FT: “[Indian] cinema attendance last year fell 6 per cent from 2024 levels to 832mn, the lowest in a decade barring the pandemic years, according to Ormax Media, a consulting firm tracking India’s entertainment sector…“We are combating gaming, we’re combating streaming, we’re combating sport, we’re combating attention span, because of reels and Instagram,” says Karan Johar.”
Arnold Kling: “Here is one of the puzzles: trading volume in the stock market. Rational investors would not trade often. If you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis, then you do not assume that you can outsmart the market. Trading to try to beat the market is a losing proposition. In fact, the overwhelming majority of individual investors do not trade frequently. But trading volume far exceeds anything that a model would predict, assuming rational individuals. A small minority of individuals account for most of the individual trading. But institutional investors appear to account for more trading than do individuals (reliable data are not easy to come by). One economic model is that there are “noise traders,” who make trades on the basis of useless or misleading information. Opposite them are market sharks, who buy what the noise traders sell and sell what the noise traders buy…We cannot think in terms of the market acting like a single man, rational or otherwise. Market outcomes reflect the bets made by irrational men with many different beliefs and strategies. The net result is that stock prices cannot be systematically predicted. So the market as a whole is weakly efficient, or weakly rational if you will.”
Bloomberg: “[Xiankun] Wu, 31, designed Junior for almost any business, equipping it with the ability to tap into company data and communications challenges, along with the organizational memory it needs to know who does what and how colleagues are connected to each other. Wu is now courting global corporate customers, offering Junior as a full-fledged AI colleague capable of managing work processes within small and medium enterprises — at a cost of $2,000 a month. Junior has its own phone number, email and Slack account. It can join every Zoom call. “Getting used to the AI agent can be exhausting,” said Wu, who splits his time between Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and Shenzhen…The proposition is blunt: it’s labor, but AI-defined. Junior drafts marketing campaigns, updates customer relationship management systems, monitors inboxes, tracks deadlines across departments and generates reports. It does so proactively: Instead of waiting for prompts, it scans internal communications, identifies gaps and relentlessly nudges employees to close them”.
FT: “If the lessons of previous periods of wrenching change are anything to go by, much of today’s business establishment will muddle through, even as a handful of new AI giants rises to become the most visible winners from the technology. Economic history has shown that “most industrial change happens by very large new companies doing big things,” says Bradley. “And then the rest of the economy kind of just carries on.” Behind that “just carrying on”, there will be no shortage of upheaval, churn and disruption.”
