WSJ: “Private-equity firms are also sitting on more than $3 trillion worth of companies that were bought at the peak of the market in 2021 when interest rates were lower, according to Bain & Co. They are holding on to them because they don’t want to accept lower valuations. As a result, money hasn’t been returned to investors. Private-equity fundraising will be depressed at least until those deals are cleared.”
Biju Dominic: “Marketing is a science and an art. Every brand campaign must be honest to the core benefit offered by the brand. But with so many competing brands promising to take care of that evolutionary need, each brand must differentiate itself. Yet, every brand must be consistent in the position it adopts, which could mean searching for new interpretations of it for every new campaign. Marketing is the art of setting a brand apart from other brands (and often from its own past), while adhering to its core positioning. Can AI agents, which are powered only with past data, manage this subtle but crucial dichotomy within the marketing function?”
Andrew Chen: “The biggest waste of time [in a hiring interview] is to ask questions where you can’t say “hire” or “no hire” based on the response. This is why long windup stories detailing their every career move is low information per minute, and not useful. This is why I’m mostly negative on using culture fit as a strong indicator — everyone on the interview loop will have slightly different POVs, and ultimately you won’t ever hire someone on culture fit alone. Same with the obligatory, “why are you interested in this role?” (Yes sometimes someone will say something that instantly filters them out, but let the recruiter ask this one — you should focus on the deep skills assessment) The best interview questions filter people out very efficiently. This is what you want.”
Economist: “Since the turn of the century, and especially in the past decade under Narendra Modi, the prime minister, India has rapidly expanded its road connectivity. The national-highway network nearly tripled in length from 52,000km in 2000 to over 146,000km last year, adding an average of around 3,900km a year. Less well-known is the infrastructure revolution in the countryside. In 2000 India had just 545,000km of surfaced rural roads, usually of dubious quality. By last year, the country had added an additional 773,000km, at an annual average of 33,500km, under one programme alone. That effort to link villages to market towns with all-weather roads, known as the Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Programme (PMGSY in the Hindi acronym), was announced in 2000. It is part of an effort to narrow the huge urban-rural income gap and has been supported by every government since. Some states also run a complementary chief minister’s programme (MMGSY). Today the orange-and-black signboard marking a road built under the scheme is a familiar sight across India. The programme has by many measures been a success.”
Ars Technica: “Microsoft Research [recently] introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems. If the results hold up outside of Microsoft’s internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces. Microsoft claims that Magma is the first AI model that not only processes multimodal data (like text, images, and video) but can also natively act upon it—whether that’s navigating a user interface or manipulating physical objects.”
