NYTimes: “The premise of Operation Breakthrough was essentially: What if we could build houses in the same way the automotive industry produces cars? Lindbäcks, a family-owned construction company in Sweden, just shy of the Arctic Circle, took that question literally. Before opening a housing factory in 2017, its management visited the factories of Toyota and Volvo as well as nearby pulp and paper plants, borrowing their best ideas. The Lindbäcks factory now spans 10 acres, an aircraft hangar for the most earthbound of structures…Everything in the factory was oriented around one main line — a slow-moving conveyor belt on which finished components were assembled into fully formed modules. The main line was the spine. More time-consuming subassemblies — shorter lines with machines building floors, walls, ceilings and so-called logistics, like countertops and cabinets — fed into the spine like ribs. One boxy unit was completed every 30 minutes. The units could be connected to create apartments of different sizes and floor plans.”
Business Standard: “Anticipating change is a strong weapon in an uncertain world. Technology and geopolitics are changing consumer behaviour in a post-pandemic world. Business leaders and investors are acknowledging the value of the insights industry in nearly every aspect of enterprise management. Broadly, the insights industry includes digital data analytics; market research, social listening and communities, and surveys. “There is a historic level of investments in the insights industry,” says Joachim Brechta, director-general of ESOMAR, an industry group. “Data analytics is the fastest-growing segment of the global insights industry.””
Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer: “The fact that LLMs are so costly to implement actually implies that there’s going to be a much greater opportunity to invest in the application layer. The infrastructure layer is spoken for, and you will most likely have to be an incumbent to participate in the infrastructure layer. On the application layer, which is probably where a huge amount of the opportunity is going to be created, that is going to be left up to small companies that are specialised and really focusing on particular parts. So we’re seeing really exciting companies that are very verticalised.”
Nonint: “You can build a generally intelligent agent. Here’s how: First, you seed your agent with one or more objectives. Have the agent use system 2 thinking in conjunction with its world model to start ideating ways to optimize for its objectives. It picks the best idea and builds a plan. It uses this plan to take an action on the world. It observes the result of this action and compares that result with the expectation it had based on its world model. It might update its world model here with the new knowledge gained. It uses system 2 thinking to make alterations to the plan (or idea). Rinse and repeat. My definition for general intelligence is an agent that can coherently execute the above cycle repeatedly over long periods of time, thereby being able to attempt to optimize any objective.”
FT: “The management guru Peter Drucker would sometimes ask a room full of executives how many of them had “dead wood” in their teams or businesses. A lot of hands would go up. And then came his supplementary: “Were they dead wood when you hired them, or did they become so under your command?” You have to admit it’s a pretty good question.”
