Geometric Investor: “The AI cycle is a stack of four linked ledgers, with different owners, different time horizons, and different required returns: 1. The infrastructure ledger. NVIDIA, HBM and memory suppliers, foundries, advanced packaging, networking, power equipment, and cooling…2. The hyperscaler and neocloud ledger. Cloud incumbents and GPU-rental specialists must convert installed compute into rented or sold capacity at utilization and gross margin sufficient to cover depreciation, power, financing, and the risk that the assets age out before they pay back. 3. The token buyer ledger. Enterprises and consumers must receive more value from tokens than the tokens cost — labor savings, revenue lift, faster software, automation, fewer errors. If the buyer’s return is negative, every ledger below it is being funded by a future that will not arrive. 4. The macro ledger. If token usage raises economy-wide productivity, trend growth and the neutral real rate can rise.”
NYTimes: “Twenty years ago, the words “Stage 4” almost invariably meant “end of life.” A cancer had spread far from where it formed, attacking distant parts of the body and often making treatment impossible. For some, that remains true today. But for a growing number of people, a Stage 4 diagnosis is not the immediate death sentence it once was. New therapies that target specific genes and parts of the immune system, as well as new regimens of existing cancer drugs, have given many patients far longer than the handful of months they might have once hoped for. More than a third of people diagnosed with metastatic disease now live for at least five years, compared with 17 percent in the 1990s, according to the American Cancer Society.”
FT: “We certainly have better tools than ever to try to extract the signal from the noise, even as the geopolitical climate becomes more volatile. “AI is truly a breakthrough when it comes to forecasting events,” says Anthony Vinci, a former US intelligence officer, international affairs expert and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution. “I look at the world and no longer trust my personal opinion of what will happen. I need an AI tool to help me.” According to Vinci, there are four ways of trying to assess the probability of future events. A few individual human superforecasters are superb at such analysis. The collective intelligence of an organisation, such as the CIA or a political risk consultancy, can also be applied. The wisdom of crowds can be harnessed through prediction betting markets, such as Polymarket or Kalshi, although these can be manipulated. And a trained AI model can parse these three sources and crunch the data for additional insights.”
Paul Graham: “The key to starting a successful startup is to understand some group of users so well that you can make exactly what they want. If you’re young you can, and should, use the hack of making something for yourself. You understand yourself. But this is just an instance of the more general rule. Only by understanding users very deeply can you make something they love so much that they tell their friends about it, and only that can get you the exponential growth you need to make a startup really successful. There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want? What could you do for them that would make their lives dramatically better? That kind of empathy is what we look for in founders, and what we cultivate in the ones we accept.”
