In 58 posts with close to 100k words, we shared a lot in 2024! Explore 2024’s biggest geopolitical shifts, cultural battles, and bold insights with Drishtikone’s year in review. See you in 2025! Happy New Year! Be safe!
When you see Russia get into existential war over Ukraine, or Israel bomb Syria or India battle with Pakistan or Bangladesh, it is not because of some whim. It has a historical and geographical context. That is critical to understand for analyzing geopolitics.
“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.” ― Seneca, Natural Questions
1. Mark this Leonard
The greatest mark of business success is to build organizations that can self sustain and together the whole is greater than the parts. Mark Leonard, CEO of Constellation Software, took $25 mn investment in software in 1995 and is now currently valued at $49 bn. The process, the principles of this man are worth noting and learning from.
2. AI apps at scale
Do you want to build the next generation AI apps? Well, go to https://www.tryleap.ai/ and start creating your models to generate images that can be done at scale for any subject. The results are stunning!
3. Xi's men and women
The dictatorship of Xi and his people. This is a very instructive tongue-in-cheek thread of how deeply and pervasively Xi has come to control China.
4. The New GPT-4
Open AI has launched GPT-4. These features are now available in ChatGPT & Bing.
“GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” OpenAI wrote on its website.
GPT-4 is available on OpenAIs subscription service, ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month.
What are some of its capabilities?
GPT-4 can generate text and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over GPT-3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text — and performs at “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, GPT-4 passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%.
Here is a very useful thread on this. Just check it out, its phenomenal!
5. Was Silicon Valley Bank bust orchestrated via Social media?
What happened with the Silicon Valley Bank? There are banking norms, and SVB was in compliance.
For all intents and purposes, they appeared to be in compliance with capital requirements, their balance sheet was constructed of very strong HQLA (High Quality Liquid Assets) and looked like they could very easily handle a stressed outflow.
The rumors and the run down because viral and suddenly it was a slippery slope. What was being done with elections, and even with Adani - was also probably orchestrated with the SVB.
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