Category: Thinks

Gwern: “Once you can replicate individual models perfectly, the unit of selection can move way up and you can do much larger groups and packages of minds. That would be an obvious place to start. You can train individual minds in a differentiable fashion, but then you can’t really train the interaction between them. You will have groups of models or minds of people who just work together really well in a global sense, even if you can’t attribute it to any particular aspect of their interactions. There are some places you go and people just work well together. There’s nothing specific about it, but for whatever reason they all just click in just the right way. That seems like the most obvious unit of selection. You would have packages—I guess possibly department units—where you have a programmer and a manager type, then you have maybe a secretary type, maybe a financial type, a legal type. This is the default package where you just copy everywhere you need a new unit. At this level, you can start evolving them and making random variations to each and then keep the one that performs best.”

NYTimes: “Practically any creature that has eyeballs produces two sets of tears: basal and reflex. Basal tears keep the eye moist, while reflex tears are meant to protect the eye from irritants like dust. Humans also shed a third type, fittingly called emotional tears, when they are sad, frustrated, overwhelmed, happy or moved…One of the most common reasons for crying is the absence or loss of a loved one, whether we’re homesick as children, heartbroken in adolescence or grieving a death at any age. We cry over the plights of others, too. These empathetic tears may occur because we are imagining ourselves in other people’s shoes, whether they are friends, strangers or even fictional characters. In fact, this is how scientists study crying: They show people a sad clip from a film and see if it turns on the waterworks.”

Wired: “Physical Intelligence has assembled an all-star team and raised $400 million on the promise of a stunning breakthrough in how robots learn…[It] believes it can give robots humanlike understanding of the physical world and dexterity by feeding sensor and motion data from robots performing vast numbers of demonstrations into its master AI model. “This is, for us, what it will take to ‘solve’ physical intelligence,” Hausman says. “To breathe intelligence into a robot just by connecting it to our model.””

WSJ: “One of the most powerful forces in entertainment has become so pervasive in so many ways that you probably don’t even realize the full extent of its reach. This site best known as a place to watch videos is now the biggest platform for podcasts. Yes, podcasts. Not Spotify. Not Apple. YouTube! Because these days, we don’t just listen to podcasts. Now we watch podcasts. It’s a profound shift that suddenly has the world’s audio giants battling for supremacy in the increasingly valuable world of video podcasts. “It’s becoming all about video,” Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told my colleague Anne Steele…The most improbable thing about how YouTube made the podcast market all about video is how swiftly it happened.”

NYTimes: “Selling products on livestream video is a big business in China. Apps like Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok, mix social media with e-commerce to keep people glued to their phones while purchasing everything from soap to spices to suitcases. The latest e-commerce trend adds a game of chance to the mix. Known as “blind box livestreaming,” it has become an entertaining and, some users and experts said, addictive pastime. With Chinese consumers slogging through a period of low expectations, blind box livestreams offer the thrill of potentially winning more prizes for a low cost. Viewers pay small sums of money to buy trinkets that are hidden in small bags — the “blind box.” The seller unpacks the blind boxes on a livestream while the buyer and audience watch. Based on what is inside, players may receive another bag and another chance to win. The seller coos when the player gets a lucky draw, and viewers cheer in the comments.”

ET: “While quick commerce becomes the preferred medium for immediate needs and impulse purchases, e-commerce is favoured for more planned purchases like home, beauty and personal care. But now quick commerce firms are diversifying beyond groceries, small-value items, etc. and invading the home turf of e-commerce players. Quick commerce is already conquering kirana, the neighbourhood small retail business, as well as hitting modern retail. As consumer preferences shift towards the convenience of last-minute grocery deliveries, quick commerce companies are outpacing traditional retailers, with 46 per cent of consumers surveyed reporting a cut in purchases from Kirana shops, a recent report has said. The quick commerce market size is expected to reach $40 billion by 2030, a jump from $6.1 billion in 2024, according to the report by Datum Intelligence.”

NYTimes: “Peptides have long been especially tantalizing for drug discovery. These molecules are composed of short chains of between two and 50 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. They are smaller and simpler than proteins are. Yet they are larger and more complex than the molecules — consisting of a single atom, or atoms bonded together — that are used in most drugs; such drug formulations can slip unnoticed through the membranes of cells and influence how they function. Peptides, by contrast, must engage with particular receptors on cells’ surfaces. Because these surface receptors differ considerably, depending on what role the cells play, any peptide that manages to interact with them tends to have a highly specific impact.”

WSJ: “Some doctors and intermittent fasters themselves say skipping meals makes it difficult to eat enough protein or maintain their muscle mass. Time-restricted eaters lost roughly twice as much lean mass—the body’s nonfat weight—as fat mass compared with a control group, according to ancillary findings in a study a few years ago. Other research hasn’t reached the same conclusion. Health experts say intermittent fasting can be a helpful weight-loss tool for some, but for others, the hunger during fasting periods will lead to extra snacking during their eating periods. And when it comes to overall health, what people eat is still more important than when they eat, they say.”

Neal Stephenson: “The real purpose of art and the reason we like art is because it exposes us to a very dense package of micro decisions that have been made by the artist. As such, we’re engaged in a communion with that artist. What makes it interesting is that connection. It may be to a living writer, or it may be to a sculptor who died 2,500 years ago, but in either case, we’re making a human-to-human connection. If we know that we’re reading something or experiencing a work of art that was just generated by an algorithm, then that element of human connection isn’t there anymore. Furthermore, we know that for every one such book or image or whatever, a million more could be generated just by launching a Python script, basically. Familiarity, the law of supply and demand takes over at that point. If there’s an infinite supply of this stuff, then its value drops to zero. Even if such a book reads pretty well as a novel, I don’t think people are going to be interested in it.”

Rathin Roy: “India’s economic engine is sputtering. Income growth for most Indians has stalled, and many young people are unemployed. The informal sector dominates, and productivity remains low. While the stock market thrives, it’s disconnected from the reality of stagnant wages and struggling businesses. The government, focused on subsidies, struggles to invest in growth. These are warning signs of a middle-income trap.”

FT: “For much of the past decade, conventional wisdom inside the entertainment world has been that only a small handful of megaservices would survive the streaming wars. After all, they had the stars, the budgets and the technological prowess. But numerous media executives now believe that there could be room for some more modest streaming services, too. About two dozen smaller, low-cost specialty streaming services have generated significant subscriber growth over the last couple of years, according to a new report from Antenna, a subscription research firm.”

Richard E. Cytowic: “From a psychological point of view, silence is more than the absence of sound. It is a singular mental space. But listening to your inner self is impossible when newsfeeds, notifications, and the infinite scroll constantly address you and hold you hostage. Rather than fearing silence as emptiness—which many people dread—you can shift perspective to see it as an essential nutrient brimming with possibility. There is a reason why yoga and meditation aim to distance body and mind from the everyday buzz: a caesura is good for your neurological health and mental well-being. One meditation aid is a kōan. A famous kōan goes, “Two hands brought together make a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The more your intellect tries to solve it, the farther it pushes an answer away. Sōtō Zen, the Serene Reflection School of Buddhism, says, “Just sitting is the essence of pure Zen.” Just sitting with eyes open, trying neither to think nor not to think (closing the eyes invites daydreaming), is the natural kind of silence that constitutes an essential nutrient.”

Samuel Gregg: “Tocqueville’s analysis of entrepreneurship exemplifies his mode of economic inquiry. Upon arriving in America, Tocqueville instantly observed something distinctive about American economic life. “Almost all [Americans],” Tocqueville wrote in his notes, are “entrepreneurs.” Not only did Americans seem to work incessantly, they were constantly innovating, changing jobs, and moving to various parts of the country. As amazed as Tocqueville was by the huge size of some American enterprises, he was even more astonished by “the countless number of small firms” that seemed to spring up everywhere. But whereas Adam Smith had emphasized how the multiplication of wants in commercial society accelerated the division of labor and magnified economic productivity, Tocqueville also attributed the sheer scale of entrepreneurship in America to something else: the fact that America was a thoroughly democratic society.”

FT: “A small start-up in New Zealand claims it has created plasma, the first step towards nuclear fusion, in under two years and for less than $10mn after experimenting with an unconventional reactor design. OpenStar, founded by chief executive Ratu Mataira in 2021 in his Wellington apartment, said on Tuesday that it had created and contained a plasma cloud at around 300,000 degrees Celsius for 20 seconds in its first experimental reactor. While much higher plasma temperatures are required to achieve nuclear fusion, OpenStar’s test stands apart for its unconventional reactor design, which the company said could be faster to scale and commercialise.” NYTimes: “In the next few years, these companies say, their fusion machines will produce more energy than they take to run. Soon after, they will start generating electricity for factories, data centers, steel mills and more, helping humanity take a decisive step away from fossil fuels, away from global warming and air pollution, away from powering our lives by setting tiny fires in engines and boilers and furnaces.”

FT: “India’s rise as a major economy has long been held back by its failure to develop a robust manufacturing sector. The share of manufacturing in GDP has remained stubbornly low, even declining over the past decade despite the government’s enormous subsidy programme to encourage companies to “Make in India”. Can this failure be reversed, given the opportunity created by the stampede of capital away from China? There are glimmers of hope. One state in southern India — Tamil Nadu — is experiencing a manufacturing boom, attracting the likes of Cisco, Corning, Foxconn, Ford, Google, Tata Electronics and Tata Jaguar Land Rover, and Nike suppliers. These investments are integrating India into global supply chains for electronics, automotives and footwear. What is the secret to its success?”

Mint: “Talk to the ‘exes’ (experts and extreme users). Each company has a target segment defined by certain parameters. However, if a business needs to discover something new, it is insufficient to talk only to the ‘average’ target consumer. We would argue that engaging with the ‘average’ consumer has diminishing returns, especially in unearthing a breakthrough insight.We have found that discussions with specialists in the field are extremely helpful to develop insights. For example, in hair-care, talking to a salon stylist and a trichologist uncovers interesting patterns. Engaging with ‘extreme’ users (both heavy users and ex-users) is also instructive in defining the value proposition, as they provide important clues and cues as to what is working and what is not, the latter often providing richer information.”

Fred Wilson on startup investing: “1/3 are good investments, 1/3 turn into something but you wish you hadn’t made the investment,1/3 are zeros.”

Reuters: “The so-called ‘training runs’ for large models can c ost tens of millions of dollars by simultaneously running hundreds of chips. They are more likely to have hardware-induced failure given how complicated the system is; researchers may not know the eventual performance of the models until the end of the run, which can take months. Another problem is large language models gobble up huge amounts of data, and AI models have exhausted all the easily accessible data in the world. Power shortages have also hindered the training runs, as the process requires vast amounts of energy. To overcome these challenges, researchers are exploring “test-time compute,” a technique that enhances existing AI models during the so-called “inference” phase, or when the model is being used. For example, instead of immediately choosing a single answer, a model could generate and evaluate multiple possibilities in real-time, ultimately choosing the best path forward. This method allows models to dedicate more processing power to challenging tasks like math or coding problems or complex operations that demand human-like reasoning and decision-making.”

Arnold Kling: “The real purpose of a central bank is to enable the government to borrow money at a low interest rate.”

FT: “No one likes to admit it — but life’s lottery has a big role to play in success…Acknowledging luck’s role downplays our own specialness. Sam Friedman, co-author of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, told me that those he spoke to at the top of politics, business, cultural institutions and the professions put talent above luck in explaining their success. In interviews, many deployed it as “a refrain, a linguistic means to distance oneself from the suggestion of intentional or strategic career-building behaviour. Instead, luck often seemed to be used as a device to frame one’s success as flowing from spontaneous or serendipitous external recognition rather than calculated intention — ‘I was lucky to be recognised by x’ or ‘I was lucky to get y opportunity’.” Rather than being integral to their success, luck seemed to Friedman to serve to deflect from “accusations of power-seeking and hubris”. Part of the reason we diminish luck’s significance is also that it doesn’t always feel lucky. Sometimes it feels normal — the good chance of being born into a stable society, being healthy and well fed.”

HT has a history of charts. “For the general public, charts encapsulate important takeaways, without forcing them to navigate underlying complexity and nitty-gritty. But just as a map is not the territory, a chart is not the full story. It’s a point from which a deep dive may begin.”

The Atlantic: “The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives. A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.”

Alberto Mingardi: “If technology and communication magnify our cognitive limits, then the case for limited government is stronger than ever. Limited government means it is not only the voters’ cognitive abilities that are limited, but their governors too. It is an exercise in building trust through rules.” [via Arnold Kling]

TIME: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024

Vitalik: “Prediction markets are about betting on elections, and betting on elections is gambling – nice if it helps people enjoy themselves, but fundamentally not more interesting than buying random coins on pump.fun. From this perspective, my interest in prediction markets may seem confusing. And so in this post I aim to explain what it is about the concept that excites me. In short, I believe that (i) prediction markets even as they exist today are a very useful tool for the world, but furthermore (ii) prediction markets are only one example of a much larger incredibly powerful category, with potential to create better implementations of social media, science, news, governance, and other fields. I shall label this category “info finance”.”

Ashu Garg: “[Box CEO] Aaron’s advice for founders is unequivocal: look toward the technological horizon and align your products with these macro trends…He stresses that riding these tailwinds isn’t just about growth—it’s existential: “I can’t point to a single B2B company in the past two decades that achieved significant scale without benefiting from some underlying architectural or market shift. If you’re going against these tailwinds, you’re dead.””

WSJ: “Americans are hearing very different narratives about current events from very different places. Many factors might have contributed to the election’s outcome, but the media world’s fracturing is hard to ignore. “Our information landscape has splintered into more and more pieces. Large, institutional news organizations are a smaller part of the geography,” said Nancy Gibbs, a former editor in chief of Time who is director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “So voters were all watching different campaigns play out, with different messages and meaning and momentum.” Freewheeling online talk shows hosted by comedians, YouTubers and other celebrities are designed to entertain as much as to inform. They are competing for attention with mainstream media organizations that have a different mission and who are bound by editorial standards.”

Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang paper on Human Capital Accumulation in China and India in 20th Century: “The education system of a country is instrumental in its long-run development. This paper compares the historical evolution of the education systems in the two largest emerging economies- China and India, between 1900 and 2018. We create a novel time-series data of educational statistics related to enrolment, graduates, teachers and expenditure based on historical statistical reports. China adopted a bottom-up approach in expanding its education system, compared to India’s top-down approach in terms of enrolment. While India had a head-start in modern education, it has gradually been overtaken by China – at Primary education in the 1930’s Middle/Secondary level in the 1970s and Higher/Tertiary level in the 2010s. It resulted in the lower cohort-wise average education and higher education inequality in India since 1907. Vocational education is a central component of the Chinese education system, absorbing half of
the students in higher education. In India, the majority of the students pursue traditional degree courses (Bachelors, Masters etc.), with 60% in Humanities courses. Though India is known as the “land of engineers”, China produces a higher share of engineers. We conjecture that the type of human capital in China through engineering and vocational education helped develop its manufacturing sector. Utilizing micro-survey data since the 1980s, we show that education expansion has been an inequality enhancer in India. This is due to both the unequal distribution of educational attainment and higher individual returns to education in India.”

WSJ: “Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.”

FT: “Adults don’t read for pleasure, either, or at least, significantly less than they used to. Half don’t read regularly or at all. And yet the majority of adults surveyed do want to read. There are books, specific books, that they would actively like to read. They simply do not have time. The book would have to take the place of something else in their day. If it can’t replace the hard realities, it had better replace the small comforts. And who would swap a known and easy comfort — telly, say, or endless doomscrolling — for the gamble of a book? Only someone who already loved reading would do that; only someone who didn’t feel already daunted by the whole thing. And listen: if the adults are overworked and overtired, might not the same be true of their offspring? How much time is set aside for the average child to sit and read? How much space is created in the school day? If a carer is working late, who is reading to the child? There is a correlation between children who need free school meals, and children who don’t read for pleasure: when money is scarce, then time is almost always scarce as well.”

Sequoia Capital: “As the LLM market structure stabilizes, the next frontier is now emerging. The focus is shifting to the development and scaling of the reasoning layer, where “System 2” thinking takes precedence. Inspired by models like AlphaGo, this layer aims to endow AI systems with deliberate reasoning, problem-solving and cognitive operations at inference time that go beyond rapid pattern matching. And new cognitive architectures and user interfaces are shaping how these reasoning capabilities are delivered to and interact with users. What does all of this mean for founders in the AI market? What does this mean for incumbent software companies? And where do we, as investors, see the most promising layer for returns in the Generative AI stack?”

NYTimes: “The first thing customers see when they walk into the Strand Book Store in Manhattan is a table of anonymous books with covers wrapped like Christmas presents and titles replaced by vague descriptions. The store calls it “Blind Date With a Book.” “When in Rome” by Sarah Adams is disguised as “Freshly Baked Slow Burn Rom-com.” “Spoiler Alert” by Olivia Dade becomes a “You’ve Got Mail-esque Romance.” Sometimes a whimsical drawing accompanies the description. Bookstores that have embraced “Blind Date Books” say they are beloved by customers. People are attracted to the element of surprise, and stores have found a new way to sell books that are overlooked because they are not new, best-selling or penned by a famous author.”

WSJ: “A new generation of executives is reimagining how business is getting done. Hyper-connected and digitally native, 20- and 30-somethings rarely make sales calls, avoid email and are loath to pick up the phone. They make connections over LinkedIn and follow up via text. When they do meet in person, it’s more likely to be over coffee than lunch, and if invited to a party, they are ordering mocktails and nonalcoholic beer…The shift in how younger business people choose to entertain and communicate with clients and investors isn’t just about personal preferences. For a host of reasons including increased competition, the Covid-19 pandemic, employee turnover and the proliferation of decision makers, the old ways of doing business no longer work as well.”

Ben Rhodes: “After he lost an election in 2002, Mr. Orban spent years holding “civic circles” around Hungary — grass-roots meetings, often around churches, which built an agenda and sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. In their own way, the next generation of Democratic leaders should fan out across the country. Learn from mayors innovating at the local level. Listen to communities that feel alienated. Find places where multiracial democracy is working better than it is in the rest of the country. Tell those stories when pitching policies. Foster a sense of belonging to something bigger, so democracy doesn’t feel like the pablum of a ruling elite, but rather the remedy for fixing what is broken in Washington and our body politic.”

Bloomberg: “BYD, which stands for “Build Your Dreams,” is the brainchild of Wang Chuanfu, a 58-year-old battery scientist who in the 1990s saw an opportunity to start a rechargeable battery company to challenge Japan’s hold on the industry. It began by focusing on batteries for mobile phones and power tools, but in 2003 it decided to pursue cars. Wang’s battery and manufacturing innovations, cushioned by China’s EV-friendly government policies and the scale of its domestic auto market, have helped BYD do what Tesla Inc., Ford Motor Co. and the rest of the auto industry haven’t: build an affordable electric car for the masses and make money doing it. Since introducing a new battery technology in 2020, BYD has gone from being an also-ran in China’s crowded car market to cracking the top 10 automakers in the world. It’s unseated Volkswagen AG from its decade-plus perch at the top in China and briefly—in late 2023—surpassed Tesla to become the biggest seller of pure electric vehicles globally.”

WSJ: “Agencies have long billed marketers by the number of hours their employees spend producing client work, using rate cards to charge different amounts for contributions by people according to their role. Now, AI is eroding the number of people, hours and roles required to deliver for clients, and agencies may find the standard billing arrangement comes up short. AI is helping agencies rapidly produce personalized creative images, for example, or altering elements like color, position, lighting and language—tasks that were once highly manual. It’s also letting copywriters, who once may have needed several hours to write 50 variations of copy for a given ad, now generate 100 variations immediately, then choose to edit and curate them.”

Dan Nguyen-Huu on Managed-Service-as-Software: “Whether your AI tools are used internally to drive efficiency or sold to external customers, the key is their usage. Modern startups can potentially do both, making the question more about sequencing rather than where you start and end up. Leveraging the new paradigm of AI and decreasing GPU costs should eventually lead to the creation of more M-SaS driven companies. These companies will transform from labor-intensive operations to technology-enhanced services with SaaS-like margins and, consequently, SaaS-like valuations.”

The Daily Economy: “What Milei’s administration is hoping to achieve through liberalization is nothing short of extraordinary, and it represents the perennial challenge nations have faced since Western Europe’s miraculous growth in the 18th century. Douglass North, a Nobel laureate economist, illustrated this challenge through the lens of institutions and credible commitments. In a famous paper co-authored with Barry Weingast, North attributes England’s economic success to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, when the Crown made credible commitments to protect property rights and not expropriate private wealth whenever they wanted. “Free markets must be accompanied by some credible restrictions on the state’s ability to manipulate economic rules to the advantage of itself and its constituents,” they write. A classical liberal economist, Milei understands the importance of credibly committing to economic reforms. He’s furiously slashing needless government programs, which have metastasized over decades of Peronist rule. In shocking style, he has closed 13 government ministries and laid off more than 30,000 public workers, or about 10 percent of federal employees. Milei’s raft of budgetary cuts have generated eye-popping fiscal results.”

WSJ: “Early in a chief executive’s tenure, inherited problems can be easily addressed. Later it’s harder—there is no one else to blame.” More: “An openness to different paths is essential for start-ups hoping to navigate periods of rapid innovation in technology.” [Both are from book reviews.]

FT: “Concerns about artificial intelligence’s disruptive effects on the workplace often dominate discussions about how the emerging technology will impact the labour market. Much commentary on the topic veers from bleak predictions of the destruction of jobs and outmoding of traditional skills to celebrations of the fortunes on offer to those who can unleash AI to boost performance. However, for some employers and educators, AI is already helping to smooth out the acquisition of skills, and to improve existing jobs. They say the technology can help organisations assess worker skills, plan for emerging needs and train their staff — boosting corporate productivity and staff career prospects. “What we’ve found is that one of the best ways to learn about AI is to use AI,” says Jim Swanson, executive vice-president and chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson.”

WSJ: “Pollsters are committing statistical malpractice. Pollsters prominently tout their low “sampling error,” wrapping their results in the cloak of science. Sampling error is an important statistical metric, typically framed as studying the variations in selecting balls from an urn with 1,000 red balls and 1,000 blue balls. But when the response rate is 2%, sampling error is dwarfed by projection errors from 98,000 colorless balls representing those who won’t respond. Pollsters bury their response rate in the fine print, sometimes even requiring the readers to calculate how low it was. That conceals that their analysis is built on shaky assumptions. Sooner or later, projections based on shaky assumptions are bound to fail spectacularly. In an era when people are no longer willing to trust elites, pollsters are risking a major crisis in public confidence. For their own sake, they need to explore different methods, such as using paid panels followed over long periods. Gallup and Nielsen already use this approach for some reports.” More: “Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.”

FT: “What happens when the growth models collapse? Japan after the bubble burst in the 1990s, with an ever more striking ageing problem, had very slow growth, but no political or social, let alone a civilisational collapse. It still plays an important foreign policy role, and it still leads in some areas of design. Maturing is not the same thing as sudden death. A future Münchau may write a parallel analysis of Chinese stagnation, where the political fallout is likely to be much more destructive. The EU provides a protective framework for a broken wunderkind, and there is dynamism elsewhere, notably to the north and to the east, where the likes of Denmark and Poland have become the new economic exemplar.”

The Diff: “It remains true that, since the release of ChatGPT kicked off the current AI cycle, it’s been a net consumer of capital by a huge margin. But there are places where that capital is producing a meaningful return, and where bigger datacenter buildouts and more costly training runs can increasingly be underwritten by rigorous return-on-investment calculations rather than the hope that models will turn out to learn some valuable new tricks…AI investments are paying off for companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, with measurable revenue growth and cost savings.”

WSJ: “Plaque begins to recolonize on the teeth between two to six hours after brushing it off, says Kimbell. After about 48 hours, it hardens to calcified tartar, which a toothbrush can’t break up.  Brushing regularly helps disrupt the plaque and stop the colonization. “The whole point of brushing is to remove the biofilm of bacteria that causes decay and gum disease,” says Dr. Edmond Hewlett, a consumer adviser spokesperson for the American Dental Association and professor of dentistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. It’s especially important to clear out foods that are sugary, starchy, sticky and acidic. Think candy and sweets, chips and bread, and fruits and juice. When these substances come into contact with the natural bacteria in our mouths, they form acid, which can lead to cavities and tooth decay.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “Every artificial intelligence (AI) company is making a frontal attack on the impregnable-so-far fort that Google has created with search. The emperor’s defeat, however, will come not from outside, but within. The market for search is worth $200 billion, expected to grow at 10% every year to $400 billion in 2035, with a fat 60% gross margin. 90% of this is owned by one player, Google, which guards it as jealously as its very own Kohinoor.”

Bloomberg: “Southeast Asia’s internet economy will log its slowest growth on record this year, a group of researchers said, underscoring weakness in consumer demand and a push to show profits instead of revenue gains. Online spending will rise about 15% this year to $263 billion in the region, research from Google, Temasek Holdings Pte and Bain & Co. showed, slowing from 17% a year earlier and reaching its lowest rate since at least 2017. The local digital economy is also set to record its lowest level of private funding this year, the report showed. Consumers in the region of more than 650 million people are curbing spending to cope with elevated inflation and interest rates. That’s raising questions about the billions of dollars in investments that tech companies have made in countries from Indonesia and Singapore to Thailand and Vietnam, looking for new Asian growth markets beyond larger economies such as China and Japan.”

Daniel Susskind: “there is one thing that we do know about growth, and this is, growth doesn’t come from the material world of things that we can see and touch and drop on our feet, but it comes from the intangible, invisible world of ideas. In other words, growth doesn’t come from using more and more finite resources, more land, more machines, building more factories and so on. That’s not where growth, as I understand it, growth in GDP per capita, that’s not where sustained growth in that comes from. It comes instead, not from using more and more finite resources, but discovering new ideas for making use of the finite resources that we have. In other words, it comes from technological progress. If you’re wanting serious sustained increases in living standards, in per capita GDP, you’ve got to instead focus on how our economies produce and share new ideas about the world.”

WSJ: “Key to Wayfair’s promotion strategy, though, is its relationship with suppliers. For decades, the company has worked with its now more than 20,000 suppliers to determine what might induce consumers to upgrade their homes. Currently—with where consumers are—that’s through promotions, which suppliers bear most of the cost of, Gulliver said. This means when shoppers see a couch or chair at 30% off, for instance, suppliers fund the reduction in their wholesale prices, which Wayfair then passes on through discounts and price adjustments. For the most part, Wayfair doesn’t carry inventory on its books, so the company is free of the pressure other retailers face to sell through stock. But both Wayfair and its suppliers have an interest in higher sales volumes, Gulliver said. So suppliers tend to lean into the deals, she said.”

FT writes about what AI companies can learn from Napster: “Generative AI companies claim a legal concept called “fair use” applies to the content they use. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella compares the training of AI models with the way humans learn from textbooks and then use that knowledge to create new ideas. But artists argue this breaches their intellectual property, and want compensation for the use of their work by companies that train generative AI models. Recently, over 30,000 artists, including ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, signed an open letter that called the use of unlicensed training data for the models “a major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods. Artists like Ulvaeus and Yorke are innovators themselves, and have long embraced new technology. The tech sector’s failure to consult and understand the creative economy has turned potential allies into adversaries. Unlike the Napster-era, this time it’s not just music affected.”

Andrew Chen on product ideas: “If you’re at a higher WTF level than desired, here’s the easiest fix. But I warn you, it’s a painful one, because it requires you to ask questions and listen. Show your product to target customers. Ask them: “How would you describe this to someone else?” Bite your tongue and listen – you’ll soon learn some simple truths. Their words that follow this question are gold. Simplicity is key. They will toss out your complicated description, and replace it with something easier and more truthful. Often times, you will dislike what you hear. Because it strips out all of your strategic differentiation, and just describes what is in front of them. Or perhaps because it doesn’t capture the technical “wow” of what’s under the hood. Sorry, this is the unvarnished truth of your product even if it’s painful.”