Vinod Khosla: “Imagine a world that operates by public transport in which your ride arrives the moment you need it. You travel directly to your destination — no stops, no transfers — at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact of both individual cars and high-speed trains. Best of all, this kind of system doesn’t require us to tear up our streets. It fits within the margins of our existing infrastructure, and would only require marginal incremental infrastructure investment. Self-driving, on-demand robotaxi pods could change the way we move around cities and dramatically increase throughput of our congested streets. We should be building fleets of these lightweight, low-cost electric vehicles. Known as personal rapid transit systems (PRT), they can travel along narrow, dedicated pathways closed off to all other forms of transport and passengers can get on and off them anywhere they choose.”
Rama Bijapurkar: “There are strong consumer-based reasons to explain the poor urban sales in mid-market categories. The Reserve Bank of India consumer confidence survey, which is (surprisingly) a large urban towns survey, shows deteriorating consumer perceptions compared to last year on almost all counts. Households in the third- and fourth-highest income quintiles have very little surplus income, and in high inflation times this is wiped out. They buy less, sadly for some companies, or “down trade”, happily for others, whose sales equity analysts may not be tracking. The Indian consumer market is getting more complex. Old paradigms and dominant logics need to be replaced with deeper, more nuanced understanding of cause and effect.”
Cremieux: “For almost the entire time humans spent dispersing throughout the world’s major landmasses, they roamed as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Before the advent of sedentism and the closely-related phenomenon of agriculture, hunter-gatherers lived everywhere man can be found today, from its more resource-poor, desolate locales to the places we might have once considered Edenic. Where man could go, man went, and he subsisted much like man anywhere else. Then, suddenly, in a five to seven thousand year burst, no fewer than seven locations independently developed agriculture. These locations did not adopt agriculture from one another, were not engaged in long-distance trade with each other, and weren’t even related by conquest; there was no cultural exchange that explains how all of these places took to the plough and the field simultaneously, and yet they did…Man started farming because the motions of Jupiter pulled the Earth into a stellar situation that made proto-farming desirable and, from there, it was a hop and a skip to real farming. Farmers established states to make life possible when nature threatened their ability to farm. After the Chinese state unified, it tended to stay unified because of the constant threat of steppe nomads invasions. Finally, the unity of China was its downfall because premodern state capacity was limited in ways that disposed its dynasties to massive population shocks that critically impaired the process of knowledge accumulation.”
Vernon Smith: “Government supplies money in proportion to failure, the private sector supplies money in proportion to success.” [via CafeHayek]
Ben Thompson: “A world of content abundance is going to benefit the biggest content Aggregator first and foremost. Of course Meta needs to execute on all of these vectors, but that is where they also benefit from being founder-led, particularly given the fact that founder seems more determined and locked in than ever. It’s also going to cost a lot of money, both in terms of training and inference. The inference part is inescapable: Meta may have a materially higher cost of revenue in the long run. The training part, however, has some intriguing possibilities. Specifically, Meta’s AI opportunities are so large and so central to the company’s future, that there is no question that Zuckerberg will spend whatever is necessary to keep pushing Llama forward. Other companies, however, with less obvious use cases, or more dependency on third-party development that may take longer than expected to generate real revenue, may at some point start to question their infrastructure spend, and wonder if it might make more sense to simply license Llama (this is where the “ish” part of “openish” looms large). It’s definitely plausible that Meta ends up being subsidized for building the models that give the company so much upside. Regardless, it’s good to be back on the Meta bull train, no matter what tomorrow’s earnings say about last quarter or next year. Stratechery from the beginning has been focused on the implications of abundance and the companies able to navigate it on behalf of massive user bases — the Aggregators. AI takes abundance to infinity, and Meta is the purest play of all.”
