in stealth. (ctrl+o to show thinking)
Library
Joined August 2024
- Tweets3.5K
- Following846
- Followers290
- Likes5.1K
Welp, sometimes the rumors are true! $SCHW
Mike Brown, Analyst, UBS: Great. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe just one more on the long/short products. Obviously, the tax advantage long/short products have been a meaningful driver of client demand and asset gathering across the industry. There is an increasing number of funds coming to market, and so given Schwab’s positioning and client interest in the category, do you see an opportunity to launch a proprietary solution? If so, what would you incur in terms of investments into entering that market? Maybe how would Schwab have a differentiated product if that were to be the case? Thank you.
Rick Wurster, President and CEO, Charles Schwab: Thanks for the question. I do expect us to have an offering. We already have a great direct indexing capability today that has had wonderful performance in terms of tax alpha and delivering for clients, and I expect us to be able to deliver an extended version of that on long/short. The reason that is so appealing is because we will be able to run that product in a very efficient way from a balance sheet and operational standpoint that will help us sustain the ability to deliver long/short capabilities to our clients. We are thrilled to have something on our platform that is a proprietary long/short. Certainly another way we can deliver monetization, but more importantly, it is a way we can deliver sustainable long/short strategies to our clients in a way that is operationally and financially manageable over the longer term.
We are thrilled about that, working on it, and we will give more updates in future calls as to when that may launch. With that, I will wrap up. Thank you for your time and questions today, and I will leave you where I started. One, our Through Clients’ Eyes strategy endures the test of time and is fueling our incredible momentum. By putting clients at the forefront of every decision, we continue to deliver record performance and growth. Two, we have an unmatched no trade-offs value proposition that positions us at the center of our clients’ financial lives and the investing ecosystem. Three, we have a clear strategy, and we are delivering client-focused capabilities at a pace as the powerful combination of people and AI amplifies our platform advantage. Finally, we have a diversified financial model that drives durable earnings growth across market cycles.
more weirdness
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Inside every person is a qual and a quant.
Tired: Two-pizza teams
Wired: Two-slice teams
@danshipper on the best team structure in the AI-era
nailed it
Tired: Two-pizza teams
Wired: Two-slice teams
@danshipper on the best team structure in the AI-era
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman
One of the best features of Instinct is that it’s all text based. You only need a minimal amount of connectivity to send a text and all the compute is inside the cloud.
BCIs coming soon.
If you’re not reading science fiction, now is a great time to start.
Andrew Huberman on why Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all going to become biotech companies.
"Dario came up through neuroscience. Sam, I've spoken to, is extremely smart about the neuroscience, as is Zuck.
The technologists who used to just engineer stuff, they're becoming neuroscientists...and I think most people don't realize that.
They will all tell you, 'Okay, here's the goal. The goal is to be able to read and write from your brain non-invasively.'
Even just for things like drive and motivation, a non-invasive device where you could literally crank up your level of motivation by stimulating the nucleus accumbens and related pathways while engaging in a particular learning task or in hard work, and then turning it off so that you can capture more energy.
That's coming, and those companies are all about that. That's what the real arms race of AI is about."
wife: you can not get 75,000 strangers on the internet to help you buy a Cybertruck and grow your followers on X by thousands a day.
daniel: bet.
