Welcoming in 2025

This seems like it will be a chaos monkey kind of year, and this post is a little ill-formed and chaotic in itself.   It is hard to predict what will happen with a new administration that seems to thrive on brinksmanship and manufactured crisis.  And in the technology business, we are just at the very beginning of the AI wave crashing through the industry and crashing through every other industry. But chaos and change can be good, they can break down old barriers and breathe new life into systems.

AI

We've just begun to get a teeny taste of what AI will do to businesses. Ray Ozzie just wrote some observations on the AI wave and how it will change every aspect of business computing.  If anything, I think he might be pessimistic.

One resolution I’ve made is to read a lot more about AI and to use more of the tools.  Here are some of the sources I’m starting from:

• We picked 50 paper/models/blogs across 10 fields in AI Eng: LLMs, Benchmarks, Prompting, RAG, Agents, CodeGen, Vision, Voice, Diffusion, Finetuning. If you're starting from scratch, start here — It would not be a bad idea to read several of these weekly.  I’ve scanned the GPT-4 announce paper and the Apple Intelligence paper to start.  
• December AI Madness — it is impossible to keep up with all the tools, but this newsletter covers a lot of them and is a great source of inspiration
• Things we learned about LLMs — one of the best resources for LLM info.

I also continue to evaluate AI's impact on investing. I’ve been long on NVDA for years.  I won’t be growing my position, but I am not shrinking it either.  Among the pure software plays, I am long on MSFT — their renewed focus, willingness to bet big, and enterprise reach will all pay off.   A ton of raw enterprise data is already sitting in Microsoft systems, and no one wants to be schlepping their data around.

The Country

2025 will be a very consequential year for our country.  Or maybe Congress will dither around and squander the year. 

I am fascinated by the stresses within the Republican party between the MAGA faction and the tech faction; will the Republicans be able to hang together and pass their legislative agenda?   I am dubious about DOGE, as are many others (Paul Krugman, Don Moynihan are good reads) — the effort is a colossal misdirection of energy that would be better spent elsewhere.

And the Democrats are in disarray.  I found this distinction useful — “While everyone is paying attention to the internecine battles on the right over skilled immigration, there’s a quieter struggle unfolding behind the scenes over the future direction of progressive policy. The two sides, which emerged during the Biden administration, might be called the “abundance” faction and the “power” faction."  I am clearly an “abundance” progressive and am finding the “power” progressive position to be tiresome and ineffective.

Of Note

LG and Samsung are adding Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant to their TVs — lots of strange, offbeat features.  And yet, nothing that makes watching TV better.   Like a unified watch list across all streaming services.   Or fast switching between streams on any service — one button to go from a football game on one service to a game on a different service.  Or a list of new releases across all streaming services sorted by Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes rating.  

NVDA — “…the new card uses neural nets to generate 90+% of the pixels for your games…Traditional ray-tracing algorithms only render ~10%, kind of a "rough sketch", and then a generative model fills in the rest of fine details. In one forward pass. In real time.”   This seems like it could dramatically improve visual quality and/or lower the cost of game gear and/or reduce the cost to develop games.  Awesome.

MIT’s “Stacked” 3D Chips Shatter Industry Constraints — it seems like we have many ways to keep Moore’s Law chugging along.