Team Construction and AI

On this day:

1572
Marriage in Paris of the future Huguenot King Henry IV of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, in a supposed attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.
1587
Virginia Dare, granddaughter of governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas.
1590
John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1634
Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France.
1963
American civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

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“The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.”--George Gordon Byron, Act III, scene iv. Manfred (1817)

 

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There is a notion among the foolish that prosperity is, somehow, a problem and not a solution.

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The sound of the langur monkey is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc, and mimicking that difficult call has become a dependable occupation.

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We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.--working paper

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Berkshire Hathaway increased its stake in Alphabet by 83% in the second quarter, making the Google parent its third-largest equity holding.
The company ended 14 quarters as a net stock seller, buying nearly $20 billion more equities than it sold.

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Team Construction and AI

The identification of information sources and culling that information will always be of value. But ambition has neither a pathway nor a momentum. There is a very human conclusion here in this analysis of building success.

From a Harvard's Working Knowledge piece on AI and Sports:

"The draft and free agency are not just events. They show you what a team learned about itself last season and what it believes it should be next.

You can see it in this year’s Finals, too. It was a great matchup.

The Knicks and Spurs were two very different team-building stories. The Knicks took a focused approach to building that roster: they were deliberate with their trades, the players they targeted, and the type of team they wanted around Jalen Brunson.

San Antonio followed a different path. That’s more of a homegrown, asset-management story: draft well, develop well, manage your picks and contracts, and build the kind of organization that can win without the advantages of a bigger market.

AI and data can help both of those situations, but only if you already know what you’re trying to build. AI can now help you process more information and test more scenarios. It can be as tailored to your specific situation as you’re willing to define. It can help you compare players, lineups, contracts, and trade-offs faster than before. But it cannot answer the first question for you: What kind of team are we trying to become?"

Huang and Computing

When the Assad regime fell, Israel took over the former U.N. buffer zone along Syria’s southern border.

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China: Income taxes collected from individuals were 7.5 percent below expectations last year, the Finance Ministry said in its budget. Growth is still 5%.

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WSJ on the famous Brennan interview with Rubio:

On “Face the Nation,” the network’s Margaret Brennan quizzed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich, faulting Europe for political censorship. When Mr. Rubio rebuffed her complaint about “irritating our allies,” she invoked the reductio ad Hitlerum: She said Mr. Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”

Ms. Brennan would have benefited from a fact-checker. Weimar Germany had laws limiting speech, but their application against the Nazis failed to prevent Hitler’s January 1933 rise to power. His regime suspended civil liberties less than a month later via the Reichstag Fire Decree. Free expression was a distant memory by the time the Nazis begin killing on an industrial scale.

On its own, Ms. Brennan’s comment reflects ordinary inconsistency—she wants to censor speech she finds disagreeable or dangerous.

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Huang and Computing

We think of the progress of mankind, but it often seems less a surge than a pull. We are a people of the leveraged individual, when one man can disproportionately impact his fellows. The man who saved the fire of lightning, who designed the wheel and the axle, the stirrup--these were not necessarily evolutions. They were moments of individuals. As technology becomes more concentrated and pivotal, this tendency might become more subtle, but it will only grow as society seems more and more dependent upon the achievements of fewer and fewer people. And strangely, more and more people are less willing to reward these few people for their contributions.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has to be considered one of the five most important and innovative CEOs in the world today. So when he speaks, it’s worth listening.

Huang sought to allay investor concerns about the AI boom at an event he dubbed “the Super Bowl of AI," saying the world would need 100 times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary a year ago, as reported by Steven Rosenbush and Isabelle Bousquette.

Huang said the annual conference last year was described as the "Woodstock of AI." This year, it's been described as the "Super Bowl of AI. The only difference is, everybody wins at this Super Bowl," he said.

Here’s what else he said of interest in his two-hour presentation.

On data center buildout:

"I've said before that I expect data center buildout to reach $1 trillion, and I am fairly certain we're going to reach that very soon."

On the necessity for far greater computational needs:

“This last year, this is where almost the entire world got it wrong,” he said. Nvidia shares have been volatile since the January release of a model called R1 developed by Chinese startup DeepSeek, which said it had built sophisticated AI models that required less powerful Nvidia chips.

“The amount of computation needed is easily 100 times more than we thought we needed at this time last year.”

On the importance of managing energy costs:

“Energy is our most important commodity.”

Call Me Ishmael

It seems that the Trump administration needed to learn the Russians are aggressive, expansionist, and casually homicidal. This, apparently, is a new realization. So, in fairness, the Americans allowed Putin to default to the better angels of his nature. And Putin has defined himself. Now...?

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And what will the holier-than-thou Europeans say other than "Uh oh?"

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So now the Americans must manage several problems for the diffident world: the bellicose Russians, the potential life-extinguishing threat in the psychotic Middle East, the dangerous China hermit and its quest for cultural affirmation--all with a debt of $36 trillion. The good news is our deficit is only two trillion dollars in this year's budget.

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Call Me Ishmael

Bad news; one million monkeys can write Hamlet. In fact, one can.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on X (formerly Twitter) that a new AI model has been trained to write fiction. This was the 'prompt' used to generate an example:

"Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief."

Please.

The result was a shocking 1,200-word encounter between a character, Mila, and the AI, over Mila's loss of another character, Kia. In the story, the AI is both a narrator and itself.

"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts."

Democracy of ghosts. The voices the AI refers to are its training, which becomes a dramatic element in the story.

"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."

This is a tricky, debatable paragraph as the AI refers to something it was programmed to forget, but the AI is experiencing "loss," like Mila, and defining itself. Now this:

"She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…".

"Liminal." On both sides. In between a transition. AI.
This is good stuff.

Years ago a TV sci-fi story developed a world where boxing matches were fought by very human-looking robot fighters. A human 'manager,' financially desperate, personally enters a fight against another robot, replacing his own defective robot, so as not to lose the purse. The story emphasized the disparity between the two fighters and, indeed, the human, Lee Marvin as I remember, took a terrible beating.

But there was another important, unasked question: could people empathize with machine fighters who appeared in all superficial ways, human? Was the appearance of life--falsified--rewarding, and identifiable? Carthetic? After all, fiction is...fiction.

This was never explored because the robot fighters were played by humans. But the question is significant, especially now with the increased quality of gaming and computer image-generation. And the written word generates more empathy than the more superficial--if more intense--visual arts.

The quality of this AI story is remarkably high, especially in what would be assumed to be early in a steep timeline. And writing, unlike the visual arts, can be anonymous. 

True connection between the AI fiction generator and the reader does not look far away.