Arvind's Newsletter

1.The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI, by Charles Duhigg in New Yorker

The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans.

The piece is not about the hiring/firing stuff, but of course, you have to start somewhere. "An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterf-ck." Read on.

2.Artificial intelligence can decipher 5,000-year-old cuneiform texts. 

Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, bear some of the oldest known writing, the wedge-like symbols known as cuneiform. But many of the relics have weathered into indecipherability. 

German researchers trained an AI using 3D scans of previously translated tablets, then used it on some that were too worn for human eyes to interpret, with “remarkable success,” The Debrief reported. The tablets contain “everything … from shopping lists to court rulings,” one of the study’s authors said. The world’s oldest known fictional work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, including a flood story very like the Biblical one but 1,500 years older, was written in cuneiform.

3.The Cybertruck Must Be Huge—or It Will Dig Tesla’s Grave, reports Wired

If Musk fulfils just 15 percent of Cybertruck preorders,it would equal the annual US truck sales of Toyota. If the polarizing EV flops, Tesla could be in big trouble.

Stupid. Divisive. Fugly. The Hummer shouldn’t have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck?

Forty-six months after the official unveiling—when design chief Franz von Holzhausen famously shattered the prototype’s Armor Glass with the spirited throw of a metal ball—yesterday’s Cybertruck Delivery Event confirmed that Tesla’s Texan Gigafactory is finally now slowly spitting out Cybertrucks.

With an estimated 2 million preorders from self-styled “reservationists,” this Blade Runner–inspired electric pickup could make the world’s most wealthy man even more unfeasibly rich. If half of those $100 refundable deposits stack up, that’s revenue of more than $65 billion, based on a newly inflated $61,000 price tag—up $21,000 from what was promised four years ago.

But landing even 15 percent of the reservationists seems optimistic because the vehicle is running late and isn’t global—Cybertruck won’t be for sale outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico for some time, and doesn’t appear to meet safety regulations in the European Union and Australia anyway.

4.Pieces aligned: Indian chess is on the cusp of an unprecedented revolution, reports Abhijit Nair in Scroll
While Viswanathan Anand is in the twilight of his career, there has been a wave of young Indian chess players who have started to make their mark.

The country has five Grandmasters in November’s top 30 world rankings, the joint-highest for any country alongside the United States.

In August, Praggnanandhaa, 18, became the first Indian after Anand to qualify for the Candidates. The next month 17-year-old Gukesh rose to the India No 1 spot, taking a place that Anand had held for 37 years.

And 24-year-old Kartikeyan Murali became the first Indian to beat the great Magnus Carlsen in classical chess after Anand.

5.The New York Times’s list of the year’s best movies for 2023. 

The films, picked by the critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson, span a number of genres, including dramas and biopics. They came from legacy studios, tech companies and independent studios alike. They’re the work of veteran directors like Wes Anderson and Steve McQueen, as well as new ones like A.V. Rockwell and Celine Song.

You can then compare the list with BBC film critic’s top 20 movies of 2023 which is provided below:

6.Finally here are some Insight(s) of Charlie Munger. With thanks to Shane Parrish of Farnam Street Blog

1.

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."

— Charlie Munger

2.

"You should never, when faced with one unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three because of a failure of will."

— Charlie Munger

3.

"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve."

— Charlie Munger

4.

"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."

— Charlie Munger

5.

"Take a simple idea, and take it seriously."

— Charlie Munger

6.

"I see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help."

— Charlie Munger

7.

"I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities."

— Charlie Munger

8.

"I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don't play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich."

— Charlie Munger

9.

"I am not smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. I make actual decisions very rapidly, but that's because I have spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly reading."

— Charlie Munger (lightly edited)

10.

"I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes."

— Source: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment