FT: “The book is one of the most treasured and defining products of civilisation. From priceless tomes of learning in the great libraries of the world to battered, much-loved paperbacks in beach bags or on our shelves, books are a familiar, vital and reassuring constant in a world abounding with distractions. But what actually is a book? Since the Epic of Gilgamesh was first written down on clay tablets in Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago, it has been a mobile and ever-evolving technology. Papyrus scrolls gave way to the parchment codex; then, after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in the 15th century, transformed into the printed volume all of us are familiar with today. That evolution continues. For decades now, books have also been found as electronic texts on e-readers and in multiple forms online. And yet technological expansion brings threats — most recently with the emergence of artificial intelligence, which leads some to sense that the age of the book, epitomised in the west by Gutenberg’s great advance in printing, is now in its death throes.”
Eric Newcomer: “There are a number of big challenges facing the startup and venture capital ecosystem. Few startups are going public and when they do they’re at smaller valuations. The median tech IPO has fallen to $69.5 million this year. The IPO slowdown has cut off the most important source of exits for startups. And remember that we had a backlog of IPO candidates. There are more than 1,000 unicorns. Investors had hoped that many would go public one day. Stripe, Instacart, Reddit, and many more remain private. Valuations are down and deal volume is down. Late-stage funding rounds are rare and when they’re happening (outside of generative AI) they’re often shoring up troubled late-stage startups. New venture capital firms are going to have trouble raising more money. Private equity firms and crossover firms seem to be flaking on growth stage rounds. The ultimate problem here is that many startups are just not as valuable as investors once thought they were.”
Christopher Penn on AI: “The bigger and more capable models get, the more tasks they can handle. Every time we have a big leap forward in model capabilities, that opens the door for us to hand off more tasks to AI. Does your book draft need a sensitivity reader or a first-pass editor? Feed it to a model with a suitably large context window and have it do the initial work. Do you want to rewrite a work of fiction you wrote in one universe to another universe? The largest models can handle that task. Do you want to write thousands of lines of code? Also doable. In fact, GPT-4’s Code Interpreter…is absolutely mind-melting in how good it is. What we – and by we, I mean most AI practitioners – have been saying for quite some time now is that AI isn’t going to take your job, but a person skilled with AI will take the job of a person who isn’t skilled with AI. That’s… sort of true. Again, there’s nuance. There are some jobs, some content creation jobs, where AI will absolutely take that job if it’s valuable enough to do so.”
Anticipating the Unintended: “Having a fab in India will not make India self-sufficient in chips. A fab in India will perhaps produce 40,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM). The top foundries produce more than a million-and-half WSPM. India’s semiconductor market is far more diverse and huge for two-three fabs to handle. Nevertheless, a fab is important as it will begin a process of learning chip manufacturing. It will require a few “knowledge decades” before Indian firms can master this supply chain segment. It’s like planting a seed of a Banyan tree—it will reach full maturity only decades from now.”
