What we’re reading (11/24)
“AI Investors Want More Making It And Less Faking It” (Wall Street Journal). “Two events this week illustrate the worsening environment for AI. First, Nvidia and Microsoft pledged to invest $15 billion between them into Anthropic, the No. 2 large language model developer. In turn, it promised to buy $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft, using Nvidia chips. This sort of circular deal had led to a nice bump in all the stocks involved in the past—but on Wednesday, nada. Second, Nvidia’s better-than-expected results were hailed by many investors and commentators as proof that there isn’t an AI bubble, and the stock jumped more than 5% on Thursday morning, while smaller AI-related stocks soared. It only took until that afternoon for people to realize that the argument was daft.”
“Wall Street Banks Scramble To Assess Fallout From Hack Of Real-Estate Data Firm” (CNN Business). “Hackers stole a trove of data from a company used by major Wall Street banks for real-estate loans and mortgages, setting off a scramble to determine what was taken and which banks were affected, according to people familiar with the investigation and a statement from the firm. New York-based SitusAMC, which boasts 1,500 clients, said Saturday night that account records and legal agreements related to some of its clients had been impacted in the hack.”
“Vibecessions, Part II” (Paul Krugman). “During the Biden years, inflation did temporarily spike – which people hated even though their incomes were growing fast enough to keep up with inflation. But the anger persisted even as inflation fell dramatically, and continues under Trump…I haven’t found a “unitary theory” of vibecessions. Rather, there appear to be several possible, and not mutually exclusive, explanations…[1] Media negativity [2] Extreme partisanship [3] People care about the level of prices, not the inflation rate [3] The economy is worse than it looks [4] Negative feelings arising from Trump’s chaotic economic policies[.]”
“How Tech Broke The Job Market” (Business Insider). “‘Congestion is the bane of a lot of markets,’ says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Stanford who's helped design programs to better match students with schools, organ donors with patients, and hospitals with new doctors. ‘Successful marketplaces have to fight hard to defeat congestion.’”
“Apple Cuts Jobs Across Its Sales Organization In Rare Layoff” (Bloomberg). “Management notified the affected workers over the past couple of weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts extended across the sales organization — hitting some teams especially hard — though the company didn’t tell employees how many roles were involved.”
