Sunday, June 11, 2023

11: AI



What’s ahead for biotech: Another wave or low tide?
Why Software Is Eating the World
What every CEO should know about generative AI
The State of Organizations 2023: Ten shifts transforming organizations
Trump’s Dictator Chic I wrote a book about autocrats’ design tastes. The U.S. president would fit right in. .

How To Be Successful. “I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky. ........ One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down. ......... All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. ........... Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language. ........ Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable. ......... My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way. ............ Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction. ........... Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. .......... Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this .......... Focus is a force multiplier on work. .......... It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. .......... Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful. .......... You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both ............... Extreme people get extreme results. ......... You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. ........ find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with. .......... work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success. ........... I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. .............. If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it. .......... Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way. ............. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person. ........... The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it. ........... The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.......... An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago. ......... One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out. ................ The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are. ....... A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment. ......... I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things. ............. The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale. ......... The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

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US-China war risks grow as Beijing sees little point in talking to Biden’s team The two most powerful nations have entered a perilous phase of miscommunication and mis-signalling – which usually occurs as a prelude to an unexpected war ........ Beijing is no longer keen on holding high-level talks with the US government, because it has pretty much given up on the Biden administration, which is widely seen by China’s political elite as incompetent, ignorant about Chinese culture and history and extremely arrogant. ....... On the issues of Taiwan, economic competition and geopolitical rivalry, serious communication between the two sides has become all but impossible, never mind negotiations based on common ground....... A fundamental lesson that policymakers on both sides must learn is that, in great power diplomacy, one should never offer something the other side does not really need, or ask for anything the other side can never give. In other words, identifying and respecting each other’s vital interests, or red lines, is the only way to avoid war. ....... It has become the new normal that the two most powerful nations talk past each other most of the time. ........... In the first decade of the last century, Britain was preoccupied with its “German problem”. The two powers had no clearly defined conflicting interests. Yet Britain saw itself as the defender of the status quo and imperial Germany as the challenger. Both sides made strategic mistakes. Their diplomatic efforts were often confounded more by a mismatch of intentions and temperaments than by real national interests, which were, in many respects, parallel. ........ Germany tried hard to show Britain the value of its friendship through offering a kind of Teutonic alliance for avoiding war with each other. A vicious circle started, however, when Germany began to show displeasure over what it considered to be the illogical and uncooperative behaviour of Britain for not considering such an alliance seriously. ........... In reality, Britain’s overriding concern was the challenge by France and Russia to its vast empire overseas, and Germany posed little threat to its position. But London was often unable to get its message through. Berlin decided that expressions of anger would be more persuasive. The Kaiser considered Britain’s intransigence to have been caused by Germany’s show of weakness. ............. What started as a serious effort to identify mutual interests slowly degenerated into a conflict at all levels. Any analysis of US–China relations should focus on how to avoid a similar misreading of the other side’s intentions. As the war in Ukraine reminds us, misunderstanding and miscommunication can lead to war. ............ Just as China aspires to become a normal state, by which it means a self-sufficient great power which has had no urge for territorial expansion in its history, the criterion for “normal” is changing. As China has adopted multipolar diplomacy for maintaining peace in its foreign relations, the US has returned to a unipolar fantasy by building more military alliances for cold-war-style bloc politics......... In the security area, what the US offers China is peace in the Taiwan Strait, contingent on Beijing’s acceptance of there being two separate Chinese territorial entities: one China, one Taiwan. China can never accept this. In the economic area, the US offer is even less convincing. It recently adopted the European Union’s language, walking back on “decoupling” to embrace “de-risking”. This is meant as a gesture of goodwill towards China. But to Beijing, it makes little sense. .............. the Chinese leaders are psychologically prepared for decoupling and have begun to build various defensive systems, including through de-dollarisation of the international trade market. They are also aggressively promoting an autonomous hi-tech strategy. Secondly, China’s leaders are convinced that the overall US strategy is to contain China all round. ............... The two most powerful nations have entered a perilous phase of miscommunication and mis-signalling – which usually occurs as a prelude to an unexpected war............ Lanxin Xiang is professor emeritus of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a visiting scholar at the Belfer Centre, Harvard Kennedy School

François Hollande: ‘Putin cannot be seduced. He respects force’ The former French president on what his country wants in a leader, dealing with the Kremlin — and campaigning on a scooter .......... With popularity ratings that reached the low single digits, and a portly, slightly goofy image that never quite fitted, in the public imagination, with the grandeur of the Élysée Palace, he left his Socialist party battered, a state from which it has never recovered......... Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has upended the postwar international order, and the China-Russian axis is tightening. ......... After Putin sent its “little green men” to destabilise eastern Ukraine in 2014, Hollande cancelled a controversial Russian order for two French-built Mistral helicopter carriers, pleasing his western allies — though he also helped push Ukraine into the Minsk II peace process that failed to recognise the nature of Russian aggression. “Putin cannot be seduced,” he tells me. “He respects force.” .......... The French public, he explains, wants a difficult balance: “Someone who embodies authority, and in whom they can then trust. But authority is not authoritarianism. It is founded on wisdom, on firmness but through conviction and respect.” ........ his 2014 secret escapade from the Élysée. He was captured in full-faced helmet on the back of a motor scooter on his way to meet his mistress, the actress Julie Gayet, who is now his wife........ (“A president shouldn’t say that”) was a stunner, replete with juicy Hollande quotes that enraged many in his own party. ....... Looking back, Hollande tells me that he doesn’t regret the book, only the title, which are words he had said in passing and was shocked to find on the cover. “It was historic; no one had done it before and there’s a need to explain what we do inside [the Élysée]. But it was used as a weapon against me. Even those who bought it didn’t read it. It was all about the title.” .......... In his 2022 book Bouleversements (“Upheavals”), he describes his first encounters with Putin, when he was struck by a combination of cold determination, hostility towards the US and fury over the expansion of the Nato alliance. Hollande judged him then, and still does, as a rational actor who is a master in the elaborate art of lying. ......... How will the war in Ukraine end, I ask him. It will depend, he says, on the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election. “If Trump is elected, he will say, we stop here; whatever the Russians have they can keep. The war costs too much.” What has changed since Hollande’s days in office, he says, is that the shape of the new geopolitical order has become clearer, with the Russia-China axis consolidating and challenging the west........... Like Macron, Hollande is a true believer in the concept of European strategic autonomy and the necessity of developing common European defence. He argues that this autonomy must always be tied to the Nato alliance......... Macron won re-election, but he has not built a real political party that will necessarily survive him......... “François Mitterrand [the late French president] used to say, ‘it’s with civilians that you make military men’, and yes, it’s with people who don’t vote for you that you have to create a majority,” says Hollande. “If you stay in your usual camp and it’s narrower now and it’s more radical, well, you won’t gain anything.”  ......... I ask him who has the kind of presidential authority the French crave? Charles de Gaulle, of course, but that’s tied up with his role in history, he says, and Mitterrand, who had a certain authority wrapped up in mystery.

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