John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) on how the show has changed over the past 10 years: “When we first began, we were doing our main story in one week. Then it became clear that was a crazy thing to do, because we would come up with the idea for a story, start writing; three days later, research would come in, which would wipe away everything that we’ve just written. So now you’re trying to write the show in two days, and that’s not a good idea. So the answer to how our show’s changed is that we write those main stories in six weeks, so we’re writing six stories at one time. That doesn’t really relate to Trump’s role in the last 10 years, but in terms of the development of our show, that is the most critical part of it.”
WSJ: “AI in the coming years has the potential to spur not only deflation but abundance, according to [Vinod] Khosla, by simultaneously fueling the creation of many more goods and services. He views the next 10 years as a transition period in which the world’s political and social structures won’t seem all that different. AI will be seen as a boost for efficiency and productivity. After that, as the mid stages of AI-driven automation take a toll on more than 25% of today’s jobs, governments will need to provide much broader and deeper social services. But there will be enough economic abundance to support it…“If medical services are a lot cheaper, if education services are near free, if eldercare becomes substantially cheaper—and today eldercare is a liability that’s looming for so many nations around the world at a level that people haven’t accounted for—the social safety net is much easier to construct,” said Khosla.”
Trae Stephens (Auduril, defence tech): “During the later stages of the Cold War and after, the US pivoted into a force posture with very high-cost, exquisite systems in low quantities. Things like fifth-generation fighter planes, aircraft carriers, and missiles that cost millions of dollars every time they’re fired. This worked when we had a dominant lead and were deterring large-scale conflict. That’s not the geopolitical landscape anymore. In Ukraine, we’re depleting entire inventories of weapons systems much faster than we can resupply. We need a supply chain that allows us to ramp up manufacturing of core, low-cost systems, so that if we ever find ourselves in a large-scale conflict, we could push weapons out to the front line quickly and not deplete our inventories.”
Alok Sama: “The best investment minds I know in the Valley have steered clear of the hype around ‘large language models’ like ChatGPT, but instead focused on how AI transforms the enterprise. In his last earnings announcement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gives the example of software company Amdocs reducing its customer service costs by 30% using an AI-powered agent. Others report a similar impact on their top line by deploying AI for lead generation and customer value propositions. This is not the stuff of racy science fiction, but when you consider that every business might expand its margins in this fashion, the economic and societal impact — displaced workers, for example — could be profound. More tangibly, economists at Goldman Sachs project that generative AI could raise global GDP by 7% over the next decade.”
Indian Express: “I’m thinking of reclaiming the pace of my friendships from school days. I want to be a slow friend. That person who has more than the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee to spare for a friend.”
