Callum Williams
@econcallum
Senior economics writer, San Francisco bureau chief, The Economist. AI, financial markets, real estate, history. Book "The Classical School"
704 Following 8.9K Followers
Leaked Russian government estimates of war deaths lines up quite closely with our estimates
Holy moly... this new paper finds that 88% of VC-backed founders receive zero exit value 🤪🤪🤪
30th September 2013
This wonderful gentleman was formerly a Professor of History at Harvard University and, after moving to Cambridge, he visited the University Library almost every day until his death at 93 years of age ...
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It's all the floorplans! There's nowhere to host!
Bedrooms sized to watch TV in bed. Huge walk-in closets. En-suite baths. Massive Kitchens ... but tiny living rooms. And no space for dining tables
“Apartments are built for Netflix and chill. We’re building for aloneness”
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Why do so few people host dinner parties? They’re a top-tier social event and not that much work if you plan right.
SF's neighborhood temperature swings are something you won't see in any other major US city outside California.
The city's famous microclimates will be on full display Tuesday, with the Bay Area Model forecasting 85° in Mission and 63° at Ocean Beach, just over 5 miles west.
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San Francisco office vacancy rate is finally starting to fall but still unbelievably high at about a third
👀 Interesting data from @tickerplus. Acc to this data, Anthropic's ARR seems to have flatlined around the time when the token index peaked. Many people questioned (rightly) at the time the inferential value of our token index for frontier labs due to the incomplete coverage. We had argued that the token index was likely a leading indicator for where AI usage was headed.
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If this data from @tickerplus is even broadly correct, isn't this really, really bad?
Hmmm not updated since June?
the best way to signal status in the Bay Area is to act noticeably stressed about lack of compute
Hilary Mantel’s exquisite description of Anita Brookner’s party technique (from the Brookner biog by Hermione Lee)
World seems to have woken up to the idea that AI capex actually needs a return at some point. People now realise that roughly $2-3trn of revenue will be needed annually, quite soon.
But the conversation about what counts as "AI revenue" is still highly unsophisticated. People will say e.g. "Amazon's cloud business is doing really well, ergo AI is seeing great ROI". No. What you need is revenue EXTERNAL or DOWNSTREAM to the system, ie from ordinary businesses subscribing to models. @darioperkins good on this. A lot of Amazon cloud revenue is just Anthropic buying stuff
How much is "proper" AI revenue? In the summer we made four estimates. We need more work to make these estimates better/more accurate! @hsu_steve @lugaricano @weakinstrument
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This could be a problem: Goldman sensitivity table shows that in a worst case scenario where hyperscaler ROIC on capex is 0 (token costs collapse, token demand goes to open models, etc) they still need to spend $920BN every year just to cover depreciation and running costs
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£5 well spent in Hay-on-Wye. What a place to live!
This is the graph I’ve been waiting for. We’ve been trying to understand UK’s growth malaise as a function of really slowly growth in labor productivity - output per hour. If the ONS is right on the hours adjustment, we actually saw labor prod growth slightly faster than peers.
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The chart takes AI capex (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle + SpaceX, accumulated through each year) as an input, then converts it into the perpetual annual revenue needed for a 10% return under each model’s assumptions about depreciation, opex, and return metric. Annual revenue required is on the y-axis; will exceed $1 trillion per year in 2027.
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Steve Jobs would fire the entire company and replace them with AI if he was alive to see this
This is absurd. Britain’s WWII generation governed so poorly they had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout like some kind of third world banana republic.
Bucco is a top, top poster but it is honestly a bit worrying that he thinks this is worth sharing. Anyone with a vague appreciation of history has argued since 2022 that AI will take a long time to diffuse. Precisely tor these reasons. Suggests that investors are still misunderstanding the AI trade
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The current barrier to greater AI diffusion isn’t model capability. In my eyes, the barrier is three things (in order):
1. Most people don’t understand what AI can do
2. They need to fundamentally think differently about their life and work
3. Human preference. Even if AI can do the thing, people still want to do it (like shopping)
Each layer is a more rigid barrier. First, someone must be motivated to understand.
Then, they have to build a habit of flipping their thinking to a more AI-forward way. They need to consider how they would deconstruct and assign out work as if they were a manager. They need to understand abstract capabilities and apply them to their own use cases, or understand what previous use cases were uneconomical that are now available.
Then they need to want to assign that task out to AI in the first place
All of this leads me to believe that we are still incredibly early. It will take 3-5 years for the middle of the curve to even understand today’s AI capabilities and change their mindset to put this technology to work on their behalf. And by then we will be much more advanced.
The technological capability isn’t the blocker. It’s our understanding, creativity, and preferences that will determine the pace of diffusion
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I think Thiel has lots of interesting ideas but it’s quite weird how people fawn over these quite obvious insights. Governments either need to raise taxes, cut spending, or do neither?
Peter Thiel says the growing US budget deficit is going to push America to "socialist levels of taxation" or massive cuts to welfare:
"You have basically three choices":
1. Massively cut spending
2. Massively hike taxes
3. Keep kicking the can down the road
"For close to 20 years, the answer's been #3#.
"Ever since the 2008 crisis, we've just been borrowing more and more money."
"My intuition is we're close to point where that ends, and then you're going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures."
Via Mathias Döpfner
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