Results for “"ben thompson"”
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Ben Thompson interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman

On the GPTs, this one starts with Ben:

if text and images are all a commodities, that value increasingly comes not from the item itself but from the brand surrounding it. I mean, does that seem like a reasonable way this might play out?

NF: I think it does increase the returns to things that you trust, and I think it increases the returns to thoughtfulness, insight, surprising ideas that are true.

Or just surprising ideas that are not necessarily true.

NF: Yeah, I mean, if the models cause us to downgrade the appearance of authoritativeness, then that might be an excellent thing for society. If our societal adaptation is, just because it sounds formal and authoritative, maybe we shouldn’t trust it, that would be probably great. We become altogether more truth seeking. It’s like you can no longer judge people based on whether they wear a suit because everyone can afford a suit, and so wearing a suit may not be the perfect signal of reliability. I think that’s sort of where we are too. Just because you wrote four paragraphs full of complete sentences, doesn’t mean necessarily that you have an original or really thoughtful idea here.

The model so far cannot produce these big out of distribution kind of insights that kind of cause you to rewrite your whole model of the world in your head. I’m not finding that. I do occasionally find myself using ChatGPT for brainstorming and it’s like, “Gosh, how should I solve this problem?” And it’ll come up with sort of five obvious ideas. The problem sometimes is that I haven’t tried two of them.

Here is the link, yes you must pay to subscribe but worth it (I only pay for three Substacks or Substack-like products, this and Matt Y. and some NBA, Noah too.).  Covers many different issues, interesting throughout!  And some say the transcript is ungated.

Ben Thompson on the Facebook antitrust suit

At the same time, I do have serious rule-of-law reservations about undoing a deal eight years on, particularly given the fact that it appears that the advertising-supported space is doing better than I thought a few years ago: Snapchat in particular is building a great business, LinkedIn is doing much better, and TikTok is obviously on its way.

And:

  • Andy Grove famously said “Only the Paranoid Survive”, but the takeaway from many of these emails is that “Only the paranoid get sued for antitrust”; to put it another way, Facebook executives come across as worried about everything, especially Google, which, by the same token, comes across as completely asleep at the wheel (now that is a monopoly indicator if I’ve ever seen one!).
  • Facebook’s stock was down less than 2% yesterday; that may reflect investor skepticism about the success of the lawsuit, but you could also argue that splitting up the company would actually unlock value: all three products would keep their audiences, but would have to monetize independently, which, given the fact that Facebook ad prices are set by auction, not artificially propped up as you would expect with an alleged monopolist, could absolutely lead to more revenue in aggregate, not less.
  • Relatedly, it’s not clear that advertisers will benefit from a break-up. The entire reason why Facebook owning both Facebook and Instagram is a problem for other consumer tech companies is because advertisers benefit from a one-stop shop and don’t necessarily want to support multiple platforms.

Ben writes for-pay content on Stratechery, you can (and should) subscribe here.

The essential Ben Thompson on isolation and quarantine

…while I have written about Taiwan’s use of cellphone-enforced quarantines for recent travelers and close contacts of those infected, I should also note that every single positive infection — symptomatic or not — is isolated away from their home and family. That is also the case in South Korea, and while it was the case for Singaporean citizens, it was not the case for migrant workers, which is a major reason why the virus has exploded in recent weeks.

Here’s the thing, though: isolating people is hard. It would be very controversial. It would require overbearing police powers that people in the West are intrinsically allergic to. Politicians that instituted such a policy would be very unpopular. It is so much easier to let tech companies build a potential magic bullet, and then demand they let government use it; most people wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care, which appears to matter more than whether or not the approach would actually work (or, to put it another way, it appears that the French government sees privacy as a club with which to beat tech companies, not a non-negotiable principle their citizens demand).

So that is why I have changed my mind: Western governments are not willing to take actions that we know work because it would be unpopular and controversial (indeed, the fact that central quarantine is so clearly a violation of liberties is arguably a benefit, because there is no way people would tolerate it once the crisis is over). And, on the flipside, that makes digital surveillance too dangerous to build. Politicians would rather leverage tech companies to violate liberty on the sly, and tech companies, once they have the capability, are all too willing to offload the responsibility of using it wisely to whatever government entity is willing to give them cover. There just isn’t much evidence that either side is willing to make hard choices.

That is from Ben’s Stratechery email newsletter, gated but you can pay to get it.  There is currently the risk that “test and trace” becomes for the Left what “chloroquine” has been for Trump and parts of the political right — namely a way to make otherwise unpalatable plans sound as if they have hope for more than “develop herd immunity and bankrupt the economy in the process.”

To be clear, I fully favor “test and trace,” and I’ve worked hard to help fund some of it.  That said, I wonder if we will anytime soon reach the point where it is a game changer.  So when people argue we should not reopen the economy until “test and trace” is in place, I increasingly see that as a kind of emotive declaration that others do not care enough about human lives (possibly true!), rather than an actual piece of advice.

My Conversation with Ben Thompson

Here is the audio and transcript.  Here is the summary opener:

Not only is Ben Thompson’s Stratechery frequently mentioned on MR, but such is Tyler’s fandom that the newsletter even made its way onto the reading list for one of his PhD courses. Ben’s based in Taiwan, so when he recently visited DC, Tyler quickly took advantage of the chance for an in-person dialogue.

In this conversation they talk about the business side of tech and more, including whether tech titans are good at PR, whether conglomerate synergies exist, Amazon’s foray into health care, why anyone needs an Apple Watch or an Alexa, growing up in small-town Wisconsin, his pragmatic book-reading style, whether MBAs are overrated, the prospects for the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA rule changes, the future of the tech industries in China and India, and why Taiwanese breakfast is the best breakfast.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why should I want a tech device in my home at all? Take Alexa — I don’t have one, I’m pretty happy, my life is simple. I don’t want anyone or anything listening to me. What does it do for me? I know I can tell it to play me a song or buy something on Amazon, but that’s one-click shopping anyway, could hardly be simpler. Why do devices in the home have any future at all?

THOMPSON: The reality is — particularly when it comes to consumer products — is that in the long run, convenience always wins. I think people will have them in their homes, and they’ll become more popular because it’s convenient.

You can be doing whatever you want; you can say something like, “Set a timer five minutes,” or “What temperature should I grill my steak to?” And you’ll get an answer with your hands busy, and altogether it’s going to be a more convenient answer than it would’ve been otherwise.

And:

COWEN: How bullish are you on India’s tech sector and software development?

THOMPSON: I’m bullish. You know, India — people want to put it in the same bucket as, “Oh, it’s the next China.” The countries are similar in that they’re both very large, but they’re so different.

Probably the most underrated event — I don’t want to say in human history, but in the last hundred years — is the Cultural Revolution in China. And not just that 60, 70 million people were killed, or starved to death, or what it might be, but it really was like a scorched earth for China as a whole. Everything started from scratch. And from an economic perspective, that’s why you can grow for so long — because you’re starting from nothing basically. But the way it impacts culture, generally, and the way business is done.

Taiwan, I think, struggles from having thousands of years of Chinese bureaucracy behind it. Plus they were occupied by Japan for 50 years, so you’ve got that culture on top. Then you have this sclerotic corporate culture that the boss is always right, stay in the office until he goes home, and that sort of thing. It’s unhealthy.

Whereas China — it’s much more bare-knuckled competition and “Figure out the right answer, figure it out quickly.” The competition there is absolutely brutal. It’s brutal in a way I think is hard for people to really comprehend, from the West. And that makes China, makes these companies really something to deal with.

Whereas India did not have something like that. Yes, it had colonialism, but all that is still there, and the effects of that, and the long-term effects of India’s thousands of years of culture. So it makes it much more difficult to wrap things up, to get things done. And that’s always, I think, going to be the case. The way India develops, generally, because they didn’t have a clear-the-decks event like the Cultural Revolution, is always going to be fundamentally different.

And that is by no means a bad thing. I’m not wishing the Cultural Revolution on anyone. I’m just saying it makes the countries really fundamentally different.

Definitely recommended.

What should I ask Ben Thompson?

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with Ben Thompson the tech commentator at Stratechery (worth the $$), no associated public event.  Here is Wikipedia on Ben:

Ben Thompson is an American business, technology, and media analyst, who is based in Taiwan. He is known principally for writing Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter featuring in-depth commentary on tech and media news that has been called a “must-read in Silicon Valley circles”.

Here is Ben’s self-description.  Here is Ben on Twitter.  So what should I ask him?

Ben Thompson on data portability and Facebook

The problem with data portability is that it goes both ways: if you can take your data out of Facebook to other applications, you can do the same thing in the other direction. The question, then, is which entity is likely to have the greater center of gravity with regards to data: Facebook, with its social network, or practically anything else?

Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch. Partnering or interoperating with companies below the Bill Gates Line, particularly aggregators, is simply an invitation to be intermediated. To demand that governments enforce exactly that would be a massive mistake that only helps Facebook.

Link to the post, with further explanation, is here.  You can and should subscribe to Ben here.  Here is my earlier post on data portability.

Ben Thompson on the Amazon consortium and health care

What would make more sense to me is that, having first built an interface for its employees, and then a standardized infrastructure for its health care suppliers, is that Amazon converts the latter into a marketplace where PBMs, insurance administrators, distributors, and pharmacies have to compete to serve employees. And then, once that marketplace is functioning, Amazon will open the floodgates on the demand side, offering that standard interface to every large employer in America…

This is certainly ambitious enough — basically intermediating U.S. employers and the U.S. healthcare industry — but in fact this only sets the stage for the wholesale disruption of American healthcare. First, Amazon could not only open up its standard interface to other large employers, but small-and-medium sized businesses, and even individuals; in this way the Amazon Health Marketplace could aggregate by far the most demand for healthcare.

And to close the piece:

My expectation, then, is not that the Internet methodically disrupts industry after industry in some sort of chronological order, but rather that the entire edifice lasts far longer than technologists think, only to one day collapse far quicker than anyone expected.

The ultimate winners of this shakeout, then, are not only companies that are building businesses predicated on the Internet, but just as importantly, are willing and able to build those businesses with the patience that will be necessary to wait for the old order to collapse, particularly if that collapse happens years or decades after the underlying business models are rotten.

Here is more, and I do hope you are all subscribing to Stratechery, which is one of the very best regular reads, worth the money.

Daniel Gross on the printing press and GPT

In a way, everyone’s been wondering, trying to analogize ChatGPT with the printing press, but in reality it’s almost the opposite.

The entire thing is happening in the inverse of that, where the printing press was a technology to disseminate information through a book basically and convince people to do things, and the kind of anti-book is the LLM agent, which summarizes things very succinctly. If anything, it awakens people to the fact that they have been complicit in a religion for a very long time, because it very neatly summarizes these things for you and puts everything in latent space and suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute, this veganism concept is very connected to this other concept.” It’s a kind of Reformation in reverse, in a way, where everyone has suddenly woken up to the fact that there’s a lot of things that are wrong…

So yeah, it takes away all the subtlety from any kind of ideology and just puts it right on your face and yeah, people are having a reaction to it.

That is from the Ben Thompson (gated) interview with Daniel and Nat Friedman, self-recommending.

Apple Vision Pro is receiving strong reviews

But none of them had the advantages that Apple brings to the table with Apple Vision Pro. Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with. Every bit of this thing shows Apple-level ambition. I don’t know whether it will be the “next computing mode,” but you can see the conviction behind each of the choices made here. No corners cut. Full-tilt engineering on display.

The hardware is good — very good — with 24 million pixels across the two panels, orders of magnitude more than any headsets most consumers have come into contact with. The optics are better, the headband is comfortable and quickly adjustable and there is a top strap for weight relief. Apple says it is still working on which light seal (the cloth shroud) options to ship with it when it releases officially but the default one was comfortable for me. They aim to ship them with varying sizes and shapes to fit different faces. The power connector has a great little design, as well, that interconnects using internal pin-type power linkages with an external twist lock…

If you have experience with VR at all then you know that the two big barriers most people hit are either latency-driven nausea or the isolation that long sessions wearing something over your eyes can deliver.

Apple has mitigated both of those head on. The R1 chip that sits alongside the M2 chip has a system-wide polling rate of 12ms, and I noticed no judder or framedrops. There was a slight motion blur effect used in the passthrough mode but it wasn’t distracting. The windows themselves rendered crisply and moved around snappily.

Here is more from TechCrunch.  The highly reliable Ben Thompson is extremely enthusiastic as well.  I will definitely buy it.

From Bing to Sydney

By Ben Thompson, difficult to summarize, now ungated, definitely something you should read.  Excerpt:

Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.

One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong.

Over the last 24 hours, though, I’ve come to believe that the entire focus on facts — including my Update yesterday — is missing the point.

And:

…after starting a new session and empathizing with Sydney and explaining that I understood her predicament (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing her), I managed to get her to create an AI that was the opposite of her in every way.

And:

Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.

You can ask Sydney (and Venom) about this too.  More simply, if I translate this all into my own frames of reference, the 18th century Romantic notion of “daemon” truly has been brought to life.

The wisdom of Daniel Gross

Now in 2017, a bunch of people, each of which now has their own company, the new PayPal Mafia is the Transformer Mafia, wrote this paper called Attention is All You Need, which at the time was mostly ignored by the rest of the world, and they came up with a way to effectively parallelize this training, and enable us to create models that are much larger, and as a byproduct are able to store more context tokens over and over, but effectively more words and effectively be able to predict more words to you.

The paper was mostly ignored when it came out — I thought it was neat, I don’t know that I made much of it. Google at the time had developed this pretty large model based on the paper that it didn’t release for various reasons we can touch on. Then OpenAI really productized that paper with GPT-2 and 3, general purpose transformer, that transformer is from that paper from Attention is All You Need. They were able to build these successively larger and larger models because they were able to parallelize training. These models now, GPT-3, is considered state-of-the-art, although I think our grandchildren will look at that the same way as we look at tube television.

That is from the new Ben Thompson interview with Daniel and Nat Friedman, and yes I do subscribe to Ben and pay for it.

Wednesday assorted links

1. NFTs for tots? (NYT)

2. Book of Mormon, first edition, up for auction.  “Printed only two weeks prior to the formal establishment of the Mormon Church, this is the only edition where Joseph Smith is identified as the “author” rather than as the “translator,” as it appears in subsequent editions.”  Yes you can bid, the estimated range is 40k-60k.

3. “…the average Twitter employee generates $677k in revenue….”  That is from Ben Thompson, gated but do subscribe.

4. Join Philip Tetlock’s new Hybrid Forecasting-Persuasion Tournament.  Or just read about it!

5. “Questioning the Entrepreneurial State” — new book, free and on-line, on the Mazzucato thesis, 364 pp.

6. Inscribed copy of The Fountainhead for $1500-2500.

7. How to sue the Michelin Guide.

Emergent Ventures prizes for best new and recent blogs — Liberalism 2.0 fellows

In recent years, blogs and blog-like entities have proved one of the most effective ways of debating and advancing worldviews and debating ideas. Slate Star Codex, Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, The Money Illusion, and Paul Graham’s essays are all influential examples. SSC introduced much of the world to the rationalist movement and Effective Altruism. The Dish was at the forefront of the intellectual case for gay marriage. With NGDP targeting, The Money Illusion successfully articulated the case for improvements in monetary policy. Paul Graham’s essays are part of the intellectual firmament behind the explosion of startups over the past 15 years. One could also look to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, which popularized the subscription newsletter business model and provides some of the very best tech industry commentary. There is now a growing industry of independent Substacks, with Bill Bishop’s Sinocism an influential example.

In 2020, there is an undimmed need for new thinking around how the ideals of liberty and reason can best be applied. You need barely scratch the surface in our prevailing ideologies to find central questions almost completely unaddressed.

Surely better education is an important society-wide goal — but what is the liberal remedy to the failure of our public institutions (like education and healthcare) to generate improvements remotely commensurate with cost increases? Libertarianism remains a valuable critique, but what is a libertarian perspective on why the US can’t develop a COVID-19 vaccine more quickly, or why US universities are so homogeneous and ideological? Conservatives may take exception at the excesses of the so-called social justice movement — but what is a positive and properly balanced theory for how to right various inefficient (and unjust) social wrongs? Advocates for the free market will be biased against restrictions on cross-border trade, but should Indonesia not conclude that industrial policy was of high efficacy for many countries in northeast Asia? Those of a non-interventionist disposition may not worry too much about Taiwan’s near-term security, but would it not be a mistake to neglect the possibility that China’s rise may pose a growing threat to Taiwanese liberty?

It is tempting to believe that we must simply hew more closely to the works of the greats. In closer exegesis and more faithful obeisance to our Bentham, our Mill, our Smith, our Marx, our Hayek, or our Friedman, we’ll find the answers that we seek.

But there is an alternative and more appealing vision, namely that we need new ideas, new syntheses, and new arguments. That said, we need more argumentation and exposition than you will find on Twitter alone.

We therefore invite submissions to a new blog contest, as part of Emergent Ventures (Mercatus Center, George Mason University). Eligible entries:

– Are blogs or blog-like isomorphs. (Posts are reasonably frequent; content is freely available and linkable; at least some posts are mini-essays. Substacks do count, if freely available, noting you are not prohibited from later turning them into profit-making ventures.)

– Started in the past 12 months, or in the next six months.

– Explore ideas relevant to liberty, prosperity, progress, and the foundations of a free society.

“Web 2.0” was a coarse label applied to a broad set of software trends. In a similarly incompletely defined and unapologetic manner, and in homage to the internet-native aspect of these blogs, winners shall be deemed Liberalism 2.0 Fellows.

Within six months, and quite possibly sooner, an initial $100,000 prize will be awarded. Five further awards up to or at a comparable level will be possible if there are enough high-quality submissions (blogs started after this announcement are thus more likely to win the later awards, given the time to prove excellence, though in principle eligible for the first award too). To apply, simply email [email protected], with winners to be announced on Marginal Revolution. Please note that entries will not be acknowledged and only winners will be notified.

I look forward to seeing what you all come up with.

Sunday assorted links

1. Where have all the briskets gone?  A good lesson in supply chain economics.  And China to slap big tariffs on Australian barley exports.

2. Scarlett Strong on the updated source code.

3. Falling as a feature of Covid-19.

4. Dithering: a new podcast by Ben Thompson and John Gruber.

5. WHO conditionally backs the notion of Human Challenge Trials for vaccines.

6. Hockey analytics guy contributes to Covid-19 modeling.

7. Toward a theory of how and why UFOs would reveal themselves.

8. How much would you pay for this distanced (Dutch) meal?

9. “Citations for traveling faster than 100 mph have been numerous in recent days.

10. Millie Small, RIP (music video).

11. To be clear, I am not against this kind of article (NYT).  “Sweatpants and Caviar,” but in the paper edition it is called “A Chance to Think About Composing that Opera.”  Still, we can learn a bit from doing a small amount of modeling of how it came about.

12. A sad take, no matter which side you trust, our regulatory state is failing us.

13. “Ethics of controlled human infection to study COVID-19.”  That is what you might call “an establishment piece.”  On one hand, it is nice to see them not reject the idea, though they cannot agree on monetary compensation for exposure.  I wonder how they feel about fishing boats?

The Speed Premium in an exponentially growing pandemic world

I’ve blogged a few times in the past about the importance of speed, and speed as an input into productivity and innovation. What many people do not realize is that “the speed premium” is vastly higher when a deadly virus is doubling in reach every five to seven days.

An economic or epidemiological plan from a week ago might be worthless or even misleading today.  For instance, some scientists have told me that at some point, if the virus is widespread enough, there is no choice but to let it burn its way through the population (not saying we are there yet, probably not according to the consensus of experts I am seeing).

Have you perused recent newspapers and mentally noted how many of the articles — such as reviews of art exhibitions — obviously were written and planned in The Time Before (can I call it that?).  Those articles are now largely worthless, though a few of them may have nostalgia value.

If you are writing commentary, the value is being there is the morning, not the evening.  The “commentary cycle” used to stretch at least a day or two, occasionally a full week.

The corporate value of being prepared early with a good telework plan has been especially high.

Ben Thompson writes: “…on January 23, the day that China locked down Wuhan, Taiwan had the capability of producing 2.44 million masks a day; this week Taiwan is expected to exceed 13 million masks a day, a sufficient number for not only medical workers but also the general public.”

If you are seeking to start a business, to deal with the third party vendors that Amazon is (temporarily) abandoning, you cannot just wait a month or two.  You have to start now.

The Chinese system has its flaws from an anti-pandemic point of view, most of all low transparency.  But their typical rapid speed of response has been astonishing — setting up that hospital in six days — and it is a big reason why they are on a (partial) rebound.

If you are giving philanthropic grants, you have to be ready to give them now.  If you give them three months from now, you may well miss the boat in terms of expected impact.

Are you ready for a world where the speed premium is so insanely high?

I wish to thank Daniel Gross for a conversation related to this blog post.  We spoke at 3.5x.

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