Hiring engineers at 900K salary & pretending to be non-profit does not work. Turns out, 97% of them wanted to make money.
Government should have banned big tech investment in AI companies a year ago. If they want, they can create their own AI but buying one should be off the table.
The idea that banks are private companies in any country is not entirely true. Everyone knows that if a reasonably big bank fails, governments will intervene to protect people's money.
Banks are technically private but won't be valued as much without government protection. So, to some extent, it's not wrong for the government to tax them more than other private companies.
However, a negative consequence of this tax it reduces the bank's incentive to lend money to small and risky companies/startups. This is equivalent to increasing capital gains to 40% - why invest in risky assets if I know I will ever only receive a small percentage of my profits (if any)?
I am saying anything that is not sensible will have to come back to equilibrium eventually. In this case, the income to house prices ratio has been severely skewed in the last 20 years. So either the average income needs to go up drastically or the house prices need to fall to a level that is reasonable or both! Now this happens dramatically in the next of couple of years or really slowly for the next decade or so is debatable & I don't believe in making predictions.
Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal.
Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't.
These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London.
I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.
All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
While I agree with the marketing aspects of Apple not using the word "AI", I fail to understand how local models will be able to outform LLMs.
First things first, we don't really know what these LLMs will evolve to be in future. Then comes the question, whatever they evolve to be, can they be implemented locally?
A key point the author talks about is Siri is garbage. Perhaps it is garbage because Siri didnt have LLMs but it is worth noting that it is still garbage after it was made local only in ios15 (2021).
Here is what I think:
Traditionally Apple has never relied on AI. They didn't need to as other than search, there were no big AI use cases. Even now, AI use cases are still being developed, so it makes sense for them to wait and watch to see how things evolve & then implement the best possible solution.
There are a lot of theories out there but very few real life examples.
If I tell facts about myself to 10 people, I am sure everyone draw their own lessons based on how they perceive the world. AND there is nothing wrong with that!
People creating self help content think they are creating a rule book for everyone to follow. But I know for a fact based on my experiences that there is no such thing. These articles would sound much better if they phrase it like - I had X problem, I did Y to resolve them, and since then Z is my core belief in life. That I can respect even though I may not agree.
I am in Indian immigrant living in the UK for past 5 years. The housing system here feels extremely stupid to me. They basically resell houses 100+ years old at 5% higher value every year. It's kinda like gold or bitcoin, except those assets are actually very limited in number. But housing is simply artificially limited due to policies.
Total UK housing stock is worth 10T GBP vs 2.2T GBP GDP output. Don't think any other country comes even close in terms of skewed reliance on housing as a driver of wealth. I can't imagine the reduction in net worth of citizens (65% are owners) when house prices crash 20% due to higher interest rates. That would be 2T of the 10T value - almost the same as GDP.
Anecdotally, every British person I know has a common long term goal - save enough money for a 5-10% deposit on a mortgage. The incentives here are all wrong. You build wealth by investing in a house & taking 90% loan to value mortgages instead of actually working harder. Work is just a means to save enough for deposit & afford a mortgage premiums and maybe 1-2 holidays a year.
People complain UK is stagnating. Companies don't want to IPO in London. I can tell why - banks don't want to lend to SMEs. 50% of their lending is actually housing mortgages. Same with people - they would overwhelmingly invest in a house rather than own company shares. Housing is the root cause of malaise in the economy. Take away the incentives to own a house by building more homes, increasing mortgage rates and eliminating government policies helping people to buy & this country would just become much better
Government should have banned big tech investment in AI companies a year ago. If they want, they can create their own AI but buying one should be off the table.