Happy Mondayy!! Today I’m going to some lecture event on “Putting collective value creation at the heart of economic thinking,“ excited to be around.
A little inspiration:
“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.“
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Here are a few thoughts as usual:
Matt Levine says this about the run on SVB and it is too funny:
Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors.
But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time.
Aahabahah :’)
And here’s Marc Rubinstein:
The problem at Silicon Valley Bank is compounded by its relatively concentrated customer base. In its niche, its customers all know each other. And Silicon Valley Bank doesn’t have that many of them. As at the end of 2022, it had 37,466 deposit customers, each holding in excess of $250,000 per account. Great for referrals when business is booming, such concentration can magnify a feedback loop when conditions reverse.
Benedict Evans linked to this study of admissions preferences to Harvard, which indicated:
roughly 15% of admissions and over 40% of white admissions would not be admitted on merit, and only got places because their parents attended or gave money or because they’re good at running.
The “because they’re good at running“ part really got me ahaha
What also gets me is that people are obsessive enough about the university to care so strongly. Like, if you think Harvard has unfair admissions history, stop thinking its a good place to be in the first place… Go convince people to stop applying. If you get them to accept more minorities through a lawsuit, surely you haven’t made your argument.
What Francesco Marconi said on Twitter.
ChatGPT is trained on a large amount of news data from top sources that fuel its AI. It’s unclear whether OpenAI has agreements with all of these publishers. Scraping data without permission would break the publishers’ terms of service.
I guess do first, then ask for permission?…
And I think it is quite funny that Elon Musk spoke about setting up a rival to OpenAI, which he co-founded. Like mans already got too much on his plate. And also his brain chips were unfortunately blocked for human testing.
That’s all, and have a great week!
With love,
Angeline