Listen : Watch : Read #29
🎙️Listen 🎙️
Lets start with a great discussion of where we are in the AI cycle. Anish Acharya Erik Torenberg are joined by Steven Sinofsky Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former President of Microsoft’s Windows division - for a deep dive on how today’s AI moment mirrors (and diverges from) past computing transitions.
They explore whether we’re at the “Windows 3.1” stage of AI or still in the earliest innings, why consumer adoption is outpacing developer readiness, and how frameworks like partial autonomy, jagged intelligence, and “vibe coding” are shaping what gets built next. They also dig into where the real bottlenecks lie, not in the tech, but in how companies, products, and people work. In a surprise to no one in the corporate world trying to make this work at scale
Lenny Rachitsky and guests continues to educate and inspire me each week. There's so much goodness here with guest, Peter Deng now early stage investor at Felicis, former OpenAI, Instagram, Uber , Facebook, Airtable , and Oculus VR and helped build products used by billions of consumers!
Some great insights including how AGI won’t solve everything, creating healthy tension and how You don’t need a tech breakthrough to scale! The breakthrough was understanding human needs and applying relentless craft plus loads more!
Finally, great when friends get together - here, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Louise Smith OBE of Unity Willis Towers Watson. Loads of great insights here as WTW scale Neuron,how culture and change adoption is still the most important thing. (Theres a theme this week). How to power people with the data and capabilities so they can do what they’re brilliant at, which is focusing on the best product and position for their client. Neuron and others enable brokers to do that... and of course, how workflow is cool! (I agree Louise Smith OBE)
📺 Watch 📺
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith as he sits down with past and present CEOs in three enlightening interviews. Bill Gates discusses his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, Microsoft’s impact over the past 50 years, and reflects on the journey. Steve Ballmer reflects on his time at Microsoft, the shift to becoming CEO, and passing the torch to Satya. And Satya Nadella emphasizes the importance of culture as a strategic asset that drives innovation, and accentuates how Microsoft has remained relevant by seizing opportunities to reinvent itself. Or as he says!
In this AI age, I’ve been thinking about what it means to build for the future. Two lines from Rilke are the best for anybody who wants to build anything: Let the future enter us then change itself in us before it becomes real.
In the Andreessen Horowitz podcast above, they reference a great presentation from Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla which I've included below too - fascinating watch!. LLM Brownouts, Jagged Intelligence, working with LLMs, Humans as verification machines, LLMs as Generation, over excitement about AI agents and keeping AI on a leash. Well worth the watch [39 mins]
📚 Read 📚
James Manyika from Google share this last week and it got my attention - the Huge Topic of AI and Jobs, you already know from previous issues, this is a hot topic from my own dinner table with Emma and the kids as they enter a very different workforce over the next decade.
MIT’s David Autor on technology and jobs. David and Neil Thompson just shared new research in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on automation and expertise that brings welcome nuance to the larger conversation around AI and jobs. In Jame's words;
AI’s effect on our economy will not be uniform, and we should expect some occupations to see higher employment levels and others with higher wages. And of course elasticity of demand also plays an important role.
It's a long read, so heres a few take aways thanks to Gemini.
"It's Not Just About Automation, It's About Expertise": Our research shows that the impact of automation on jobs isn't uniform. It depends on whether automation removes the "expert" or "inexpert" tasks within an occupation.
"The Counterintuitive Wage-Employment Twist": We found that if automation makes an occupation more expert, wages rise but employment falls. If it makes it less expert, wages fall but employment rises. This is a crucial distinction from traditional task models.
"Accounting Clerks vs. Inventory Clerks: A Case Study": Think about accounting clerks, who saw wages rise and employment fall because automation left them with more expert problem-solving tasks. Contrast this with inventory clerks, where wages fell but employment rose as automation eliminated their expert tasks.
"Solving the Routine Task Automation Puzzle": Our framework finally explains why wages in routine-task occupations haven't always dropped despite job losses. The key lies in the expertise level of the routine tasks being automated for that specific occupation.
"Beyond Task Quantity: The Scarcity of Expertise": The core takeaway is that the value of human labor isn't just about how many tasks we do, but the scarcity of the expertise required for those remaining tasks. This is a fundamental shift in how we understand the future of work.
"A Framework for the AI Era": This "expertise framework" isn't just about past computerization; it's a powerful lens for understanding the ongoing and future impacts of AI on the labor market.
Right now, though a growing number of Americans use ChatGPT (see Paul Lee at Deloittes research last week) many people are sick of AI’s encroachment into their lives and are ready to fight back. Tensions are so high that even the suspicion of AI usage is now enough to draw criticism! Em Dashes Ed Halsey anyone!
I don’t think we are there just yet but I get the sentiment. Is it the same as the smartphone backlash? One I'll be asking the kids!
I shared this earlier this week, many moons ago - I wrote an article that I and others still reference regularly - 'we have all the ingredients, but we just want cake' - This week BYD and Octopus Energy started to deliver cake. (No insurance just yet Greg Jackson, but who knows!). Thats the Icing on the cake (I wrote about that too) - love this idea!
This is a long read but well with it - especially given the number of M&A and PE deals in the market right now, not just life insurance but retail insurance and brokers too. Kudos to Toby Nangle over at the Financial Times for this one (free to read)
According to insurance-focused credit rating agency AM Best, the North American life and annuities sector controlled about $8.7tn of assets at the end of 2023. Over the past decade or so, private equity firms have gobbled up about a tenth of this market.
Have we learned nothing? This debate seems to rage on, whether its flood damaged homes being rebuilt in the same way in the same area to the 16,000 homes that need to be rebuilt in LA post the wildfires there.
It's long been rumoured - the 1st billion dollar, 1 person company. Well - we are not quite there yet, but this is a great example. While an actual solo unicorn remains a mythical creature, Israeli developer Maor Shlomo provided compelling evidence that the concept might not be impossible, selling his company Base44 to Wix for $80m. There was indeed 8 employees, but wow! Still some hell of an example!
👀 Quick bites 👀
And thats It! See you next week!
Time to update your bio?