Category: Thinks

Nathan Lambert: “The path forward for open [AI] models is to solve different problems than the frontier labs, to find places where open models are effectively free alternatives, to show ways of using specialized models that the closed labs cannot offer. The world of open models needs to embrace creativity, before building powerful AI systems grows too expensive and prices out many of the prized open labs of today.

Ben Thompson interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about Accelerated Computing. “I think that that’s the big idea, that we need to help customers not just build chips, but build systems and then after we build systems, not just build systems, but build AI factories. AI Factories has a lot of software inside, it’s not just our software, it’s a ton of software for cooling management and electricals and things like that, and redundancies and a lot of it is over-designed, it’s over-designed because nobody talked to each other.” More: “[AI] is [a] five-layer cake: Energy → chips → infrastructure → models → applications.”

FT: “The market for personal travel planners, high-end club memberships, private wealth managers and educational consultants has in recent years grown by high single to double digits. Fractional aviation subscription services (think NetJets) are growing by about 10 per cent a year. Those with Clear (the airport service that speeds you through security if you must fly commercial) have tripled since 2022. It’s all part of a burgeoning “concierge” economy that caters to affluent consumers who don’t wait — or want — for anything…Concierge services are about convenience and access, but they are also about bringing ease and luxury to areas that have become digital commodities or suffer from high levels of consumer dissatisfaction, such as healthcare or financial services.”

Ajay Shah: “We in India have locked down one question. We know that we want control of our own monetary policy with an inflation target. Monetary policy — the short-term interest rate of the economy — will be devoted only to the pursuit of consumer price index stability at 4 per cent. Everyone in India has got this point. To see the inflation-targeting reform through, we need the other two pieces. The government has to step out of activities on the exchange rate, and it has to step out of interference in the capital account. Both kinds of interference create contradictions, induce mistakes by firms, and hinder Indian economic growth. Embracing the automatic stabiliser of the open economy will give us a long-term, stable, harmonious arrangement that is best-suited to foster Indian success.” 

John Cochrane: “What should government do about rising energy prices? Nothing. Or, more concretely, get out of the way, ease restrictions, and let the market work its magic of sending energy to the most economically important uses while encouraging others to save, substitute or provide new energy. Keep inflation under control, and don’t induce financial problems.”

NYTimes: “The new business models have made it more difficult for investors to evaluate the businesses of software companies, Ms. Saiprasad said. Unlike revenue from seat-based pricing, the money that other models bring in is less predictable, she added. The shift has spooked Wall Street. Since October, anxieties over A.I. have erased roughly $3 trillion in market capitalization from software companies, or a third of the value of the S&P 500 index’s software sector. So far this year, shares of Salesforce and ServiceNow have fallen about 30 percent. “This is an industry that people believed is extremely durable and that, once you get a customer, you have that relationship for the next one, three, five, 10 years,” Mr. Zukin said. “Now, with the changes happening, you don’t even know what’s going to happen in two months.””

OpenAI: “OpenAI was the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users, the fastest to 100 million users, and soon the fastest to 1 billion weekly active users. Within a year of launching ChatGPT, we reached $1B in revenue. By the end of 2024 we were generating $1B per quarter. We are now generating $2B in revenue per month. At this stage, we are growing revenue four times faster than the companies who defined the Internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta.”

Jordi Visser: “For more than a decade, equity markets were built around a simple premise: durable franchises deserved durable multiples. Investors weren’t just buying earnings. They were buying time. Time to compound. Time before meaningful competition arrived. Time protected by scale, distribution, switching costs, and capital intensity. Time was the moat. The entire architecture of modern markets reinforced that belief. Passive flows concentrated into the largest platforms. Growth indices tilted toward scalable digital economics. Valuation frameworks stretched duration assumptions further into the future. A narrow cohort absorbed more and more of the index because the math appeared rational. Scale begot scale. But something subtle has changed. AI does not simply disrupt business models. It compresses time…AI lowers the cost of building businesses. But it raises the bar for sustaining advantage. More companies can start. Fewer can dominate.”

Arnold Kling: “The AI models find patterns that a human would not have spotted. That is why it is wrong to think of them as like a child savant who studies the encyclopedia. As AI models improve, they are going to be better able to find patterns that we as humans would have found. In addition, they will find patterns that we would not have found, and increasingly these will be interesting. At the same time, they will hallucinate less. It is as if their acid trips come with greater and greater clarity over time.”

WSJ: “People who would never post an Instagram video to hawk nutritional supplements or teeth-whitening strips are increasingly striking deals with brands nonetheless. Just don’t call them influencers. They are the “alternatively influential,” according to Figures, a new representation firm for public thinkers and tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes despite only modest internet followings—in comparison to the massive online pull of celebrities and big-time creators, the company says.”

Bloomberg: “Decades of research on how markets react to layoff announcements have established a consistent pattern: Investors punish companies that frame cuts as a response to problems. But when a company frames the same cuts as proactive restructuring, the penalty disappears. The stated reason for the layoff matters more than the fact of the layoff. AI has become the most powerful proactive frame available. “We’re restructuring around AI” is a growth signal. “We over-hired during the pandemic and revenue softened” is an accountability signal. In a market where artificial intelligence is the black hole around which everything orbits, swathing your cuts in AI-labeled wrapping paper lets you tap the valuation boost of an AI adoption story. The technology doesn’t need to work if the belief that it will does.”

FT: “Given the speed of recent rollouts, China will probably be both the testing ground and a leading indicator for agentic AI. In the US, the different parts needed to run AI systems are often controlled by separate companies. AI model developers, cloud providers and apps are separated as are payments, commerce and messaging services. A similar dynamic exists in Europe, where regulatory constraints can make integration harder. That fragmentation makes agentic AI harder to deploy at scale, as systems must navigate across multiple providers. Until now, much of the conversation about who leads the AI race has focused on model capability: who scores highest on controlled benchmarks. The US still holds the lead in models. But once AI begins to act, benchmark scores matter less than the ability to get things done. By that standard, China may already have an edge.”

Aaron Levie: “Now, the path forward is to make software that agents want. While the biggest users of agents tend to be developers or at least highly technical users that often will have their own preferences of tools, in a world of agents doing any type of task for knowledge workers, this type of preference will slowly drift away. Short of an enterprise already having a standard, agents will then be in the driver’s seat for what gets adopted for any particular workflow. This could mean the tools they sign up for, the code that they write, the libraries that they use, the skills they leverage, and so on. The platforms that are easier for agents to adopt, and solve the agent (and user’s) problems the best, will get ahead far faster than those that don’t. Agents won’t be going to your webinar or seeing your ad; they’re just going to use the best tool for the job, and you’ll want it to be yours.”

NYTimes: “At a moment when faith in markets is fraying and faith in governments is strained, [Adam] Smith’s message is neither to worship the invisible hand nor to wish it away. It is to discipline power, defend competition and keep the focus where he always insisted it belonged: on improving the lives of ordinary people.”

Andy Kessler: “Think of agents as autonomous digital bots that roam up and down a company probing and executing its business process. How items are sold, deals are closed, or inputs are procured. The dream is to have successful agents that efficiently and automatically restructure the organization to optimize the business constantly. Possible? Eventually. But first agents need to understand how the company really works. They need the “context”—a company’s living, breathing ecosystem with “decision traces,” the history of every decision made, every prospect considered, every process used or discarded. Things like “we were a close second and lost that deal but are ready to step in.” Where is that snippet stored today? In someone’s memory. A context graph captures the sequence of decisions—the why. Not a snapshot like an org chart, but a movie with millions of potential plots.”

NYTimes: “Now coding itself is being automated. To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny: American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose. You might imagine this would unsettle and demoralize programmers. Some of them, certainly. But I spoke to scores of developers this past fall and winter, and most were weirdly jazzed about their new powers.”

NYTimes: “Despite or even because of its omnipresence, social media is evolving. Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, anticipates a future where social media is transformed into a thousand channels broadcasting at you. It would be reminiscent of cable television circa 1995: ubiquitous and a little bland. “The whole point of social media is talking to each other,” Mr. Goldman said. “If that becomes too legally risky, it will still be media. It just won’t be social.” All future engagement will be with a machine. On Facebook, content generated by artificial intelligence is already being prioritized over friends and family.”

Business Standard: “Consider this. India now has over 900 TV channels, thousands of newspapers and over 860 radio channels. We make more than 1,600 films in a normal year. It has been over a decade since streaming took off and six years since short videos did. The last two years have added micro-dramas to the list. With more than 60 video streaming apps and a dozen music streaming ones, there is now an obscenely rich spread on tap. Here’s a sense of the scale: YouTube uploads 500 hours of video every minute. This column only talks of the 523 million Indians who use broadband internet-connected laptops, TVs or phones, making for an over-served, pampered market…How do you tell a story to this audience?”

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps: “ChatGPT leads but the race for the “default AI” is on. ChatGPT is still far and away the largest consumer AI product. On web, it is 2.7x larger than the #2, Gemini (measured by monthly traffic) — and on mobile, it is 2.5x larger (measured by monthly active users). ChatGPT has seen weekly active users grow by 500 million people over the past year to 900 million today. This is especially impressive given growth is difficult to maintain at scale — over 10% of the global population now utilizes ChatGPT every week.”

WSJ: “In their current form, tokenized stocks are digital tokens that represent shares of publicly traded companies on the blockchain. By design, each token is equivalent to a single share of stock. Most of the tokens trading today are technically derivatives and not stocks, at least at the moment, and thus don’t confer the holder all of the rights of ownership that shares provide—even if they track those shares’ prices. In the future, though, tokens are expected to grant those rights, including dividend payouts and the ability to vote on shareholder proposals.”

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.”