Category: Thinks

WSJ: “Instead of paying humans to join focus groups and complete surveys, Aaru uses thousands of AI agents, or bots, to simulate human responses. It feeds demographic and psychographic information into its models to create human profiles that match clients’ needs, and the results those bots spit out are being used for product development, pricing, identifying new customers and political polling.”

Arnold Kling: “The human should not have to learn how to prompt the AI. The AI should learn how to prompt the human.”

TheMaxSource: “Eighty one percent of consumers need to trust a brand before they’ll consider buying from it. Not interested. Not aware. Trust first, transaction later. The math gets sharper when you look at what drives that trust. User generated content gets 28% higher engagement than branded content. Videos about your product from actual customers get viewed ten times more than your official ads on YouTube. Translation: people trust other people talking about your stuff more than they trust you talking about your stuff.”

Sandeep Goyal: “Marketing has survived print-to-broadcast, broadcast-to-digital, desktop-to-mobile. Each shift created winners and casualties. This one goes further. It does not merely change the channel. It changes the decision-maker. Yes, AI is upending marketing. But the real upheaval is this: The future customer may not blink. May not feel. May not be persuaded by nostalgia. And yet, paradoxically, the brands that will thrive are those that double down on the one thing machines cannot manufacture — meaning. AI isn’t just upending marketing: It’s rewriting who the customer is.”

Dr. Barbara Sturm: “Don’t start a business just to start a business. The biggest motivation should be that you’re totally in love and obsessed with a product you’ve created.”

Rajesh Shukla: “As millions of [Indian] households ascend the income ladder, they will not merely spend more, but spend differently. The key to anticipating India’s next consumption wave lies not in the slope of income growth, but in the thresholds it crosses.”

Vasant Dhar: “It is undeniable that modern-day AI machines have achieved remarkable fluency with language. They seem to understand what we tell them, regardless of the words we choose to express ourselves. This enables the same conversational fluidity that we have with humans. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that LLMs are not designed to be truthful, but to ensure that the narrative “makes sense” in any context.”

Bloomberg: “I’ve long thought that calling Adam Smith the father of economics seriously understates his significance. In some ways he was indeed the first economist, and The Wealth of Nations, published 250 years ago…, was indeed the discipline’s seminal text. But his ambitions and insights extended so much further than the dismal science as now conceived. In many ways, his modern followers, intent on narrowing and thereby desiccating the field, have let him down. The breadth of his thinking is hard for modern readers to grasp because his prose was ornately opaque even by the standards of his time. Scholars argue about what he really meant and didn’t mean – a literature that doesn’t rival the one dedicated to Karl Marx (who was much influenced by Smith) because nothing could, but which trundles on and shows no sign of exhausting the source material. Meantime, for non- specialists, Smith is simply an avatar of laissez-faire capitalism. What a pity his legacy has come to this. The right way to mark the anniversary is to celebrate not only the works but also the remarkable intellectual temperament that produced them.”

Bloomberg: “Manish Chokhani…worries that companies are fated to be banyan trees. Deprived of the opportunity to grow tall by India’s structural inequalities, which leave more than a billion people outside the formal economy, they resort to growing wider, not taller, and turn into sprawling but shallow conglomerates with roots all over the place….If India ever wants to move on from an economy of banyan and bonsai trees, it has only two more decades in which to do it.”

WSJ: “It’s about to get much more difficult to spot writing generated by our three synthetic friends. Programmers are hard at work making the LLMs write much more like human writers. Models are moving away from simply predicting the next most logical word and are becoming systems that can reason, edit and refine their own work before you ever see it. Given the rapid rate of improvement, casual readers will find LLM text largely indistinguishable from human prose within two to three years, perhaps sooner. Professional editors and trained critics will have a longer window, probably four to six years before the tells become vanishingly subtle.”

FT: “Five ways demographics are transforming the world economy…Longer work lives are becoming more common…Populations are both shrinking and ageing…The increasing urgency of the AI productivity push…Welfare systems will struggle to evolve…Economic incentives will need to be rethought.”

Gina Raimondo: “I refuse to accept that an unemployment crisis is inevitable. The answer, however, isn’t to slow down A.I. innovation and leave ourselves less competitive and less prepared. Nor is generic reskilling that pushes people into completely new roles and industries. Instead, we should build a modern transition system with better data to predict job losses and new forms of support to help workers transition between jobs. What we need is a new grand bargain between the public and private sectors — one in which employers are held responsible for defining skills essential to the A.I. economy and for creating pathways into jobs and the government invests in the training, incentives and safety nets that help workers move quickly into them. The private sector has always been better positioned to see which new jobs are emerging, which skills matter and how quickly demand will shift. So this new bargain should start with businesses taking the lead and providing real-time, A.I.-powered insights into hiring plans, technology adoption and skill needs.”

NYTimes: “[Michael] Pollan, a professor of science and environmental journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-founder of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics, has written many well-received books about food, plants and mind-altering drugs — but here he takes on a new challenge. He confronts questions about the mind not as a neuroscience expert, but as an explorer, interviewing dozens of leading voices in science and proffering a rich survey of thinking in the field. Pollan writes: “My hope is that this book smudges the windowpane of your own consciousness and serves as a tool to help you fully appreciate the everyday miracle that a world appears when you open your eyes — a world and so much else, including you, a self.””

Paul Graham: “The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you’re smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there’s no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you’ll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they’ll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.”

Jack Dorsey: “Something really shifted in December in the sophistication of [AI] tools. Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3 went from being really good at greenfield products to being really good at larger and larger code bases. It presented an option to dramatically change how any company is structured, and certainly ours. We have to rethink how companies run, how they’re structured, how they’re built. It has to be closer to building the company as an intelligence.”

Sven Beckert: “The emergence and the spread of capitalism is the most important process that has unfolded on planet Earth in the past 500 years…Today, we live in a world where we are surrounded by capitalism. We live in capitalism like fish live in water. It’s everywhere. It determines how we work. It determines how our cities are being built. It has an impact on the international relations between states. It also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. It’s so overwhelmingly present that it’s hard to see that this is a revolutionary departure from prior human history. “

Jim Collins: “Repeatedly in my journey, I’ve started out with what I think is the question, self-renewal, corporate vision, whatever, and I’ve ended up with the method leading me to a much bigger question that the method answers. And so in this case, all of a sudden, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I’m not studying self-renewal. Self-renewal is a residual artifact of really the big question, and the big question is the title of the book, which is the question we all face with, which is What to Make of a Life?”

Steve Newman: “Agents are comparatively weak at high-level decision making, but they make execution cheap. So sometimes, instead of trying to choose the right path, you can just tell the agent to explore every path…Don’t ask AI to help you make a design decision. Just have it pick six options, code all six, and see which ones came out best…People use the term “agent” pretty loosely. The core idea for me is a system that pursues a goal rather than following a script.” [via Arnold Kling]

NYTimes: ““Rooster,” which stars Carell as a best-selling author lecturing at the same small college where his professor daughter’s marriage is publicly imploding, is about a father’s efforts to stay in his adult child’s life. But funny. “The Bill [Lawrence] recipe is, not only is it going to make you laugh, it’s going to tap into something in your own life,” said Zach Braff, the star of “Scrubs” and a longtime collaborator.”

FT: “The dominance of screens and the addictive quality of phones and social media, which tech companies have long monopolised, is something to react against. Even the presence of your phone is a trigger, now looped into automatic function. It is productive to be clued up about how our brains interact with screens. But the solution is not the interminable cry of optimisation: attention isn’t something you can just ramp up and up and up. We need breaks. Natural slumps occur during the day. Different forms of attention demand more of us. Mindless scrolling can actually provide your brain with relief, while letting the mind wander can be creatively or philosophically vital. Or it might just feel good.”

Mint: “There isn’t anything Arijit Singh can’t sing. Give him a ghazal, and he will make it sigh. Or a Mohammed Rafi-singing-for-Shammi-Kapoor pastiche, where he will channel old-school playback. He will do western pop inflections that feel like a breeze. He will, of course, nail those weepies that he’s synonymous with. But he will also lay bare his voice, with its grains and cracks and other imperfections, in haunted Vishal Bhardwaj compositions. He will do amusing vocal stunts in a faux-Arabic tune for Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Arijit Singh is India’s No.1 singer for a reason…He had a peak (2013-17), then what should have been a post-peak, yet there was no visible decline. If anything, his cultural dominance only intensified. In 2023, he became Spotify’s most followed artist in the world. And then he announced his retirement from playback singing. At age 38.”

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.”

WSJ: ““Humans need fun,” Keza MacDonald writes in “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play.” “We are playful animals.” That’s the thesis of her history of Nintendo, the company that during the 1980s changed videogames by making “Donkey Kong,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “The Legend of Zelda” and, yes, “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” Over the next 30 years, the company would release several new game systems, including the Game Boy hand-held system, the Wii and the Switch. These were usually not the most technically advanced devices on the market but often the most affordable and approachable. Ms. MacDonald, who writes the “Pushing Buttons” newsletter for the Guardian, argues that Nintendo “represents an uncomplicatedly fun approach to video games, a bridge back to the central joy and excitement of childhood play in a world that is increasingly pressured and fraught.” Ms. MacDonald’s love for the company—the book ends with a ranking of her 50 favorite Nintendo games—can veer toward blinkered adoration. But her enthusiasm can also be catching.”

Venu PSV: “Disruption is a foundational feature of business. Businesses become great by overcoming disruption, protecting their moats and delivering returns…There is clearly a need for a model that gives space for opposite forces to be weighed in. HiHo model looks like 4 key dimensions – Help, Hinder, Input and Output. To the Help Vs Hinder and Input vs Output dimensions, we add 1st and 2nd order effects to allow for time lapse that supports evolution, adoption and adaption.”

NYTimes: “For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers. Economies everywhere are bracing for an era in which A.I. tools automate entire categories of white-collar work, but the brunt could fall hardest on India, undermining two decades of effort to climb the value chain and establish a place in the global tech world.”

WSJ: “The workplace can be a tricky place to navigate. Almost everything we do at work—identifying the experts, managing tough feedback from a boss, figuring out how to work in teams made up of different personalities—comes down to our ability to manage relationships. And to do so, we need savvy social skills. But the newest workplace generation—Gen Z—is unlike anything we’ve seen. Through a combination of having fewer real-world relationship experiences, spending their education years in remote environments, and learning to communicate largely through asynchronous methods, these 20-somethings have missed opportunities to develop the skills needed to navigate the complex world of work. The result is that many are woefully unprepared for surviving—let alone thriving—in their jobs.”

NYTimes: “Tai Chi is a traditional Chinese martial art with complex, flowing poses — known as forms — that integrate movement, breath and mindfulness. Typically, Tai Chi walking (or Tai Chi gait) is the first thing that new students learn. “It’s the most fundamental movement for Tai Chi practice,” said Feng Yang, an associate professor of biomechanics, kinesiology and health at Georgia State University, who practices and studies Tai Chi. When you walk normally, you push off from one step to the next, using momentum to propel you forward. Tai Chi walking takes away the pushing, slowing everything down until you have total control of each movement. “Some people call Tai Chi gait a catlike walk,” Dr. Yang said. “You need to walk very slowly and silently.””

McKinsey’s questions for growth leaders: “Are our growth aspirations and commitments bold enough to allow us to grow faster and more profitably than the market? Do our resource allocations match our growth priorities? How many independent growth engines do we actually have today—and how many rely entirely on the core? Which adjacencies genuinely build on our strengths, and which are distractions dressed up as growth? Where can AI and agentic AI help us build up our competitive advantages? Which strategically critical capabilities should we build organically, and which would benefit from being developed through thoughtful partnerships or acquisitions?”

WSJ: “AI-written code may replace minor applications, but it isn’t dependable enough to write anything essential on its own. I talk to a lot of customers, and none has yet suggested they might vibe-code a critical system. In the end, AI-generated code may do more to lower costs for software companies than it does to lower prices for their consumers. The software industry will survive its second free-code scare. As Safra Catz of Oracle said in 2012, “If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet.””

NYTimes: “In the future that Elon Musk envisions, humans won’t just live on Mars. They will also never have to work again. Money will be irrelevant. And everything they could ever want will be immediately accessible. This is what Mr. Musk calls “sustainable abundance,” a post-scarcity society where humans have created technologies so ubiquitous and so powerful that they have eliminated the need for labor.”

NYTimes: “Planning a strength training regimen can feel overwhelming. You have to work your upper and lower body, focus on mobility and build grip strength if you have time. Wouldn’t it be easier to if you could train multiple regions at once? That’s the logic behind combination exercises, which string together two or more moves, making it easier to cover more muscle groups quickly. This not only works the targeted muscles, it also hits smaller, supporting ones during the transitions from one move to the next, said Katy Bowman, a movement teacher in Carlsborg, Wash., and author of “Move Your DNA.””

Danny Crichton: “No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place.”

Aaron Zamost: “When I use these [AI coding] tools, I conclude an imaginative, future-forward company may want to increase hiring, at least of people who know how to use them creatively. In many or even most scenarios, the bottleneck that prevents the discovery of what your product should be or how you should improve the one you have is the time and effort it takes to sandbox and try out new ideas and the social blocking that occurs in meetings. Like the individual-focused PC—as opposed to the “efficiency”-oriented mainframes that preceded it—these tools mostly empower the individual to leapfrog these impediments.”

FT: “Academics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business have been doing ethnographic research into how technology workers are using generative AI. Some will tell you that ethnographic business research is both the worst kind of business research and the worst kind of ethnography, but I admit to a soft spot for this stuff. What the researchers found was the opposite of Adams’ morose Vogon guard: the minutes are amazing but the hours are terrible. “In micro moments of prompting, iterating and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability,” researcher Xingqi Maggie Ye explained. “But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect.” These tech workers felt that generative AI was making them dramatically more productive and capable — but they were also trying to do more, voluntarily working longer hours, and hurtling towards burnout.”

Asian Paints CEO Amit Syngle: “Based on our research, a lot of our marketing efforts have been shifting from just a central initiative to regional markets and micro marketing. For example, in Tamil Nadu, we launched Varnamaalai, a shade guide based on the soaps that Sun TV was showcasing. In West Bengal, we did a pack which had the elements of Durga Puja, the Howrah Bridge and the trams of Kolkata. Because of regionalisation, paint cans, which were earlier used in bathrooms and kitchens, are now adorning living rooms. While it has led to a significant increase in our marketing budget, we think it is a worthwhile return on what we spend, rather than just spending on a national framework, which we continue to do.”

Bloomberg: “India is fast becoming one of the world’s biggest AI user bases. The question now is how it can turn that scale into superpower status rather than just training Silicon Valley for free. That will be a tall order for a country largely caught flat-footed by the boom. But let’s start with the basics: The three main building blocks of AI are talent, compute (including high-end chips and infrastructure), and data. India doesn’t lack engineers, but it currently doesn’t have foundational research training at scale or enough advanced processors at public labs and universities. What it does have, in abundance, is data. It should start treating this like a strategic asset rather than leaking it out as a free export.”

Activate: “After years of discussion about India’s potential in AI, the first wave of AI-native unicorns is now beginning to form across infrastructure, applications, and foundation models. Some are being built to power India’s own AI ecosystem, while others are building global products from Indian talent. For the first time, both of those stories are unfolding at the same moment.”

Arnold Kling: “I think that the potential for AI to increase productivity is very high. But I look at faculty at universities, for example, and think that the chances for realizing these productivity gains are pretty low. To take advantage of AI, you need to be willing to completely re-think your mission and your role. My guess is that the professionals at large incumbent organizations who are most willing to do that are also the ones most likely to leave and strike out on their own. What organizations will be left with are the folks who are inclined toward denial and resistance.”