The Sunday Drive - 04/30/2023 Edition
Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur
👋🏻 Hello friends,
Let's take it easy and enjoy a leisurely Sunday Drive around the internet.
Vibin'
No story for the Vibe this week - just one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists. For your “Etta-fication”, this week I’m vibin’ to Something’s Got a Hold on Me by the one and only Etta James.
💭 Quote of the Week
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." - Rachel Carson
📈 Chart of the Week
A team of economists has hypothesized that productivity growth trends are poised to improve (read what others have been saying here.)
Morgan Stanley analysts are highlighting that public policies are effectively creating labor shortages — the focus on friend-shoring and re-shoring stops multinational firms from being able to source workers wherever they like. And that in turn incentivizes productivity-boosting investment.
It is vitally important to accelerate productivity if we are to be able to mitigate the current inflationary environment yet still have a growing economy. Instead of focusing on whether or not there will be a recession and how deep and protracted it might be, we (policy makers, investors, everyone) need to be thinking about ways to increase the productivity of our labor. This is just as true at the individual level as it is at the macroeconomic level. I’m convinced, despite all the fear and loathing about its potentially detrimental effects, that AI and data driven technologies are the key to that productivity growth.
🚙 Interesting Drive-By's
🤔 Some Things I Think - a wonderful post by the always amazing Morgan Housel
A good test when reading the news is to constantly ask, “Will I still care about this story in a year? Two years? Five years?” A good bet in economics: the past wasn’t as good as you remember, the present isn’t as bad as you think, and the future will be better than you anticipate.
💡 You Have to Own - from Dror Poleg, a really great thinker and someone I admire greatly:
As technology tilts power towards capital, individuals must adapt by investing in diverse assets and embracing innovative approaches to secure their future.
🤓 OpenAI’s Hunger for Data is Coming Back to Bite It - from the MIT Technology Review:
In AI development, the dominant paradigm is that the more training data, the better. OpenAI’s GPT-2 model had a data set consisting of 40 gigabytes of text. GPT-3, which ChatGPT is based on, was trained on 570 GB of data. OpenAI has not shared how big the data set for its latest model, GPT-4, is.
But that hunger for larger models is now coming back to bite the company. In the past few weeks, several Western data protection authorities have started investigations into how OpenAI collects and processes the data powering ChatGPT. They believe it has scraped people’s personal data, such as names or email addresses, and used it without their consent.
📉 We Should Really Be Having More Kids - from a great young writer, Jack Raines:
In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway penned this now timeless exchange:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
We worry about global warfare and pandemics because they’re big and scary and sudden and could wipe us out with a sudden BANG! But the real existential threat, declining birth rates, will progress like Mike’s bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly.
🧐 Founder & CEO is a BS Title - from Jason Fried, Founder & CEO of 37Signals:
Founder & CEO is a common title, especially in tech.
It happens to be my title too.
I've come to believe it's an impossible title. You're either CEO, or you're Founder. You can't hold both full-time jobs.
👋🏼 Parting Thought
If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em at me.
I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...
Your faithful financial provocateur,
-Mike
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