Rahul Sanghi: “We reached out to some of the most thoughtful (and active) investors from the Indian venture capital landscape, and asked them to look ahead to 2024. We presented each of them with the same two questions: 1. What trends excite you most about India going into 2024? 2. If you were starting a company in India today, what would you start?” From the responses: “The most common theme that excited investors was the expansion and innovation within the financial services industry. This makes a lot of sense given that India has only recently become a well-banked country with effective fintech rails. But while 90% of Indian adults now have bank accounts, relatively few people participate in the capital markets. There is a lot of headroom for credit, investments, and insurance products to all grow (not to mention profit pools too!). The second most cited trend was AI-enabled transformation. Our respondents predict that there will be a wave of AI adoption across corporations that mirrors the tech wave of the 90s and 2000s in the US. Except this time, AI startups will be the ones to build products that help customers optimise their workflows and improve productivity.”
FT: “[Taylor] Swift, now 34, has unlocked a new level of stardom. Streams and Instagram “likes” have quintupled. Next week, she is set to tie Elvis Presley for the second-highest number of weeks holding the top-selling US album. From there, she trails only The Beatles. For Taylor Swift, 2023 was one of the biggest years for any artist in music history. Earning some $2bn, her utter domination has been compared by industry magazine Billboard to the “fab four” in 1965, or Michael Jackson in 1983. At a time when record executives agonise over how difficult it is to hold listeners’ attention, Swift has come to exist on her own planet. The Federal Reserve noted her tour had bolstered the economy through hotel bookings, with cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis breaking records for hotels rooms occupied during her visits. One sentence towards the end of a song — about making friendship bracelets — boosted sales at craft stores across the US. Several universities, including Harvard, have created classes about her. In Argentina, fans queued on rotation for five months to get as close to the stage as possible for Swift’s concert.”
Yann LeCun: “Machine learning is great. But the idea that somehow we’re going to just scale up the techniques that we have and get to human-level AI? No. We’re missing something big to get machines to learn efficiently, like humans and animals do. We don’t know what it is yet. I don’t want to bash those systems or say they’re useless—I spent my career working on them. But we have to dampen the excitement some people have that we’re just going to scale this up and pretty soon we’re gonna get human intelligence. Absolutely not.”
NYTimes: “[Canada’s] Northern College traditionally drew its students from the province of Ontario’s vast, sparsely populated hinterland, a region dominated by miners and loggers. Today, a whopping 82 percent of the public college’s students come from abroad — nearly all from India. How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.”
