Sundar Pichai: “Just imagine when the internet came, blogging became a thing. Pre-internet, very few people had a means by which they could put their thoughts out to the world. With the internet came a new medium, which allowed people to create and express themselves in a new way. With mobile came cameras, and you could shoot and you could create videos. Look at what’s happened with YouTube. For me, a similar part of this is that we are all talking about things like vibe coding…You saw Veo 3, so we are now in that phase. I think people are going to be able to create AI applications, you can call it, vibe coding, there are many names for it. But that power is yet to be unleashed. We are barely scratching the surface, and these models aren’t quite there. You can kind of do one-shot coding, but you really need to be a programmer to iterate and create something with polish, right? But that frontier is evolving pretty rapidly. So I think you’re going to see a new wave of things, just like mobile did. Just like the internet did. I came to Google at the time when AJAX was the revolution, the fact that the web became dynamic. You had things like Google Maps, Flickr, and Gmail, that all suddenly came into existence. But I think AI is going to turbocharge in a way we haven’t seen before.”
The Generalist: “After hiring thousands of people and reviewing tens of thousands of resumés, Marc [Lore] has developed “X-ray vision” for identifying top talent. The pattern: true superstars (top 5%) appear only once every twenty candidates, but they’re easily recognizable by their track record of demonstrable success in every role…Marc looks for candidates who stay long enough at each job (4-5 years) to prove impact and get promoted multiple times. He also analyzes career moves: superstars make moves that are undeniably upward – better company, bigger role – not lateral transitions that suggest settling.”
FT: “Basecamp Research [is] a 42-person company based in London’s Clerkenwell, which is trying to build a “digital tree of life” by sequencing new genomes harvested from natural environments. To do that, Basecamp sends its explorers as far afield as Cameroon, Costa Rica, the Arctic ice caps and Point Nemo, the patch of ocean that is the furthest from land anywhere in the world. Clark got the job and now he and his team are involved in harvesting samples and sequencing them in a lab. Once digitised, his discoveries feed artificial intelligence models creating a digital copy of the biological world that Clark’s bosses hope will be vital in the hunt for future medicines.”
Mint on cricket fantasy leagues: “This gamification comes at a price. The players are now spreadsheets with limbs. The scoreboard is a stock-ticker. More than the countries or IPL teams we support, we are increasingly becoming beholden to our individual fantasy league teams. Our viewing experience is in danger of changing from a collective one to an individual one, where you only care about how those you’ve put in your team are faring, taking precedence over team loyalty and fanhood. This makes cricket viewing transactional. You don’t watch a game; you work it. You grind it for points. You look up expected strike rates and recent fantasy form and head-to-head bowling matchups. You don’t cheer a team as much as you audit it.” More: “Modern cricket is increasingly scientific and underpinned by professional analytics. The game’s new backroom stars are the analysts who break down all this data.”
