Bloomberg: “Getting businesses to buy, install and use a new generation of AI-fueled software — the corporate version of the products that government agencies use to pinpoint drone targets or locate landmines — requires a lot of legwork. But instead of capitulating and building up a sales staff to recruit, onboard and maintain relationships with customers, Palantir has adopted a novel approach: software boot camps. The events are part hackathon, part conference and part party. Lasting from one to five days, they feature demos from engineers, work sessions for attendees and presentations by existing customers on how they use the tools. If the software works the way it’s supposed to, the effect is that customers and engineers become unofficial salespeople.”
WSJ: “There’s no way of learning to manage people other than by direct observation of those who do it well…Time management may be the most underrated capacity of great managers. Controlling your own time well and not permitting others to dictate how you spend it is one of the determinants of successful leadership. Watching others is really the only way to develop a command of this essential practice. Another skill you can’t learn sitting at home is motivating others to reach for success. Leadership involves getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. This requires articulating and continually reinforcing an external purpose and a visceral sense of teamwork. It isn’t a cold digital process; it is a human and at times personal connection with all the members of your team. It manifests itself in immediate and constructive feedback. None of us are born with these skills, nor are we conditioned or trained to do them well. Watching others who have successfully developed this leadership capacity is, in my mind, the singular way to learn it.”
Douglas Irwin: “There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every government intervention involves a tradeoff of some sort. Higher sugar prices increase employment in sugar production but reduce employment in food-manufacturing industries. Higher semiconductor prices increase employment in the semiconductor industry but decrease employment in the computer industry. Higher steel prices increase employment in the steel industry but decrease employment in steel-using industries. When an industry asks the government to impose trade barriers that would raise the domestic price above the world price, the choice means trading off jobs in one sector of the economy for jobs in another sector, not creating or losing jobs overall.” [via CafeHayek]
Rohit Krishnan: “What can LLMs never do?…There exists certain classes of problems which can’t be solved by LLMs as they are today, the ones which require longer series of reasoning steps, especially if they’re dependent on previous states or predicting future ones. Playing Wordle or predicting CA are examples of this.”
Ben Thompson: “Meta, in other words, is not taking some sort of philosophical stand: rather, they are clear-eyed about what their market is (time and attention), and their core differentiation (horizontal services that capture more time and attention than anyone); everything that matters in pursuit of that market and maintenance of that differentiation is worth investing in, and if “openness” means that investment goes further or performs better or handicaps a competitor, then Meta will be open.”
