What I read this week...

Adobe abandons Figma, Foxconn enters EVs, and Taylor Swift keeps killing it

Saw this guy on vacation last week

• A Look Back at Q3 '23 Public Cloud Software Earnings (Clouded Judgement)

• Adobe Scraps $20 Billion Acquisition of Figma (WSJ)

• Foxconn makes most of the world’s iPhones. Now its CEO wants to make EVs (CNN)

• Google’s True Moonshot (Stratechery)

• A sneak peek into the book (AI Snake Oil)

• GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question (AI Snake Oil)

• Private equity bosses prepare for an AI revolution (Financial News)

• The Office Market Had It Hard in 2023. Next Year Looks Worse. (WSJ)

• Can Large Language Models Reason? (Melanie Mitchell)

• AI’s challenge of understanding the world (Science)

• Clouded Judgement 12.21.23 - Are Software Stocks Expensive?(Clouded Judgement) 

• Everything you need to know about Churn (Mostly Metrics)

• Why Startup M&A in 2024 Will Rebound (Tomasz Tunguz)

• Meta’s CTO on how the generative AI craze has spurred the company to ‘change it up’ (Semafor)

• Apple Develops Breakthrough Method for Running LLMs on iPhones (MacRumors)

• Weak-to-strong generalization (OpenAI)

• Meet the PHOLED That Is Transforming Displays (IEEE Spectrum)

• An Anticipated Wave of AI Specialist Jobs Has Yet to Arrive (WSJ)

• Modernizing Our Royalty System to Drive an Additional $1 Billion toward Emerging and Professional Artists (Spotify)

• How Well Do Large Language Models Support Clinician Information Needs? (Stanford HAI)

• Sorry, but FunSearch probably isn’t a milestone in scientific discovery (Gary Marcus)

• The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (The American Prospect)

• Nike Sends Warning About Slowing Consumer Spending (WSJ)

• You don't present to execs, you sell to execs (Manas Saloi)

• 38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking in 2023 (Pitchbook) 

• The hyperloop is dead for real this time (The Verge)

• The AI revolution is an opportunity for writers (the human kind) (On Substack)

• Taylor Swift Is Still Intimidated by the Fear of Being Average (WSJ)

• On Social Media, Demand Slopes Upwards (Never Met a Science) 

• Discovery is the original sin of the modern age (Strange Loop Canon)

• What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (Sam Altman)

• Why I’m so short (Robert Reich) 

• The Egg (Andy Weir) 

What I listened to this week

• Jeff Bezoz: Amazon and Blue Origin (Lex Fridman, Ep. 405) 

• Epic legal win, OpenAI's news deal, FCC targets Elon, the limits of free speech & more (All-In Podcast, Ep. 157)

• AI and Everything Else (Benedict Evans)

• David Roux on AI, What Tech Gets Wrong, and Founding Silver Lake (Barron’s) 

Book I’m reading

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Song of the week

The Otter by Caamp

Thanks for reading, and happy holidays!