FT: “What makes Balatro so addictive? Put bluntly, the same feedback loop you may recognise from such pastimes as, well, gambling. The game revolves around playing poker hands from cards in a deck — only there are no other players or competing hands to defeat. Instead, different hands and different cards are assigned values, and your aim is to achieve a certain score to progress to the next round. After each round, you visit a shop where you can acquire tools to improve your chances of success: jokers that affect how your cards score and interact with one another; tarot cards that can skew the composition of the deck in your favour. But, most importantly, once you’ve paid your £9.99 for the game, you’re only ever staking theoretical chips, not real money. Instead of reacting to a disappointing result with a groan or a cold sweat, you learn to incorporate it into your long-term strategy.”
Alice Newton-Rex: “WhatsApp has two main revenue streams. One of them is paid messaging, such as the customer service I was just talking about, or maybe an airline sending you a boarding pass. The other is Click to WhatsApp ads, which are run on Facebook and Instagram. When you click on them, it opens up a conversation with the business on WhatsApp. This is popular in some developing countries, where businesses might not have a presence online…Click to WhatsApp ads is the more established business, with revenue in the billions. Paid messaging is a bit earlier in the journey, but it’s also doing well and we’ve passed a $1bn run rate.”
Donald Boudreaux: “Strangers asking for bank-account numbers do differ in some ways from strangers asking for votes. But I’m struck by the similarities. In both cases, individuals who we don’t know and who don’t know us seek to gain our trust so that they can then gain open-ended access to our wealth. In both cases, the strangers seeking our trust proclaim there to be a special, personal connection between them and us. And in both cases there is every reason to distrust these proclamations.”
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on AI Agents: “The first stage is AI processing the same information that you process—seeing what you see, hearing what you hear, consuming the text that you consume. The second phase is [AI having] a long term, persistent memory that creates a shared understanding over time. And the third stage is AI interacting with third parties by sending instructions and taking actions—to buy things, book things, plan a schedule.”
