National Review: “Central planning didn’t make China richer…“China became an economic powerhouse by opening its markets, recognizing the nonstate sector, and allowing individuals to lift themselves out of poverty. Attempts at industrial policy under the SASAC failed,” Dorn writes. “The lesson for China is to continue on the path of marketization and liberalization, not to revert to destructive state control and repression.” If China wants to ignore that lesson and persist on its return to state-run economic planning, the U.S. shouldn’t get in the way. And hopefully someday the communist regime will fall, and Chinese people will be able to prosper as much as they could if only they lived under the rule of law with property rights and free markets.”
Noema: “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) means many different things to different people, but the most important parts of it have already been achieved by the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. These “frontier models” have many flaws: They hallucinate scholarly citations and court cases, perpetuate biases from their training data and make simple arithmetic mistakes. Fixing every flaw (including those often exhibited by humans) would involve building an artificial superintelligence, which is a whole other project. Nevertheless, today’s frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.”
WSJ: “Workers around the world are adopting artificial intelligence to streamline tasks ranging from email writing to product development. Now companies have begun using AI to root out another workplace inefficiency: meetings. Across the U.S., some workers are using tools that record, analyze and summarize what has been said, allowing them to skip gatherings entirely and skim the highlights. The AI also acts as a kind of virtual Miss Manners, reminding people to share the mic and to modulate their speaking pace, and advising them how to avoid verbal flubs.”
Ninan: “The overall picture of the [Indian] economy is, therefore, painted in broadly optimistic hues, with some contrapuntal colours a part of the mosaic. The economy is, therefore, chugging along at the “new-old normal” growth rate of 6-plus per cent. That’s great, given the global context, but there’s no near-term prospect of acceleration.”
Ashu Garg: “As we enter 2024, founders will need to balance ambition and caution. Startups with proven PMF and sound unit economics should lean into capturing market share, but prepare to tap the brakes if economic conditions deteriorate…Founders have learned hard-won lessons from the ups and downs of the past few years. Now is the time to apply them: remain vigilant about cash runway, concentrate resources on proven areas of strength, and optimize GTM efforts. For all its uncertainty, 2024 holds ample opportunities for startups that can embrace efficiency without sacrificing ambition.”
