I had a recent conversation with both Stanford professor and another professor from Tsinghua separately. The Stanford professor kept showing me the Ghibli and toy packaging gen from GPT that maximized his dopamine. To him, this is the pinnacle of technology. I asked him what he thought on the Full-self Driving, he was not amazed, and he told me his colleagues did not believe it’s going anywhere either. The professor from Tsinghua was the opposite end of the spectrum. His main research focus had been shifted toward robotics, and he was extremely impressed by the Full-self Driving videos on Weibo. What do you think how these two professors indirectly or directly influence their students on their research topics? And how big of the gap would that be many years from now? Every new PhD students would have the influence of technology breakthroughs 5-10 years in the future. If we are incubating our brightest and smartest PhD students at > $80K per year in elite schools, should we not encourage them to think bigger?

Historically, it was difficult to reinvent a company at the height of its market cap. When I was in Nokia, I asked why my Finnish colleagues why the company did not reinvest its resources to build the actual smartphone — event its concept video predicted the vision correctly years ago. The answer was, it would take a long time to rewrite Symbians to support a new paradigm than changing the mechanical design and plastic molding of a phone. The risk was simply too high — new software, tooling and backend infrastructure, while it was under pressure to release new models every few months to fan off the competition from Asia. Quarters after quarters, Nokia enjoyed massive market shares that it was not in a hurry to change until it was too late. Looking back, the answer seems obvious. Yet, it was difficult to commit to the right path. Reinvention often requires repeatedly going from zero to one. That was hard to stomach to most people.