FT: “Space to Grow is a useful primer that explains what is happening in the space economy. The problem of space debris, for instance, exemplifies the tragedy of the commons. A scarce but unpriced resource — near-space — is in jeopardy as more satellites increase the risk of collisions, generating debris that would make some orbits unusable. Authors Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau track how a cold war competition between great powers evolved into “a multifaceted enterprise spanning science, exploration, and — especially now — commerce”, in which a government-led model “has given way to a mixture of public and private actors”.”
Tyler Cowen: “Simply the brand name of ChatGPT has become a word like Xerox or Google. People haven’t heard of Claude or Gemini to a remarkable degree and they just call things ChatGPT. That has been very sticky. A name that was viewed as stupid, like arbitrary, has turned out to be brilliant. I think that was an accident, but it’s one of the best marketing names I’ve heard in retrospect. And how much that is people’s entry point into talking about what this is, stickier than I would have thought and actual ease of distribution, less sticky.”
SaaStr: “Consider this staggering example: Peter Thiel sold $1 billion worth of Facebook shares early in the company’s trajectory. Had he held those shares, they would have compounded at roughly 30% IRR and be worth approximately $30 billion today—potentially making him significantly wealthier than he is now. This illustrates a crucial point about timing and conviction in high-growth investing. The companies that do make it into that top 10% of compounders can generate life-changing returns, but only for investors with the patience and conviction to hold through the inevitable volatility and doubt.”
WSJ reviews “Primal Intelligence”: “As Mr. Fletcher describes it, primal intelligence is part of our lost nature and a key to activating intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense…AI can steal datasets from stories and recycle them into plots but, Mr. Fletcher is keen to remind us, the computer is still not reading the story. We are. We are the ones taking the word scrambles and lacing meaning into them. Mr. Fletcher uses moving pictures to drive the point home: If you ask AI to generate an image of a running horse, it will do so with bits and bytes of data, still images that it pushes together for us to view. It’s our brain that sees the horse run; we write action and story over bald data. In this way, our primal intelligence lets us see beyond what is to what might be, uncover new ways to ask why and what if, and recognize exceptions and opportunities.”
