- This large (22m records) cross sub-discipline study found that nearly one in ten people (13% for women and 7% for men) have an autoimmune disease – much higher than historic estimates.
- this “research also confirmed that some autoimmune diseases tend to cluster together (for example, one person with a first autoimmune disease is more likely to develop a second autoimmune disease than someone without autoimmune disease), however at a much larger scale and for a much larger set of autoimmune diseases than previous studies.“
Misc
Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.
Labour Union Support is on the Rise
- Quite the divergence as membership of US unions continues to fall.
- Source: Bernstein.
Electricity Exergy Stagnation
- “The most striking finding is that world electricity energy efficiency (measured as overall primary-to-useful exergy efficiency) has stalled, rising dramatically from 2% in 1900 to 15% in 1960, and remaining nearly stable for the last 50 years, only reaching 17% by 2017.”
- Why? Power generation got very efficient from 1900 to 1960 but we started to use the electricity in uses that aren’t efficient (mainly switching use to heat and cool buildings).
- Source.
Food Self-Sufficiency
How does ChatGPT work?
- In the spirit of Feynman this superb blog post, by none other than Stephen Wolfram, gives a lucid explanation of what is going on under the hood of the latest tech phenomenon.
- The short answer is “it’s maths”.
- “But in the end, the remarkable thing is that all these operations—individually as simple as they are—can somehow together manage to do such a good “human-like” job of generating text. It has to be emphasized again that (at least so far as we know) there’s no “ultimate theoretical reason” why anything like this should work. And in fact, as we’ll discuss, I think we have to view this as a—potentially surprising—scientific discovery: that somehow in a neural net like ChatGPT’s it’s possible to capture the essence of what human brains manage to do in generating language.”
Impact Markets
- Imagine if foundations/grants would only pay for projects that had already succeeded at making an impact, leaving “venture” to take the risk on which projects actually would succeed by buying shares in them.
- This idea, reverse engineering how capital markets operate, is discussed at length here in a very practical way.
AI Winners
- The argument that AI is unlikely to be a winner for the middle-ground companies.
- Why? “was a feature not a product” – in other words value will either accrue to core AI platforms (e.g. Open AI) or to incumbent software tools with distribution who will just add AI features.
- “Adobe will own the AI-based image editing market Office & Google Docs will own the AI-based writing market Salesforce will be the best AI-enabled CRM Shopify the best AI optimization and customer support Zoom the best AI meeting summaries … all with a few API calls“
Dark Chocolate
- Is worse than lamb in terms of CO2 emissions.
- Source: This excellent climate-focused deck.
Challenger Banks Continue to Win?
- 900 days ago this site ran a series of article comparing challenger banks and incumbents in the UK on how good their user experience was (we covered it here).
- Today, there is an update, and the picture hasn’t changed.
- This chart for example shows the time between app updates – a measure of how quickly improvements are coming to customers.
- “On average, the challenger banks deploy updates 4.6x more frequently than the incumbents“.
Fintech Valuations
- According to FT Partners latest monster 2022 Fintech Almanac, median private fintech valuations (>$200m) actually had a good 2022 – they rose.
- Slide on page 35 explains this partially.
- Of selected fintech unicorns – only Stripe, Klarna, Sumup, FinAccel saw valuations fall.
- Naturally, some didn’t need to raise money so would not feature on this list (e.g. Revolut).
Anti-ESG
- Charting the backlash against ESG across US states.
- “As of January 2023, almost 50% of US states either have some type of anti-ESG restriction in place or have placed blacklisting ESG action high on their legislative agenda.“
- “Analysis of these developments (111 in total as of 10 January 2023) reveals how at the state level, anti-ESG developments have rapidly outpaced those in support of ESG measures over the past three years.”
- The chart on page 66 of the deck suggests that this backlash, at least as it materialized in ESG ETF flows, is mostly an American and Japanese phenomenon.
- Original source here; chart from this excellent climate slide deck.
Off-Exchange ETP Trading
- 2022 saw a new record in off-exchange trading of US ETFs.
- Part of a broader trend where trading off-exchange in US equities went from 35% in 2015 to 43% last year.
- Yet, as the FT Alphaville article notes, “ETF shift from lit to off-exchange trading has actually been even starker than it has for equities as a whole“.
Most Successful Film of All Time?
- Films often get measured by gross box office, with Avatar (both of them) reigning supreme on this measure.
- However, using a measure of return on investment (percentage of budget recovered) throws up an alternative perspective.
- Winners on this measure are E.T. (7,552%) but also films like “The King’s Speech (2,849%), Home Alone (2,648%), and breakout sleepers like Crocodile Dundee (3,282%), Slumdog Millionaire (2,523%) and … er, Black Swan?“
- Source.
Low Earth Orbit
Hedge Funds Ranking
Aquaculture
- Aquaculture now accounts for just about 50% of the total production of fish.
Homo Silicus
- Interesting use case of GPT3 – to model economic agents – as was done in this paper.
- “These models can be used the same way economists use homo economicus: they can be given endowments, put in scenarios and then their behavior can be explored—though in the case of homo silicus, through computational simulation, not a mathematical deduction“
Scaling AI Model Training
- Interesting, but technical look, at what it costs to train large language models.
- This has implications for all kinds of businesses as this technology becomes more widely used.
52 Things – Tom Whitwell
- The classic annual list, 2022 edition. Eye opening as usual:
- “37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet.“
- “40% of global shipping involves moving fossil and other fuels (oil, gas, wood pellets) around. More renewables (solar, wind, nuclear, geo), means fewer ships.“
- “If you want a question answered on the Internet, post a wrong answer first.“
