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Conversation starters in tech, finance, philosophy, and everything in between.
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Welcome to Issue #11!
The number eleven is somewhat of a big deal in Canada. The maple leaf on the Canadian flag has 11 points. The loonie (one dollar coin) is an 11-sided polygon, or a "hendecagon". Clocks depicted on Canadian currency show 11:00.
Although some Canadians ascribe symbolic qualities to the 11 points on the Canadian maple leaf, none exists. The number and arrangement of the points were chosen after wind tunnel tests showed the design to be the least blurry under high-wind conditions.
Pretty important when it comes to flags.
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OpenAI's GPT-3 is the hot topic right now.
GPT-3 is the third and most recent iteration of GPT, which stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer. Transformer references a 2017 Google innovation which could figure out the likelihood that a particular word will appear with surrounding words.
As described by the OpenAI team: "We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training."
Luke Dormehl wrote a good brief on GPT-3 in mid-June, a few days after OpenAI released an API in private beta. While the initial and second iterations had 110 million and 1.5 billion parameters respectively, GPT-3 features 175 billion parameters.
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Manuel Araoz "writes" that GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin. See for yourself.
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Hackers are fascinated by GPT-3. To everyone else it seems a toy. Pattern seem familiar to anyone?
-- Paul Graham
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The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out.
-- Sam Altman
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Several important developments this week:
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New Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem unleashed his own monetary bazooka. Not only was the key rate held at 0.25% (no surprise), Macklem promised that it would stay there for a long time. Years, even.
Additionally, the BoC kicked off a debt monetization/federal bond purchase program of $5bn CAD a week for the foreseeable future.
I am so excited to be a part of the beta test for these wild economic theories. /s
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Just because the full consequences haven’t hit yet doesn’t mean there isn’t a huge problem. It’s as if someone jumped out of a window on the 42nd floor. As you go by the 20th floor, you’re still OK but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a real problem.
-- Charlie Munger
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Major US banks reported their second quarter earnings. Bank earnings reports are important because they are indicative of the country's general economic health.
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The takeaways so far from bank earnings: JPMorgan is consolidating its power as America's dominant financial institution. Wells Fargo is increasingly being left behind. All the banks are girding for a significantly weaker consumer in the months to come.
-- Lisa Abramowicz, Bloomberg
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The additional $600/week unemployment benefit in America is set to end this week, with no sign of economic recovery. Barring an extension, expect shortfalls in the budgets of many American families. No wonder major US banks have drastically upped their loan loss provisions.
Congress is debating an extension with an aim to pass something before the August recess, but a sticking point is federal aid to state and local governments. Stay tuned.
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"China’s economy returned to growth in the second quarter after a deep slump at the start of the year, but unexpected weakness in domestic consumption underscored the need for more policy support to bolster the recovery after the shock of the coronavirus crisis. Gross domestic product (GDP) rose 3.2% in the second quarter from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday, faster than the 2.5% forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll, as lockdown measures ended and policymakers ramped up stimulus to combat the virus-led downturn."
Why in quotes? Well, because I didn't write it. But who did?
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You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.
-- Marcus Aurelius
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In other words, focus all of your time and energy on what is important. For example, figuring out what is important.
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I wrote about our tendency to attribute ideas to the person you heard it from.
Never be afraid to talk or write about something just because "someone else already has". Even the largest audiences don't include everyone. If it's valuable information, you're doing people a service by spreading the word. And you'll get the credit.
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