Molly Worthen: “Charisma is not something that leaders have; it’s something that they do. Charisma is a kind of storytelling. It’s an ability to invite followers into a transcendent narrative about what their lives mean.”
FT: “Large language models gravitate towards the statistical consensus. A model trained before Galileo would have parroted a geocentric universe; fed 19th-century texts it would have proved human flight impossible before the Wright brothers succeeded. A recent Nature review found that while LLMs lightened routine scientific chores, the decisive leaps of insight still belonged to humans. Even Demis Hassabis, whose team at Google DeepMind produced AlphaFold — a model that can predict the shape of a protein and is arguably AI’s most celebrated scientific feat so far — admits that achieving genuine artificial general intelligence systems that can match or surpass humans across the full spectrum of cognitive tasks may require “several more innovations”. In the interim, AI primarily boosts efficiency rather than creativity.”
SaaStr: “We’re living through the biggest private equity hangover in history. PE firms are sitting on a record 29,000 companies worth $3.6 trillion—and half of these have been collecting dust on their books for five years or more. For SaaS founders, this isn’t just market noise. It’s a fundamental shift that’s reshaping how deals get done, how companies get valued, and what it takes to build an exit-worthy business.”
NYTimes: “[AI’s] ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past?…It is perhaps the most brain-breaking vision of A.I. history, in which an intelligent agent helps you write a book about the past and then stays attached to that book into the indefinite future, forever helping your audience to interpret it. From the perspective of human knowledge, is that utopia or dystopia? Who’s to say?”
