My Two-for-Tuesday morning reads:
• What if Elon Musk Was Always Elon Musk? The most disturbing part of the controversial new four-hour documentary. (Slate)
• Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone: A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely “spooking people” inside big labs. Will Knight on Rishub Jain, who left Google DeepMind after realizing that using AI to build the next generation of AI was removing humans from the equation. (Wired) see also AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems — and Kill Us All: An Anthropic safety researcher puts the odds of annihilation above 10% — doomsday now more likely than Steph Curry missing a free throw. (Wall Street Journal)
• ‘Offensively Cheap’: Solar Power Is Looking Up: Rachel Millard reports from Chakwal, Pakistan, where a cement maker is turning dry earth and peach groves into a forest of panels — solar already generates over a quarter of its power. (Financial Times)
• The Simple Request That Could Lower Your Mortgage Rate: Lenders can now consult two different credit-scoring models and pick the one that results in the lower rate . (Wall Street Journal)
• A Stealth Startup Thinks It Just Hacked the Memory Shortage: Kepler Computing claims a new approach to chip design—and a proprietary material—can help end the supply bottlenecks that have sent memory prices surging. (Wired)
• The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire: New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project . Katja Hoyer on how East Germany’s coffee crisis turned Vietnam into one of the world’s great coffee producers. (Katja Hoyer)
• The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines: Sally Jenkins on Kevin Dowdell, an elite FDNY rescue-unit lieutenant, who taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him. (The Atlantic)
• Trump Is Remodeling the White House. The Group Set Up to Protect It Has Stayed Quiet: The White House Historical Association, a nonprofit set up by Jacqueline Kennedy to preserve the building’s character, has declined to criticize the president’s changes. Dan Diamond on the White House Historical Association — the nonprofit Jacqueline Kennedy set up to preserve the building’s character — declining to criticize. (Washington Post)
• People long for simpler times, say Practical Magic reboot stars: Mix together a beloved film simmering for decades, a sprinkling of social media hype and a generous glug of star power and you just might conjure up the long-awaited sequel to Practical Magic. Naomi Clarke on the decades-simmering sequel, with Joey King and Williams as Sandra Bullock’s daughters. (BBC)
• Does the NBA Have an Owner Problem?: The Ringer on Ballmer, Mark Walter, and soaring team valuations — “Every day or every week, it’s like: Wait a second, how can that be possible?” (The Ringer)
Video of the day: China Found Something Better Than Oil
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Seth Bernstein, CEO of AllianceBernstein and Head of Asset Management of Equitable Holdings, the 69% owner AB. The firm manages $905.5B. Previously, he spent 32 years at JPMorgan Chase, where he eventually became the Global Head of Managed Solutions & Strategy at JPAM, responsible for all discretionary assets for Private Banking clients, and Global Head of Fixed Income & Currency. He eventually became CFO of JPM’s Investment Management & Private Banking division.
AI-pilled firms are growing headcount
Source: Ramp
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