Ray Dalio (newsletter): “Principle: “A Smart Rabbit Has Three Holes.” That is an old saying I learned in Hong Kong that is meant to convey that any place can become unsafe and that having the ability to go to other places is invaluable. It is a lesson from history that might have been lost to people who haven’t experienced that need in their lifetimes. The fact is that throughout history—over the last 200 years—about 85% of countries have had such bad circumstances that large numbers of people have had to flee them. More specifically, today there are about 195 countries, and over the last 200 years, approximately 160–175 of those had at least one period in which substantial numbers of people fled because of war, persecution, famine, or state collapse. History has shown that the Big Cycle is at times driven by the five big forces toward periods of disorder, as seems to be happening now. In any case, it would be naive to not consider and prepare for this possibility. When I think about investing, I think about what your money is for. I think that we would agree that, first and foremost, it is to keep you and your loved ones safe. I have found that one’s perspective about wars and investing in light of them depends on one’s proximity to them. If you are someone who is experiencing some sort of war (civil or international), your perspective is very different than if you’re outside of the war, thinking about the return on your investments. My point is that history has shown that the best investment you can have in times of war is alternative safe places to go that are well stocked, and the best asset you can have is your human capital.”
Erik Matlick: “I replicates software. It cannot replicate unique data. Data is AI’s input layer. Software is the output layer being commoditized. DaaS never carried inflated valuations built on hypergrowth expectations. Slow and steady turns out to be a feature, not a bug. AI agents interpret data faster than humans ever could. More AI systems = more demand for proprietary data. Data businesses distribute across integrations and ecosystems, far less burdened by MAUs, DAUs, and “hands on keyboards.” What were perceived as SaaS strengths have become weaknesses. What were perceived as DaaS weaknesses have become strengths.”
Knowledge@Wharton: “Decision-makers have long relied on the “wisdom of the crowd” — the idea that combining many people’s judgments often leads to better predictions than any individual’s guess. But what if the crowd isn’t human? New research from Wharton management professor Philip Tetlock finds that combining predictions from multiple artificial intelligence (AI) systems, known as large language models (LLMs), can achieve accuracy on par with human forecasters. This breakthrough offers a cheaper, faster alternative for tasks like predicting political outcomes or economic trends. “What we’re seeing here is a paradigm shift: AI predictions aren’t just matching human expertise — they’re changing how we think about forecasting entirely,” said Tetlock.”
Ashu Garg: “AI isn’t just collapsing the cost of intelligence: it’s making it infinitely scalable, and through agents, giving it the ability to act autonomously. That’s a larger surface area than any previous tech transition – which means the scale of both the disruption and the opportunity are much larger too.”
