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Took a breather from the myriad changes happening the last few weeks. This year has been eventful indeed. Some principles to follow as I pursue a more definitely uncertain, indefinitely successful and infinitely interesting future.
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OpenAI just released the o1 model that is focused on reasoning capabilities, generally substituting immediate next token generation with some reasoning steps introduced before some delayed token generation. This represents a significant 0-1 step-up in LLM capabilities, immediately surpassing beyond Gemini, Claude and other open-sourced models like Llama3 in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Most likely, this model does not represent a foundational model improvement, but rather entails introducing an orchestration layer informed by chain-of-thought reasoning, self-reflection and reinforcement learning. As opposed to zero-shot prompting using the base pretrained model, this means perhaps a factor more number of inference calls for each request. This has interesting implications on the output token cost structures of using AI models with reasoning.
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I have recently read several articles echoing a similar sentiment: due to the limitations of artificial intelligence, AI will not replace traditional financial analysts anytime soon. One author suggests that human intelligence is still decades ahead of AI in automated fundamental investing. However, despite the confidence seemingly portrayed in these articles, the rationales and empirical evidence provided to support this notion have been weak.
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Peter Thiel: Competition as Validation. It may be tempting to squeeze through the narrow door that everyone is trying to get into, but take a step back and instead look around the corner and explore the vast, empty gate that no one is paying attention to. It is unthinkable that in many perceivably esteemed career paths the degree of competition has become so fierce when the stakes are so low. The intention is not to insinuate a lifestyle lacking in competition, and thus lacking in ambition. While thriving to succeed in a highly competitive space may indicate some level of ambition, the reverse is not true.
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Learnt an inspirational quote from Sam Altman today: Inaction is an insiduous form of risk. Only by moving forward can we see and explore the wide universe of opportunities ahead. Have found myself starting to appreciate the complexity of risk management in personal or career decision making; a state of action or inaction both involves accepting a level of risk, and have therefore decided to restructure the problem into 2 concepts: Action and Conviction.
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Understand the intrinsic convexity of opportunities. Convex opportunities are those that produce increasing return per unit of marginal effort over time. Here, return and value are intentionally ambiguously defined, and they could be any notion ranging from value to the customer, financial return, number of goods sold, new knowledge, etc. Identifying convex opportunities can be challenging; it can be due to a mix of both exogenous and endogenous variables including various technical, regulatory and market dynamics, state of technology, location, and point in time.
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When things are good they are never as good as they seem, and when things are bad they are never as bad as they seem.
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Take some time to realistically understand the nature and perception of luck.
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Understand what your personal and professional boundaries are, while optimising for rapid personal development. If you do not set what your boundaries are, someone else will set them for you - in work and in life. Never let someone else have control over your time and effort. Be the one in control.
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Have been trying to squeeze in some time to create a website like this to showcase some projects and analysis I have been working on in my own time. Will ensure that some content will be informative, others not very much so.