Conference Presentation, Interview
E135: Wagner rebels, SCOTUS ends AA, AI M&A, startups gone bad, spacetime warps & more
- Russian society has consolidated behind Putin with independent polls (Levada Center) indicating approximately 80% to 83% support, though the Wagner mutiny raised questions regarding regime stability and Putin's ability to manage power centers.
- Putin is expected to remain in power for up to three decades total, with predictions suggesting a loss of power within the next 10 years due to health issues like cancer or exhaustion from the use of violence and fear following the Ukraine invasion.
- The Russia-Ukraine conflict is characterized as an existential fight where Putin is willing to escalate further, potentially triggering a full mobilization in Russia within the next few months.
- The Supreme Court's ruling to strike down affirmative action is projected to first impact university admissions by eliminating legacy and athletics-based preferences at federally funded institutions, followed by a second order of lawsuits challenging race-based hiring programs in the private sector.
- Venture capital fundraising for late-stage funds has cratered, with a financing crunch expected to worsen over the next 18 months and a cleanup of fraud and due diligence issues estimated to take 10 years.
- Current unicorn returns are predicted to be low, with 30% to 40% classified as "zombie coins," and a blended return of approximately 1.1x for the entire stream due to high failure rates and inflated valuations driven by hype cycles.
- Big enterprise infrastructure companies are racing to acquire capabilities to build end-to-end AI tool chains, exemplified by the Databricks acquisition of Mosaic ML, which is valued between $500 million and $1.3 billion.
- The AI funding frenzy involves significant capital expenditures, such as Inflection AI's $1.3 billion round where $900 million was allocated to 22,000 NVIDIA H100s, creating atypical enterprise values relative to revenue and potential revenue cycling between chip makers and cloud providers.
- Educational policy views include an emphasis on increasing investment in early childhood education (childcare, pre-K, elementary) rather than fixing the university pipeline, alongside arguments for school choice to break union monopolies and demands for transparency via rate cards for legacy admissions.
- A 15-year "slow Hummer" data release from NANOGrav supports Einstein's general theory of relativity by observing gravitational waves from spinning supermassive black holes, offering potential future insights into the universe's large-scale structure and the possibility of near-light-speed travel.