625: Google TurboQuant, Karpathy’s AI Psychosis, Anthropic's Tight Compute, Memory Stocks, Jensen as VC, xAI's Exodus, Texas Batteries, Germany, and Fixing Nuclear Paperwork
"The Japanese have a word for this"
We see with our brains, not with our eyes.
—Norman Doidge
🔪🧳🏠 The dullest knives in the world can be found in Airbnbs (and also in my mother-in-law’s kitchen drawers 😅).
It's the trifecta:
Owners buy the cheapest knives they can find, so they’re made of soft steel that dulls easily.
Heavy use, often by people who do things you’re not supposed to do (don’t put your chef’s knives in the dishwasher!).
There’s also a principal-agent mismatch: the owner who'd sharpen them isn't the one using them.
What to do about it?
I’m going to buy a portable knife sharpener and add it to my travel checklist. Every time I go somewhere and the knives are dull, I’ll bring them back to life. For myself, but also as a small public service.
I think it will be deeply satisfying.
📚Unread books on my shelf silently taunt me.
I keep buying more anyway.
Apparently, buying books and reading books are two separate hobbies, and I'm better at one of them 😅
The Japanese have a word for this: tsundoku, the art of buying books and letting them pile up. At least it sounds dignified.
🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴
🤖💭🗜️ Google’s TurboQuant: 6x Less Memory, Zero Accuracy Loss
Google researchers published TurboQuant this week, a compression algorithm that they say reduces KV cache memory requirements by at least 6x, without loss of accuracy. 🤯
Two things are interesting about it: 1️⃣ the technical implications and 2️⃣ the business implications:
