Mint: “With over 270 million online shoppers, the Indian e-retail market has now surpassed the US to become the second largest globally, according to a recent report by management consultancy Bain & Co. The domestic e-retail market has reached a size of approximately $60 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV). A key metric in e-commerce, GMV tracks the total value of all the goods sold on a platform, not including discounts and other expenses. One of the primary drivers of the e-retail sector is quick commerce, where orders are delivered in less than 30 minutes.”
Ethan Mollick: “What’s clear is that we continue to be in uncharted territory. The latest models represent something qualitatively different from what came before, whether or not we call it AGI. Their agentic properties, combined with their jagged capabilities, create a genuinely novel situation with few clear analogues. It may be that history continues to be the best guide, and that figuring out how to successfully apply AI in a way that shows up in the economic statistics may be a process measured in decades. Or it might be that we are on the edge of some sort of faster take-off, where AI-driven change sweeps our world suddenly. Either way, those who learn to navigate this jagged landscape now will be best positioned for what comes next… whatever that is.”
Keith Rabois: “There’s a common denominator between building a company and being an early-stage investor – it’s identifying the alpha in people. The technique differs when applied to founders versus employees, but in both cases, you’re trying to identify the highest-potential people on the planet as early as possible in their trajectory. That’s the art of venture capital, and to some extent, it’s how you scale a high-tech company. At Khosla Ventures, our mantra is to be “bold, early, and impactful.” “Early” means I want to be the first institutional capital in every single company of note. The only way to do that is by having an unfair advantage in attracting and assessing undiscovered talent.”
FT: “Advertising groups and tech start-ups have been racing to find ways to help brands boost their likelihood of surfacing in results from artificial intelligence chatbots, marking a new era of “search engine optimisation”…These new tools are able to predict an AI model’s sentiment towards companies by feeding a slew of text prompts to chatbots and analysing the results. The technology is then used to create a ranking of brands, allowing agencies to advise on how best to ensure they are mentioned by the models. The moves come as advertisers face pressure from the rising use of AI to create and target their marketing. Meta and Google have been developing self-serve tools for running ad campaigns directly to brands, in a potential threat to the work of agencies and media buyers.”
WSJ: “The concept of prompt engineers was to have an expert crafting the exact right inputs to generate the best responses out of large language models. But today, AI models are much better at intuiting user intent and they can ask follow-up questions when they’re unclear on it. Also, companies say they are training a wide range of employees across functions on how best to prompt and use models, so there’s not much of a need for a single person to hold this expertise. “Two years ago, everybody said, ‘Oh, I think prompt engineer is going to be the hot job.’” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft. “It’s not turning out to be true at all.””
