Rajesh Jain

FT: “Four Chinese generative artificial intelligence start-ups have been valued at between $1.2bn and $2.5bn in the past three months, leading a pack of more than 260 companies vying to emulate the success of US rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The newly minted unicorns — Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and 01.ai — have gained significant backing from a largely domestic pool of investors and are fighting to hire the best talent to develop the most popular AI products. “There is no winner of foundation models yet in the China market. These are some of the names leading the charge to claim that title,” said Charlie Dai, vice-president and principal analyst at tech-focused consultancy Forrester.”

Arnold Kling: “While power has become more concentrated, knowledge has become more dispersed. In the economy, people are increasingly specialized. Science, medicine, and engineering have split into smaller sub-disciplines. In general, policy makers have too little knowledge relative to the high concentration of power. Consider the bills passed in [the US] Congress that run to hundreds of pages, which is more than they can read. And often the bills merely delegate power to unelected officials in government agencies.

Reuters: “Prominent computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is building a startup that uses human-like processing of visual data to make artificial intelligence (AI) capable of advanced reasoning, six sources told Reuters, in what would be a leap forward for the technology….She said the cutting edge of research involved algorithms that could plausibly extrapolate what images and text would look like in three-dimensional environments and act upon those predictions, using a concept called “spatial intelligence.” To illustrate the idea, she showed a picture of a cat with its paw outstretched, pushing a glass toward the edge of a table. In a split second, she said, the human brain could assess “the geometry of this glass, its place in 3D space, its relationship with the table, the cat and everything else,” then predict what would happen and take action to prevent it. “Nature has created this virtuous cycle of seeing and doing, powered by spatial intelligence,” she said.”

Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds: “Development requires helping the poor find their way from farm to factory, and from factory to office, classroom, and laboratory. This requires massive investment, which in turn requires sophisticated financial intermediation. It is for this reason that the trade and financial dimensions of globalization are complementary.” [via CafeHayek]

WSJ: “Rain starts as water vapor high in the sky; the individual water molecules float free of one another, mixed in with the other gases that make up the atmosphere. When the conditions are right, they condense to join a liquid water droplet or freeze solid onto an ice crystal. At the start, these solid or liquid particles are very small and just drift along with the air currents. But as they grow in mass, they start to fall. Lots of raindrops start off as ice crystals and melt as they fall into warmer air. Once all the droplets are liquid and falling, the dance really gets going. The smallest raindrops are around two thousandths of an inch across. These baby drops are spherical because the surface tension of the liquid squeezes the total surface area to be as compact as possible. Physicists find it strange that people often draw raindrops with a pointy end at the top, because the surface tension makes sure that there are no sharp corners—they’re all smoothed out incredibly quickly. Raindrops never have points.”

Arnold Kling: “It takes a long time for people to accept that an industry is dying. Twenty years ago, people who worked as reporters or editors at local newspapers still thought they had a future. More recently, I have a relative who worked in the Hollywood ecosystem who ignored my warnings that his occupation was threatened. And there are plenty of young people who want to try becoming college professors. All of these are instances where the consumer demand still exists. People consume plenty of news. They consume more entertainment than ever. And people want to learn. The problem is with the business models of the legacy providers. The demand is there, but they are not meeting it efficiently. As the market evolves, someone who wants employment in a declining segment ought to adapt. Instead of adapting, too often people go into denial and end up yelling at consumers to stop choosing their preferred options.”

IBD: “”The AI vector search market is nascent,” said JPMorgan analyst Pinjalim Bora in a [recent] report. “The main ask from enterprise (customers) is how to empower LLMs (large language models) with proprietary enterprise data, while at the same time preserving the privacy and governance of the data.”…In the long-run, vector technology will play a role in search across massive data sets of semi-structured and unstructured data — images, social media posts, emails, audio files and sensor data. “Traditional databases are optimized for storing data such as tables, documents, and key-value pairs,” added JPMorgan’s Bora. “However, with advancements in AI and natural language processing, increasing quantities of semantic vector data have required new repositories. Vectors allow for storing the intrinsic meaning of unstructured content, such as images, videos and natural language in a machine-readable format.””

New Yorker: “However dynamic or sociable they become, Web-site home pages will continue to reckon with the structural problems of the social Internet. Facebook still works to track its users around the Internet, and uses the data to target them with advertising. Readers often log on to publications like the Times with their Gmail accounts, further entrenching Google as a Internet gatekeeper. Consumers’ attention is still largely dictated by algorithmic feeds, and TikTok continues to provide the best opportunity to draw new eyeballs, at least until it gets banned by the United States government. Individual sites trying to replicate the dynamism of social platforms must reckon with the fact that they are doing so at a far smaller scale. Loyal audiences are pointedly not everyone; there is a limit to how much revenue can be juiced from them. Moving away from the traffic firehose of the wider Internet seems counterintuitive, in that sense, but it may be the only viable option left.”

WSJ: “Artificial intelligence is making it possible for companies to replace humans in tasks that range from modeling sweaters to participating in clinical trials. AI systems can take in data on a person’s individual characteristics—such as appearance, shopping preferences and health profile—then predict how they would look in an item of clothing, how they would answer a question or be affected by a disease. This AI content, sometimes referred to as a person’s digital twin, is already being used for a variety of tasks. Los Angeles-based startup AI Fashion uses photos of real models to generate completely new AI images of them modeling various pieces of clothing for fashion campaigns and e-commerce sites. Another startup, Brox AI, created digital versions of 27,000 individuals, with information about their brand preferences and shopping habits, that allows companies to ask the AI focus-group-style questions. And San Francisco-based Unlearn is using AI to generate digital twins of people based on their health data to predict how disease might progress over time for those individuals—aiming to make clinical trials more efficient and effective.”

Nate Silver: “I think political beliefs are primarily formulated by two major forces: Politics as self-interest. Some issues have legible, material stakes. Rich people have an interest in lower taxes. Sexually active women (and men!) who don’t want to bear children have an interest in easier access to abortion. Members of historically disadvantaged groups have an interest in laws that protect their rights. Politics as personal identity — whose team are you on. But other issues have primarily symbolic stakes. These serve as vehicles for individual and group expression — not so much “identity politics” but politics as identity. People are trying to figure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both directions: people can be attracted to a group or negatively polarized by it. People have different reasons for arguing about politics, and can derive value from a sense of social belonging and receiving reinforcement that their choices are honorable and righteous.”

Mint: “India’s welfare delivery model stands at a crossroads today. The public debate on poverty tends to centre on the poverty line and ways to measure it accurately. But we need to start paying more attention to how poor beneficiaries get identified. Even with a universally-agreed definition of poverty, governments will still need granular data on household characteristics to be able to reach poor households. They will also need to find a way to update such data regularly, so that a household that escapes poverty is eased out of the social security net, while one that becomes poor is included. Without a reliable and dynamic database, governments will find it hard to reach the poorest of households in need of state support. They will have to either rely on extra-official agents to help identify the poorest lot, or devise quasi-universal schemes to cut down exclusion errors. After a decade of rapid progress in welfare delivery, India may be headed back to the pre-SECC era.”

WSJ: “Did your mom ever suggest a warm glass of milk to help you sleep? An emerging field of research called chrononutrition indicates that choosing the right foods and meal times may improve our sleep. Some key findings: Eat dinner early. Keep consistent schedules. And, yes, drink milk. You already know that fruits, veggies and lean protein are good for your health. But they can boost your sleep, too. These foods are the basis for the Mediterranean diet, which research shows may improve sleep quality, reduce sleep disturbances and boost sleep efficiency—the amount of time you spend asleep when you are in bed.”

The Generalist: “Great cultures stem from the founder’s personality. The result is that an Elon Musk company will differ from one founded by Jeff Bezos simply because of their differing personalities and perspectives. Entrepreneurs should look to legendary firms for inspiration but be wary of adopting their approaches wholesale. For a culture to be authentic, it has to connect to the people driving it. Use rituals to enforce your values. It is not enough to simply state your company’s principles. You must find ways to embody them through repeated rituals. For example, Front champions its culture of “transparency.” One ritual that puts this principle into practice is for team members to keep their calendars public. Find small ritualistic behaviors that reinforce the culture you want.”

Rahul Matthan: “Karthik Muralidharan’s tome, Accelerating India’s Development, [is] in many ways, is a remarkable book, not just because of its size (at 800 pages, it could easily do duty as a doorstop), but because of how it has been written. It’s neatly organized into bite-sized essays that are easy to digest, with each chapter building on those before it to collectively contribute to the grand argument. Most importantly, unlike so many books of its ilk, instead of just focusing on what is wrong with the Indian state, it offers implementable suggestions as to how to make it better. The starting premise of the book is that the last time we made any “systematic investments into the institutional foundations of the Indian state” was in 1950. Since then, all we have done is increase our expectations of what the state must provide us without making necessary investments in its capacity to deliver. One of the reasons for this, Karthik argues, is that Indian citizens had universal adult franchise right from the country’s birth, unlike those of other nations. Where other countries pursued development at the cost of initially disenfranchised interest groups (women, minorities and the like), Indian politicians had to appease everyone and as a result could take no short-cuts. This is why as powerful as universal adult franchise has been for democracy, it has affected the pace of our development.”

WSJ: “Stock photographers who survived the disruptive advent of digital cameras and online sales are bracing themselves for the next great tech shock: generative AI. “The stock photography industry is going away,” said Connecticut-based photographer Tony Northrup. “AI is ending it for the remaining photographers who figured out how to stay profitable.” Photographers’ concerns highlight a growing unease within the wider commercial creative industries that AI will wipe out jobs that until now have relied on artistic talent and decades of experience. Industries such as marketing, publishing, music and news have long relied on stock photography to create, illustrate or promote their products for less cost than commissioning photos would require. AI’s new capability to generate realistic images from simple text prompts is now giving stock clients an affordable, fast alternative that comes with greater control of the final image.”

Michaeleen Doucleff: “To make cognitively demanding tasks a habit, try to do them every day at the same time and in the same place. Add a ritual before you start, such as turning off your phone and launching an app to block distracting websites. “You’ll teach yourself that mental exertion pays off under these certain conditions,” Botvinick says. After a few weeks, concentrating deeply won’t just feel easier; it will actually be easier.”

FT: “Mike Brearley, once at the helm of a very successful England cricket side, is now a psychoanalyst. He argues we each have a team of internal players, who we need to coach so we can use all their skills for tip-top performance — and find balance between them for a happy existence. “We all have an indulgent side, a playful side, a serious side, a work ethic, a superego or a harsh conscience,” he said in a recent interview with Cambridge university’s alumni magazine…Instead of falling out with ourselves and indulging in the equivalent of locker room fisticuffs, his advice, in a book published last year, was that “captaining ourselves, like captaining a team, requires a willingness to allow thoughts and feelings their space”. He suggests “nudging rather than forcing” these parts of ourselves into being more effective.”

Arnold Kling: “In profit-seeking businesses, a company that gets too heavily bureaucratic will eventually lose money and have to cut back or go bankrupt. That provides a check on bureaucracy. But government interferes with this process by creating compliance requirements. These requirements force businesses to expand bureaucracy, and they provide a barrier to entry preventing new firms from coming in and competing on the basis of lower overhead. You cannot execute a lean startup in an industry that is heavily regulated.”

WSJ: “[Cal] Newport, 41, says we can accomplish more by shedding the overload. He calls his solution “slow productivity”—and has a book by the same name—a way for high achievers to say yes to fewer things, do them better and even slack off in strategic doses. Top-notch quality is the goal, and frenetic activity the enemy.  This, he told me, is the thing that can save our jobs from AI and layoffs, and even make shareholders happy…One mistake we make, Newport says, is taking on too many projects, then getting bogged down in the administrative overload—talking about the work, coordinating with others—that each requires. Work becomes a string of planning meetings, waiting on someone from another department to give us a go-ahead. Newport recommends giving priority to a couple projects, then bumping the others to a waiting list in order of importance. Make that list public, say, in a Google doc you share with bosses and colleagues. “

Dev Ittycheria: “The real sophisticated [AI] apps will be using real-time data, being able to make real-time decisions on real-time events. Maybe something’s happening in the stock market, maybe it’s time to buy or sell, or it’s time to hedge. I think that’s where we will start seeing much more sophisticated apps, where you can embed real-time data along with all the reasoning.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “Agents will be the next big thing in artificial intelligence…Agents would also create the next class of devices for the post-smartphone era, like Rabbit R1 and AI Pin, both of which were unveiled recently. They use GenAI models as their operating system (OS), natural spoken language as their user interface (UI), and, importantly, have rudimentary agents instead of apps. So, for example, you can call an Uber, order food on Doordash or play Spotify by just telling your Rabbit R1 to do so. A Large Action Model (LAM), which is built on LLMs, functions as Rabbit’s OS to make it your personal voice assistant. The LAM OS uses its long-term memory of you to translate your requests into actionable steps and responses; it comprehends what apps and services you use daily. The LAM can learn to see and act in the world like humans do. It is still early days, but the app-led devices of today will likely give way to new agent-led devices.”

Peggy Noonan: “Even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.”

WSJ: “Renewable electricity is growing fast. The trouble is, it can’t keep up with growing power demand. In the U.S., the new driver is energy-guzzling artificial intelligence. Demand was already on the rise to power electric vehicles, heat pumps and other devices designed to reduce fossil fuel use. In the developing world, the boom is driven by industrialization and basics like lights and air conditioning. That means more fossil fuels, including coal, the worst emissions offender. “The reality is we can keep adding renewables until we’re blue in the face and it won’t be enough,” said Sumant Sinha, chief executive of ReNew, one of India’s biggest renewable energy companies.”

FT: “In a new book, Making Sense of Chaos, the complexity scientist Doyne Farmer points out that both Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law provide a good basis for forecasting the costs of different technologies. Both nicely describe the patterns that we see in the data. But which one is closer to identifying the underlying causes of these patterns? Moore’s Law suggests that products get cheaper over time, and because they are cheaper they then are demanded and produced in larger quantities. Wright’s Law suggests that rather than falling costs spurring production, it’s mass production that causes costs to fall. And therein lies the missed opportunity. We acted as though Moore’s Law governed the cost of photovoltaics. While there were of course subsidies for solar PV in countries such as Germany, the default view was that it was too expensive to be much use as a large-scale power source, so we should wait and hope that it would eventually become cheap. If instead we had looked through the lens of Wright’s Law, governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall. PV is now so cheap that the question is moot. Yet if we had acted more boldly 40 years ago, solar PV might have been cheap enough to put fossil fuels out of business at the turn of the millennium.”

Harish Damodaran: “The political economy of India has changed considerably to transcend the simple binaries of amir-garib. The old expropriate-and-redistribute model has lost its political viability. The withdrawn 2014 land acquisition act amendments and the 2016 demonetisation were probably the last experiments at expropriation. Income and wealth inequality may have to be addressed through policies focusing more on job generation, universal access to quality education, skill development and progressive taxation than radical redistribution.”