Written on a flight back from visiting the Netherlands

1. How the Dutch became the leading power in the world and how they lost that status
2. Reclaiming land from the ocean – the risk and reward with global warming and a lack of unclaimed land to occupy
3. How we shape our children through encouraging traditions that instill values or norms in them
4. Why SUPing long distances doesn’t make much sense (it is slower, harder and has more risk of falling in) but I still enjoy it more anyways
5. Birds in different parts of the world – why some species thrive everywhere while other times a different species fills a similar role locally
6. Are rabbits the most efficient way to turn sunshine into protein? They are definitely the cutest
7. Appreciating difference in culture for the Darwinistic strength it gives humanity as a collective
8. Difficulty and danger – how the mix of them interacts in challenges I create for myself and what the ideal state is
9. Caffeine – is it just energy debt paid later? is there interest?
10. LLMs and Generative AI – what about them will be commoditized, what will be differentiated, what will the landscape look like. It is a foregone conclusion to me that they will be involved, but perhaps I am wrong.
11. Is general AI something we can iterate to or is there a step function we will struggle to overcome?
12. What is the long term business model of generative AI and where are the profit centers? The costs are real (training, running and data access), the value is real (saving person-hours of work) but I have yet to see a business model that connects them in a way I believe can capture the value appropriately. I am watching the industry experiment with usage based billing, something I’m arguably now an expert on, and doesn’t make long term sense, to me. The economic value per use case differs dramatically and doesn’t seem to correlate with the difficulty. Will we find an efficient market simply due to an arms race pushing costs to their local maxima? The ads auction, search intent and cross-site targeting of specific users were genius ways to get us out of the world of 7 cent PPM ads for ringtones. Will generative AI have a similar breakthrough business model? Who will drive it?