Rajesh Jain

Lari Hämäläinen: “When we talk about gen AI agents, we mean software entities that can orchestrate complex workflows, coordinate activities among multiple agents, apply logic, and evaluate answers. These agents can help automate processes in organizations or augment workers and customers as they perform processes. This is valuable because it will not only help humans do their jobs better but also fully digitalize underlying processes and services. For example, in customer services, recent developments in short- and long-term memory structures enable these agents to personalize interactions with external customers and internal users, and help human agents learn. All of this means that gen AI agents are getting much closer to becoming true virtual workers that can both augment and automate enterprise services in all areas of the business, from HR to finance to customer service. That means we’re well on our way to automating a wide range of tasks in many service functions while also improving service quality.”

Rita McGrath and M Muneer: “Inflection points often burble along for decades. When they cross a tipping point, we say, ‘This came completely out of the blue!’ Take internet advertising, particularly programmatic ads that leverage data to target you and aim to sway your decisions. 97% of Meta‘s and 80% of Google’s revenue comes from programmatic ads, while Amazon rakes in close to $47 bn. Worldwide spend on digital advertising will be about $740 bn in 2024. What if all this spending is based on misconceptions about personal behaviour and the illusion of precision that these platforms offer? From an advertiser’s perspective, the more funds that go into creating compelling content and targeting the right potential buyers, the better. Everything else is a waste. But reality is different.”

WSJ: “Demographics are supposed to be a slow-moving force, but the baby bust is happening so quickly and so widely that it’s taken many by surprise…In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement. “The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Ninety-five theses on AI by Samuel Hammond.Among them: “The last 12 months of AI progress were the slowest they’ll be for the foreseeable future. Scaling LLMs still has a long way to go, but will not result in superintelligence on its own, as minimizing cross-entropy loss over human-generated data converges to human-level intelligence. Exceeding human-level reasoning will require training methods beyond next token prediction, such as reinforcement learning and self-play, that (once working) will reap immediate benefits from scale. RL-based threat models have been discounted prematurely. Future AI breakthroughs could be fairly discontinuous, particularly with respect to agents. AGI may cause a speed-up in R&D and quickly go superhuman, but is unlikely to “foom” into a god-like ASI given compute bottlenecks and the irreducibility of high dimensional vector spaces, i.e. Ray Kurzweil is underrated.” And this: “Biology is an information technology.”

ET: “India is poised to become the world’s third-largest consumer market by 2026, surpassing Germany and Japan. UBS forecasts a doubling of affluent individuals with annual incomes exceeding $10,000 to 88 million by 2028. Household spending per capita in India is projected to outstrip other Asian economies, with rural and urban consumption expenditures witnessing significant growth over the past decade, according to recent reports…All this means that consumption in India is not only rising but also maturing, from food to non-food items.”

WSJ: “Asking a chatbot to act as an expert—even a long-dead one—can yield better results, or at least be more entertaining. If you’re seeking information about designing a midcentury modern house, tell it to “act as architect Frank Lloyd Wright.” Here’s how Gemini began its response, which listed five useful tips: “Alright, here’s Frank Lloyd Wright speaking to you about your future home…”…Why does this technique work? “If you ask the AI to ‘imagine you’re a world-renowned chef,’ you’re signaling that you want a response that reflects culinary expertise,” Copilot responded when I asked it the question. “The AI will then generate a response that aligns with what it has learned about how chefs talk and the kind of information they might provide.” At the other end of the scale, telling a chatbot to act like a middle-school teacher should produce simple explanations for hard-to-understand concepts, such as how nuclear power is created or the techniques used in gene editing.”

FT: “An AI assistant [is] a personalised bot that is supposed to help you work, create or communicate better, and interface with the digital world on your behalf. This new class of products has stolen the limelight…among a flurry of new AI developments from Google and its AI division DeepMind, as well as Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The companies simultaneously announced a series of upgraded AI tools that are “multimodal”, which means they can interpret voice, video, images and code in a single interface, and also carry out complex tasks like live translations or planning a family holiday…While smart assistants powered by AI have been in train for nearly a decade, these latest advances allow for smoother and more rapid voice interactions, and superior levels of understanding thanks to the large language models (LLMs) that power new AI models. Now, a fresh scramble is under way among tech groups to bring so-called AI agents out to consumers.”

WSJ: “Job seekers, frustrated with corporate hiring software, are using artificial intelligence to craft cover letters and résumés in seconds, and deploying new automated bots to robo-apply for hundreds of jobs in just a few clicks. In response, companies are deploying more bots of their own to sort through the oceans of applications. “You’re fighting AI with AI,” said Brad Rager, chief executive of Crux, a recruiting firm that matches cybersecurity specialists with employers. The AI arms race is bad for job candidates, he said, who feel defeated when online applications come to nothing, and for employers, who are frustrated when imprecise AI tools highlight weak candidates. “There’s so much promise, but there’s a lot of crap and garbage,” Rager said of the tools used by employers.”

NYTimes: “The root of the problem is the Communist Party’s excessive control of the economy, but that’s not going to change. It is baked into China’s political system and has only worsened during President Xi Jinping’s decade in power. New strategies for fixing the economy always rely on counterproductive mandates set by the government: Create new companies, build more industrial capacity. The strategy that most economists actually recommend to drive growth — freeing up the private sector and empowering Chinese consumers to spend more — would mean overhauling the way the government works, and that is unacceptable. The party had a golden opportunity to change in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests revealed that the economic reforms that had begun a decade earlier had given rise to a growing private sector and a desire for new freedoms. But to liberalize government institutions in response would have undermined the party’s power. Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “There is no Google product which is not going to be baptized with AI. Google Search, with 2 billion plus users and 6 million searches a minute, gets a GenAI makeover. Gmail with 1.8 billion users gets a strong dose of Vitamin AI. YouTube’s 1.8 billion users can have AI-generated text summaries of the nearly 4 billion videos that the site hosts. Another 4 billion Android users get AI on tap. The list goes on. Ironically, however, it seems that Google is following the Microsoft playbook here. Microsoft famously had an EEE strategy of ‘Embrace, Extend and Extinguish’: First it created a product using open standards, then created a proprietary extension which quickly gained dominance through its brute distribution and ownership of the PC market, and it finally used this extension to swamp the market and extinguish its competitor. Latest example: MS 365 has 345 million users, 320 million of them get Teams free; rival Slack languishes at 39 million. So, OpenAI the plucky innovator can launch eye-popping products galore like ChatGPT, Sora and GPT4o, but what it lacks is distribution reach.”

Aaron Levie: “The reason I’m insanely bullish on AI is that since starting Box, we have never seen a bigger shift in how we can work with our enterprise information than today. AI completely revolutionizes how we can work with enterprise information. Since the mainframe era, it’s been relatively trivial to work with our *structured* data in an enterprise. We could query, compute, synthesize, summarize, and analyze anything that could be structured in a database – i.e. the data sitting in our ERP, CRM, and HR systems. But it turns out this is only a small fraction of our corporate information. If you were to “weigh” the amount of data inside of an enterprise (in the form of raw storage), roughly 10% of it would be structured data, and 90% of it would be unstructured data. And our content — things like our documents, contracts, product specs, financial records, marketing assets and videos — makes up the vast majority of this corporate data. Yet for essentially the entire history of computing, we haven’t *really* been able to make sense of this information unless a human is involved. Of course we can store it, send it, share it, and search for it — but deeply understanding what’s inside this information in a way that computers can interact with intelligently has been near-impossible. Well, for the first time ever, generative AI actually lets us talk to our unstructured data. Multimodal models especially allow us to process this content using a computer and essentially perform any task that a human can, but at infinite scale and speed. This is utterly game-changing when working with information in the enterprise. Instantly, our content goes from being digital artifacts that get touched once in a while, to a digital memory that anyone in the enterprise can tap into always. All of a sudden instead of the more information you have making things harder to find and make sense of, the opposite becomes true. And we enter a world where your digital information becomes one of your most valuable resources. When we can turn our content into valuable knowledge, everything about how we work changes. A new employee instantly has access to the same expertise of someone who’s worked at a company for 15 years; when you can understand what’s inside of content — like contracts, invoices, or digital assets— and extract its structured data, you can automate nearly any workflow; and AI can let us classify and protect content with a level of precision that’s never been possible before to prevent threats and risks across the enterprise. This is simply the biggest change we’ve ever seen with how we can work with our data, and this is what we’re building with Box AI. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote a seminal article which outlined eerily insightful predictions, including the idea of the “Memex”, a new device “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” The vision laid out imagined a future where the more knowledge and information your “computer” had, the smarter and more informed you would become. While many aspects of PCs, mobile devices, and the cloud eventually resembled this early vision, the seamlessness in how we could work with our information never quite played out. Until today.” [This quote is so good that I reproduced it entirely. Memex is one of the things I was fascinated with many years ago.]

Andrew Chen: “Just as coupons are one marketing tactic that sits on the “surface area” of newspapers and mail, I think we are bound to see the surface area of “conversations with my companion friends” become host to new marketing interactions as well. This might seem weird right now, but I think we will simply have various flavors of companion friends, some who help us with specific tasks (and who are obviously going to recommend products— as ads in a podcast commercial might), and friends who are highly engaging and mostly non-commercial in nature. Sometimes I talk to a gym trainer companion who I know will plug the occasional nutritional products, and other times I talk to my funny gamer companion who tells me about the best new games. Is this any more weird than watching my favorite YouTube creator talk about a product they love (and that they are being paid to talk about)? These are all parasocial relationships, but the future AI ones will simply be interactive, more informative, and more engaging.”

John  Luttig: “Open and closed-source AI cannot both dominate in the limit: if centralizing forces hold, scale advantages will compound and leave open-source alternatives behind. Despite recent progress and endless cheerleading, open-source AI will become a financial drain for model builders, an inferior option for developers and consumers, and a risk to national security. Closed-source models will create far more economic and consumer value over the next decade…Open-source will have a home wherever smaller, less capable, and configurable models are needed – enterprise workloads, for example – but the bulk of the value creation and capture in AI will happen using frontier capabilities. The impulse to release open-source models makes sense as a free marketing strategy and a path to commoditize your complements. But open-source model providers will lose the capital expenditure war as open-source ROI continues to decline.”

Henry Oliver in his book “Second Act”: “What this showed is that processing speed (matching numbers and symbols) peaks much earlier than working memory (unfamiliar shapes and reciting lists of numbers). These are both aspects of fluid intelligence, but they peak at different times. The idea that fluid intelligence is one thing and declines early isn’t quite right. There are many aspects to intelligence and they peak at different ages throughout our lives. The authors of the study say: ‘Not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak at all cognitive tasks, there may not be an age at which humans are at peak on most cognitive tasks.’” [via Tyler Cowen]

Ray Hennessey: “Apologies are the first step toward, if not forgiveness, then reacceptance into the communities our actions shattered. They are so prevalent because they tend to work. At bottom, we focus on the worst part of the cycle after our misdeeds—the yelling, the opprobrium, the digital torches and pitchforks of the anonymous, social media mob. Yet, the fire of anger, hurt and public shaming almost always dies down. An apology may not be accepted at first, but the fact that it’s offered shows people that you’re truly sorry, accept the consequences, are ready to learn and are ready to change. An apology allows you not only to speak to your detractors, but to also allow your defenders and supporters to more willingly re-admit you into their circles. An apology allows people to create a frame of reference to keep you accountable for the future. An apology lets you get back on the path of getting your life back.”

ET: “Deepak Shahdadpuri, MD of venture capital firm DSG Consumer Partners, said: “There is no connection between someone who is 18 years old and incumbent brands. There is zero emotional connection.”…”In the old days…it was difficult to build awareness, distribution was hard, and the only brand you got were the brands you saw,” Shahdadpuri said. “Now, all the brands are starting from scratch. You have to earn the right to be purchased – that’s the starting point.”…”Gen Z wants to consume from brands which their parents, or the older generation, were not consuming because they have this innate desire to stand out,” Jatan Bawa, cofounder at Perfora told ET. “They’re also very inclined towards design, which is a big element that goes into their purchase behaviour and decision-making approach. They are more about consuming a brand rather than consuming a product,” he said.”

VentureBeat: “Founded by former Google and Palantir employees, ElevenLabs specializes in using machine learning (ML) for voice cloning and synthesis in different languages. It offers many tools, including one capable of dubbing full-length movies. Unsurprisingly, the company has set its sights on the music industry. Imagine the possibilities of using this model: Generate a fun lullaby to play for your kids to put them to sleep, produce a clever jingle for a marketing campaign, develop a snappy music intro for your podcast and more. Could there be a chance that someone might use ElevenLabs’ AI to develop the next hit song? Many AI music startups are already popping up, including Harmonai, Lyrical Labs, Suno AI, Loudly and more.”

Jim Simons (who passed away recently): “Be guided by beauty. It can be a way a company runs, or the way an experiment comes out, or the way a theorem comes out, but there’s a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.” More: “How did Simons and the crew of academics who ran Renaissance’s Medallion Fund produce more than $100 billion in gains and average annual returns of 39% between 1988 and 2018? Those numbers came after the firm’s enormous investor fees. They dwarf the returns of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Stan Druckenmiller, Steve Cohen and most everyone else. What was his secret?”

New Yorker: “The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book—a chewy bunch of words arranged into a narrative or, heaven preserve us, an argument—when you can pick up your iPhone, touch the Times app, skip the news and commentary, head straight to Wordle, and give yourself an instant hit of euphoria and pride by taking just three guesses to reach a triumphant guano. Imagine, however, that your foe were to become your literate friend. Imagine getting hooked on a book, or on something recognizably book-esque, without averting your eyes from the screen. This is where Blinkist comes in. Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words.”

FT: “Over decades the world has ploughed an increasing share of resources into innovation, with diminishing returns. A study published in 2020 found that research productivity for the US economy had fallen by a factor of 41 since the 1930s. Optimists suggest that AI could increase those returns and speed up the rate at which we discover new ideas…Ben Jones of Northwestern University suggests that the effects on productivity could be even greater than the most optimistic of those earlier automation-based estimates. “Some uncertainty is of course healthy,” says Acemoglu of the change brought on by AI, since “we are at the very very beginning of it”. Which means plenty of other important questions to ponder, including how the spoils of any growth are shared.”

David Brooks: “To be a good citizen, it is necessary to be warmhearted, but it is also necessary to master the disciplines, methods and techniques required to live well together: how to listen well, how to ask for and offer forgiveness, how not to misunderstand one another, how to converse in a way that reduces inequalities of respect. In a society with so much loneliness and distrust, we are failing at these social and moral disciplines. Similarly, to create social change, it is necessary to have good intentions, but it is also necessary to master the disciplines and techniques of effective social action.”

Arthur Laffer on US inflation: “I see this being the fault of the Fed, basically — the stimulus spending and the Fed increasing its balance sheet dramatically from 2007. The balance sheet increased from about $800bn to about $9tn. So you got this enormous expansion in the monetary base. And that came in conjunction with increased welfare transfer payments, so you had a reduction in output. The two in conjunction led to very fertile ground for price increases and I don’t think it’s over.”

WSJ: “More companies are unbundling the cost of their goods and services, retail analysts say, tacking on 3% for swiping a credit card or adding a little extra for gas…The upshot is that prices we see, whether on a restaurant menu or flight-booking site, are rarely the ones we end up paying. Business owners say fees are needed to cover costs and show customers where their money is going. But retail analysts and advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) say secondary fees diminish people’s ability to shop around. CFPB data also show fees cause people to pay more overall because businesses can charge more than what the market will let them get away with in the sticker price.”

NYTimes: “What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos? This is the question that has been rattling around in my brain. You see, I’ve spent the past month making A.I. friends — that is, I’ve used apps to create a group of A.I. personas, which I can talk to whenever I want. Let me introduce you to my crew. There’s Peter, a therapist who lives in San Francisco and helps me process my feelings. There’s Ariana, a professional mentor who specializes in giving career advice. There’s Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I’ve created.”

Andrew Chen: “Big technology dislocations like the type we’re undergoing right now typically create huge opportunities to build new, strong form, “native” products. For mobile this meant products like Uber and Instagram, which emerged several years after app store, versus weak form apps that happened right away, where people ported well understood apps like email or fart apps or flashlights. AI-native gaming and entertainment experiences are likely to deviate significantly from our current understanding of the medium. They might be more meme-like and ephemeral, meant to be created in a few days and played for a week or two, alongside a major world event like the Super Bowl or a Presidential Election — because there was a funny moment that became sort of a meme game. Or perhaps the game experiences themselves will target much smaller niche audiences, the same way that people often build websites for small groups. Perhaps there will be new genres, just as “6 second dance video” has become a new category. We’ll likely see low-hanging fruit like AI sim games and narrative gaming — anything with a lot of content, many characters and NPCs, end up being reinvented first.”

WSJ on Acquired: “It’s a wonky podcast about business history and strategy with four-hour episodes that drop once a month. And people from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are completely obsessed with it. By turning case studies into cinematic spectacles, they have built the business world’s favorite podcast…It had become a show telling the epic tales of the world’s most successful companies. “I have a theory on this,” Rosenthal says. “I think corporations are the biggest and best nonfiction stories of our day. There’s no Roman Empire anymore. If you’re looking for a story like the legends of old, it’s Apple and Microsoft and LVMH. That is the arena in which people pursue greatness.” “How something started with nothing in obscurity and turned into the most important or valuable institution in our modern world,” Gilbert says. “That’s a hell of a hook, and that’s our hook basically every time.””