Nassim Taleb on Euro

"EURO IS DOOMED AS A CONCEPT", declares the author of "The Black Swan", Nassim Taleb, at a recent interview with CNBC. Adding that "We had less debt cumulatively [two years ago], and more people employed. Today, we have more risk in the system, and a smaller tax base. [...] Banks balance sheets are just as bad as they were" two years ago when the crisis began and "the quality of the risks hasn't improved."

Part I: While discussing the outlook for the global economy with Bob Long (CEO, Conversus Capital) on CNBC, Taleb says, "We have no other solution but to slash debt".

Part II: "The balance sheets of banks are just as bad as they were" two years ago when the crisis began and "the quality of the risks hasn't improved," argues Nassim Taleb.

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The Independent Directors at OpenAI

Sam Altman was the CEO and Greg Brockman was the chairman of the board at OpenAI.org, the parent company that is listed as a not-for-profit organization in the US u/s 501(C)(3). On 17 Nov 2023 both of them were fired by the Independent Directors of the board. This post talks about the 4-day drama that ensued at the back of these events, focusing on the role of Independent Directors. (Try here for a related earlier post.) One year ago the company launched the ChatGPT, the Large Language Model, that rose to prominence with its Generative AI capabilities (“GPT” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and human-like response and interactive interface (“Chat”). At launch ChatGPT was based on based on GPT-3.5 series. The launch took the internet by storm as Microsoft unveiled its commercial partnership with the firm, and its global marketing machine geared into action. To accommodate for this new profit-making "partnership" endeavor, the firm came up with anothe...

OpenAI and the Network Effect (ft. Md Rafi and Ola Krutrim)

"Who is the greatest Bollywood singer of all times?" I typed into chat.krutrim.com It listed seven, but missed Mohammad Rafi. Horrified, I followed up, "Why is Mohammad Rafi not in this list?" And it missed the context, replying, "Mohammad Rafi is not in the list because the list you are referring to is not provided." With a deep sigh, it reminded me of Altman's India visit June last year. Someone asked him if India should invest in building a Foundational model (assuming funding and talent is not as issue). And he replied , "it would be hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.. you shouldn’t try”. Try they will, and they should. The world's fourth(?) largest economy has pockets of deep pockets that can sustain the demands of developing a resource hungry technology such at Foundational LLMs. But distribution, diffusion and monetisation remains challenging, when chatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in Indic languages are just an App ...

$NVDA: When You are The Moat

NVIDIA had their earnings call yesterday for the quarter ending Dec'23. Markets were muted in anticipation. As expected, the S&P 500 rose by 2.5% on the back of a strong performance and pipeline. The day after, NVIDIA stock rallied to all time high of $800. This gave the company a market cap of USD 2 Tn, surpassing Alphabet, Inc., and becoming the fourth largest listed company in the world by market value. For perspective consider this - the single day gain of USD 277Bn was bigger than the largest listed company in India - the world's 4th biggest equity market, and by an estimate its market cap was now larger than the entire SENSEX of India. Who knew? Perhaps not even Berkshire Hathaway. (See share holding pattern in the links below). One of the simplest reasons for the meteoric rise of NVIDIA is, as Warren Buffet once famously said about resilient businesses, that NVIDIA provides a moat to the the software firms for their business of developing and productising AI and, sp...

mind × the + gap ™

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