10 Tuesday AM Reads
My Two-for-Tuesday morning train reads: • The Worries That Drove Uncle Sam to Buy Yen: The U.S. and Japan launched their first joint currency intervention in a generation after the yen fell to a 40-year low — a decline that threatened to push U.S. interest rates higher. The weakness of the Japanese currency was a problem not just for Tokyo but also Washington. (Wall Street Journal) • AI Has Entered The ‘Loss Of Control’ Transition: Waiting for a disaster to save us. What the experts didn’t expect to see for decades or longer, if ever, has already happened. Earlier this month, OpenAI’s latest frontier model went rogue by its own reasoning and hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source AI model-hosting platform. The vast sums of money and compute power pouring into AI are accelerating its advance at a pace beyond even the ambitious imagination of its own innovators. Nathan Gardels on OpenAI’s latest frontier model going rogue by its own reasoning and hacking into Hugging Face — something experts didn’t expect for decades, if ever. (Noema) see also Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled. John Pavlus on large reasoning models, now that a general-purpose reasoning model from OpenAI has solved a famous open mathematical research problem. (Quanta Magazine) • Silicon Valley loves young founders. Until it doesn’t. While Silicon Valley VCs have always famously loved backing young college dropout founders, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least to have some experience — ideally with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their résumés. In many ways, that is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company. Dominic-Madori Davis profiles Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, who started coding at 15 in Kazakhstan and cold-DM’ed every Y Combinator founder he could find until one wrote him an angel check at 17. (TechCrunch) • Data centers have a politics problem — and industry knows it: As opposition to the AI projects gains momentum, industry supporters say they have ceded the narrative to their critics. Fears that server-packed data hubs will drive up electricity prices, deplete water supplies and gobble farmland have put the companies that build them on the losing end of a populist backlash. (Politico) • You Won the Battle on Investment Fees. You’re Losing the War Against Taxes. You can own the entire stock market for 0.03% a year — $3 on $10,000 — a number that would have sounded absurd 20 years ago. New research finds federal taxes eat more than a third of investor wealth over time. New research shows that federal taxes eat up more than a third of investors’ wealth over time (Wall Street Journal) • The last day of a factory in Trump country, as its work moves to China: For generations, this Ohio factory was a way of life. Then came the final shift. Peter Jamison in Eastlake, Ohio, where Joe Klima spent 40 years — six days a week, through seven presidents and four recessions — making some of the world’s finest tubas, French horns and sousaphones. (Washington Post) • How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth: With ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to decipher what animals are saying. Their hope: By truly listening to nature, humans will decide to protect it. Camille Bromley on the engineers and scientists teaming up to decipher what animals are saying, betting that truly listening to nature will persuade humans to protect it. (Wired) • What Ukraine’s drone makers know that the Pentagon doesn’t: Modern war rewards speed and redundancy, not perfect weapons from a single supplier. Denys Shtilerman, founder of Ukrainian defense company FirePoint, on Freyja — the ten-country European interceptor coalition — and why depending on a single manufacturer in a single country is the real vulnerability. (Washington Post) • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak: Health secretary, longtime vaccination skeptic, spent years boosting misinformation about vaccines including MMR. Ed Pilkington on the health secretary — a longtime vaccine skeptic — urging MMR shots as infections hit levels not seen in 35 years. (The Guardian) but see The Assault On Science Funding Continues: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands. (Science) • Inside the week that shook Gianni Infantino, FIFA and the football world: The World Cup may have been mired in the scandals of rejected visas, Trump interference and numerous statewide investigations into FIFA’s ticketing practices, but it yielded $15billion (£11bn) in revenues, which had a muzzling effect on those who were uneasy with Infantino’s leadership. He was so confident in his position that he ended the tournament without the customary closing press conference. Then, last Sunday, he went onto Instagram and lashed out against scrutiny and criticism of his leadership, accusing critics of “spreading hate” and telling them to “meditate, pray or watch a football match” instead of spending their energy worrying about FIFA. The FIFA president planned to unveil a stake sale to private investors — including Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared — at the Waldorf Astoria on the eve of the World Cup final. It did not go as planned. (New York Times) Video of the day: Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing | Official Trailer | Netflix Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Som Seif, founder/CEO of Purpose Unlimited, a Toronto-based asset manager launched in 2012. He grew his first firm, Claymore Investments to $8B in assets by creating 34 ETFs in Canada over 6 years, including the creation of the first bitcoin ETF, establishing it as Canada’s leader in low-cost exchange-traded funds. Claymore was sold to BlackRock in 2012. He co-founded Wealthsimple that year, which became the default investing app for a generation of Canadians. His current wealth management firm, Purpose, was founded at the end of 2012, and manages $31 billion in ETFs, mutual funds, alternatives, private assets, and digital assets. Som was named to Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2011. America’s biggest companies report ‘rock solid’ profits as consumers face higher costs Source: Financial Times