Listen : Watch : Read #19
Originally posted: April 20, 2025 here
🎙️Listen 🎙️
A brilliant listen from Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger talk to the one and only Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. What I love about this is some of the origin of his curiosity when he talks about how chess early on (from the age of 4) inspired him to learn more, than led to Alpha Go, then Alpha fold...
How we have not yet cracked creativity with AI and much more! I love this!, sent to my son to listen to also to inspire him as he explores into engineering and AI as a possible career ahead. [57 mins]. Demis was voted one of TIME magazines 100 most influential in an excellent interview here too. Listen to the podcast below with Reid and Aria.
More of my favorite people, Dave Wechsler of OMERS Ventures and Monica Shokrai of Google on the brilliant InsurTech Rap, this from a few weeks ago and ahead of Google Cloud NEXT, in which Monica talks through life from an Actuary to Google Cloud, the brilliant Risk Protection Program and much more. [27 mins]
📺 Watch 📺
My good friend Robert Pick with Lori Chordas from AM Best team on how Human Oversight is 'Table Stakes' for AI driven insurance decisions for now. I share Bob's optimism here in that we will definitely get there, but for now, we now have to have the baby steps to build confidence and show the path to internal governance, regulators and customers alike. [8 mins]
I'm a fan of Tom Goodwin, I don't always agree, but he 100% challenges the norms, makes you pause, and think about technology and the future. I enjoyed this with Dominic Price touching on lots of stuff, from The Power of carving out time to become more innovative, Ways to become more comfortable with AI (my point last week about the benefit of the AI dolls) and his user guide - something I learned about while at Google too!. My buddy Bruno Aziza also talked about these too a few months back. [58 mins]
A 69 Page PDF on a playable game, You have to just love how AI can bring relatively dry content in a fun way to explore and learn - Nicely done Amit Pitaru and thanks Matthieu Lorrain for highlighting here.
And Robots still seem to be the talk of the town, this from the BBC News where in China as Robots race a Half Marathon! I wonder when we will see a Robot race in the London or NY Marathon!. I hope their knees feel better than mine after running! It's of course not the first time, back in 2011, Japanese robots ran a full marathon.
Speaking of running, many of us will have been involved in school sports days with ours or friends kids. From 3 legged races, to the wonderful egg and spoon. Many of us will have played sports at school or college, run 5k, 10k or done something like a HYROX, Tough Mudder or even a marathon. My kids are older now, but my advice to anyone - just check the mums and dads around you before you sign up to the school races!
Olympian! (yes you read that right), Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce didn't hold back! Still laughing! [22 secs]
📚 Read 📚
You know all those anti-bribery and corruption training we all do, and often moan about or roll our eyes to - turns out we still need them! The Serious Fraud Office (UK) this week charged United Insurance Brokers Limited, aServiceNowentity of UIB Group was charged with allegations of failing to prevent associates from bribing state officials in Ecuador between October 2013 and March 2016
I love this from BYD - looking to make EV charging as fast as filling up a tank of Gas/Petrol. This was always inevitable. This could add 248 miles of range in as little as five minutes. Other solutions being explored look at pulling into a typical service station and having your batteries physically swapped out for fully charged ones.
Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners sits down with his very first investment as a partner - Zoomin CEO, Gal Oron - a great conversation including some wise words on 1. Bootstrap for discipline, raise venture for horsepower - reminds me of the concept of Frugal Innovation, something i learned from Renault Group years ago. Sometimes I think too much resource (money, people etc) slows you down and removes the need to be scrappy, innovative, creative. Reminds me of the X, The Moonshot Factory theory about how your first version should be or look!. Clue, its not pretty!... all the way through to customer obsession (read raving fans!), both in the good times and bad!.
Theres been a lot of M&A, Fundraising this week in the world of Insurance and beyond. (see Quick bites below), but this also caught my attention from OpenAI, in talks to buy coding assistant Windsurf for more than $3bn. Funny as some people have different views on the examples always being about coding, some say it being pointless, I think this tells a different story and as they say, perhaps the start of something super interesting on top of Foundational models.
I wanted to finish with a piece from Peter H. Diamandis from his newsletter on 'Why insurance's $2 trillion model is dead'. A quick snippet from it.
I'm writing this from a friend's home, where we've taken refuge. We're among the lucky ones – our house is still standing. But more than 18,000 homes have been destroyed, and 200,000 Angelenos have been displaced. The devastation is estimated between $100 billion to $200 billion, and honestly, I think that's a low-ball estimate.
But here's what really pisses me off: This was preventable. ALL of it.
My Chief AI officer, Steve Brown, and another close friend Scott, both lost their homes for the second time. The second time!
However, I don't think the full version is online anywhere yet. (you'll have to subscribe to it to see more!). It's not the first time Peter has taken aim at Insurance, just look at his blog here and the active XPRIZE for Wildfire. If you're interested in joining the fight against wildfires or learning more about the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, visit www.xprize.org/prizes/wildfire.
👀 Quick bites 👀
Congrats Oliver Kent-Braham and entire Marshmallow team! Marshmallow, the UK insurance startup for migrants, raises $90M at a $2B+ valuation
Congrats Ant Middle and the entire Ageas UK team on the acquisition of esure Group Ageas to acquire esure from Bain Capital for £1.3bn
And thats It! See you next week!