The Turing Test Turing called it the Imitation Game. He argued that asking “can machines think?” was “too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Instead, he devised something definitive. The Players: (A) A man. (B) A woman. (C) An interrogator (of either sex). The Setting: The interrogator is in a separate room from the man and the

Jackson Hole Not exactly convenient, Jackson Hole. I’ve often wondered why the Federal Reserve decamps to the middle of Wyoming every year when their head office is on the other side of the country. It turns out that in the early 80s, the hosts of the conference wanted to attract then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

Eggs for the win Recently advertised. A good job with a large accounting firm. A$87,500 including superannuation (so, $78,125). I found this 1998 report on graduate salaries. 27 years have passed, which is roughly ‘a generation’. Graduate salaries in accounting firms at the time were A$28,000 across a decent sample size. If we use indexation

I’m in this camp. It seems to be obviously true. I can’t think of a song from the last five years that might stand the test of time — but I’m almost certainly wrong. It seems to correlate with openness to new ideas. By 35, you are most likely who you are are going to

Google Ultra Yes. I tested it. I paid a ridiculous $204.99, for a maximum of five queries per day, just to see what this model could do. My general rule of thumb is that Open AI overstate the capability of their models (GPT5 came out a few hours ago) and Google does the opposite. To

Panic Rarely do we open with Lagarde, but she’s been forced into action by the United States Genius Act. As a quick refresher, the act will allow US banks to issue stablecoins provided they are 100% backed by US Treasuries (90 day maturity and less). It digitises the US bond market and turns it into

Bail-out “Bitcoin bails out the UK” was not a headline I expected to see quite yet. Should it go ahead, the sale is likely to go down in history alongside Gordon Brown’s memorable decision in 1999 to sell 500 tonnes of Britain’s gold for $275/oz. That gold is now worth $40 billion and Gordon sold

Vanguard Back in December 2023 we covered that Vanguard was one of the few large fund managers who had not submitted a Bitcoin ETF application. I was rather supportive of their view at the time: “Even so, Vanguard are sticking to their knitting and not pretending to know what they don’t know. In my estimation

Big Beautiful Bill Our investment thesis was and remains that governments will spend money they don’t have at an accelerating rate. Demographics, and therefore politics, point to this. The monetisation of huge state debts is really a universal basic income of sorts. We will continue to pay for everything with money we don’t have. Accordingly,

Abundance The best example of abundance I can find for you this week is this https://chat.minimax.io/, a new Chinese AI model that you haven’t heard of. Minimax is free and works slightly differently from other models, largely because US export restrictions on chips mean it has to. This one is sixteen small models behaving like