WSJ: “Waymo was doing 10,000 paid rides a week in August 2023. By May 2024, that number of trips in cars without a driver was up to 50,000. In August, it hit 100,000. Now it’s already more than 250,000. After pulling ahead in the race for robotaxi supremacy, Waymo has started pulling away. This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It’s because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars.”
Mary Meeker’s AI report. From FT: “[Meeker said] that new AI advances will mint “multiple companies worth $10tn and they probably will not all be based in North America”. She added “the wealth creation will be extraordinary. We have never had a five billion-user market that one could get to so easily.”…Meeker argues that the costs to train models such as OpenAI’s GPT series or Google’s Gemini is rising, while increasing competition from cheaper domestic models and overseas groups such as DeepSeek is putting pressure on pricing power…“The business model is in flux. And there are new questions about the one-size-fits-all LLM approach, with smaller, cheaper models trained for custom-use cases now emerging,” according to the report. “In the short term, it’s hard to ignore that the economics of general-purpose LLMs look like commodity businesses with venture-scale burn.”” Axios.
FT: “Behavioural public policy has come to mean two distinct things. The first is a recognition that people do not necessarily conform to the simple model of human behaviour in an economic textbook. For example, workplace pensions could be set up for anyone who decides to opt in, or for everyone who decides not to opt out. The distinction seems trivial, yet in a real-world setting full of fallible real-world people, the change in the default option makes a huge difference to what people actually choose. The second is that new policy ideas are worth testing rigorously, ideally through randomised controlled trials. There is nothing particularly “behavioural” about this idea, but such trials have tended to provide strong evidence that behavioural economics is worth taking seriously, and so the advocates of randomised trials often tend to be the same people as the advocates of using ideas from behavioural economics. So, could more psychologically realistic, rigorously evaluated policy lead to higher economic growth?”
Alice Evans: “Fertility is collapsing everywhere, all at once. Perhaps with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, where rates are still very high, but across Latin America, the Middle East, Northern Africa, all those trends are going sharply downward. Economically, this has catastrophic implications for middle-income countries, because as you have an aging population, then older people typically have lower rates of labor force participation. They’re less economically productive. It’s the young people who are innovative, productive, starting up new companies. But as the entire economy ages, then it becomes more sluggish. And those younger people, either through savings or taxes, need to pay for elderly health care or pension costs or provisions.”
WSJ: “It’s Wall Street meets fantasy football. Stock salespeople and others across Wall Street submit trading recommendations to the duo’s hedge-fund firm, Marshall Wace. The firm analyzes the ideas and rewards firms of top contributors with millions of dollars of commissions each year. The tips are run through algorithms that evaluate them alongside a host of other factors that the firm sources and scrapes each day. That includes information like social-media signals, fund flows and satellite imagery of everything from parking lots to oil tankers. The best ideas that arise from that data crunching are then put into action into many of the firm’s portfolios. Others have tried and failed for years to fully match the strategy, which has propelled Marshall Wace into the ranks of the world’s largest hedge funds. It manages more than $70 billion and bested the performance of leviathans including Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Steve Cohen’s Point72 last year, delivering a 22.7% return in the firm’s hallmark fund that uses the algorithms, all with a staff a fraction of the size.”
