his long-term future at a big corporation. Eleven years later and the former entrepreneur is Adobe’s Chief Product Officer. Working at the $227 billion software behemoth, Scott discovered he was a mission-driven entrepreneur rather than a serial one. Rather than restricting his entrepreneurial urges, Adobe has given Scott a platform to tackle them from a new vantage… The prevailing dogma is that startups should ship and iterate as quickly as possible. Scott believes that’s often counterproductive. You need to “surprise and delight” your customers to create a product that grows organically. You can’t do that by simply meeting a user’s expectations; you must surpass them. Doing so takes time and polishing…We live in a “generalized” world, per Scott. When we visit an online store or look at a menu, we see the full range of options. The Adobe executive expects future generations to have more personalized product experiences that filter out unsuitable or unwanted options. They will also have far less choice, as a result.”
WSJ: ““When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach,” Musk said in 2013 during a TED talk. “Good physics is really sort of figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.” The challenge, according to Musk, is that it is easier to make decisions by looking at previous experiences, past practices or, as he describes it, analogy. These can be mental shortcuts. That is fine for most things in life. But that approach, he said, can be limiting when it comes to discovering something new. For breakthroughs, he advocates the first principles approach. In the most basic sense, Musk has described the approach as such: “Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘OK, what are we sure is true, or as sure as possible is true?’ And then reason up from there…The first principles process involves envisioning what ultimate success looks like and then being open to any path that leads there.”
Bloomberg Businessweek: “ChatGPT, based on a version of GPT-3 and released broadly last fall, dazzled with its conversational legerdemain, and the more advanced GPT-4 followed earlier this year. “It’s a game changer, a world changer,” says Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington, expressing an enthusiasm common now in AI academia. “We’re at the very beginning of this, and it is a very fast-moving phenomenon.” The result is a frenzy not seen since the dot-com fever of the late 1990s. Tech CEOs are reorienting their companies toward AI and raising their stock prices simply by mentioning the subject on earnings calls. Venture capitalists are reevaluating their portfolios and piling into AI startups. JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated that AI excitement drove 45% of this year’s gains in the S&P 500 through April. That excitement also led to a frank reassessment of previous trends, such as web3 and the metaverse, whose appeal to regular folks now seems thin or imagined next to the prospect of smarter machines answering bigger questions. Beneath the marketing-speak rests the potential for genuinely amazing advances, such as the recent AI-assisted discovery of a new type of antibiotic treatment for a drug-resistant superbug.”
