AI Superpowers

Just finished reading AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee. Lee has the credibility to speak on this topic, with a PhD from CMU on speech recognition, he also ran research, engineering, and businesses for Apple, Microsoft, and Google related to AI, and now rhe uns a VC firm that funds AI startups.

The book is easy to read. It has 2 threads:

1. China vs US development of AI.
   • The U.S., as well as UK’s DeepMind (subsidiary of Google), continues to produce deep neural network innovations and has deep technical expertise in DNN and AI.
   • Lee forecasts that China might have the advantage, due to government funding and initiatives, aggressive hard-working entrepreneurs, technical knowhow, market driven implementations, and enormous amount of data from large population and high internet and mobile deployment in China. One key mention is the Chinese government’s push on the so-called Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. This program is recently upgraded.
2. Dealing with the impending disruption from AI.
   • Narrow AI vs Artifical General Intelligence (AGI). All the extraordinary improvements in AI are narrow in scope, where the problem is solving one aspect of intelligence: image recognition, speech recognition, playing GO. So the threat of the Terminator remains in the movies.
   • However, narrow AI’s are very good, and would displaced a lot of jobs (up to 50%) in the next 10+ years. AI would solve many problems and make a portion of the work humans do much more efficient. The consequence would be economic growth and life improvements. But not for all, where wealth disparity of today would be amplified by AI.
   • Lee’s proposal is we recognize that our social relationships and emotions (e.g. love and compassion) could not be replicated by AI. While humans use AI to perform tasks such as medical diagnostics, financial management, insurance adjustments, self driving car, …, humans add the compassion to enhance society. This would require some restructuring of social contract, where people’s lives and self worth are no longer defined by his/her jobs.

I found much of the book very illuminating, until this last part. It’s an interesting conjecture. Maybe more specifics could be added on how this change could be implemented or somehow people would settled onto this solution to the AI conundrum.

The forecast of AI disruption is likely to be real. The book did not provide many parameters on the AI disruption that would predict its consequences and develop the right response. Lee wrote about how lymphoma are classified into different types by just a few large features, primarily because humans could only deal with these few features. However, to better determine the nature of his own lymphoma, he researched into many more small features, which led him to have a more optimal response and action. I would say the book’s forecasting of AI disruption is analogous to the lymphoma situation: the book did not have enough features to provide a sufficient forecast of future outcomes that would lead to an optimal response. The suggested response in the book is an interesting suggestion, but not a readily implementable solution.

Nevertheless, the first 80% of the book offers great insight into current AI development, especially in regard to China vs US.

Below is good interview of Kai-Fu Lee with Sebastian Thrun:

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“Want More Inventions, Do More Experiments”

This is a great interview with Jeff Bezos by ret. USAF Gen. Larry Spencer, where Bezos spoke on several interesting topics:

On innovations:

• Want more inventions, do more experiments.
• Distinguish experiments from operational excellence. Experimental failures are OK, as that’s learning. These are different from operational failures.
• Winners pay for thousands of experiments. Positive outcomes are long tailed, i.e. not capped.
• Multiple paths to YES to encourage innovative thinking, where junior manager could move forward on experimental project by getting an YES from one of multiple senior executives who are empowered to green light projects; as opposed needed the entire chain of the management hierarchy to
• Invention at high level requires true expertise, but also requires a beginner’s mind.

On space, Bezos is pitching Blue Origin to the Air Force. At the same time, he made the following good suggestions:

• Going to space needs to be low cost, have short lead time, and have high reliability.
• DoD and the Defense Dept should use commercial solutions, as much as possible, Commercial solutions have lots of co-customers, who are driving

Decision making in large organizations:

• Want scale to do big things
• Also need nimbleness, which is achieved by fast decisions
• 2 types of decisions:
  • “Type 2”, 2-way door decisions, where it’s low cost to reverse decision; these tend to be made by junior managers.
  • “Type 1”, high consequence decisions that are not reversible; these tend to be made by senior managers.
• Problem with large organizations is the junior managers mimics senior managers’ decision making process, making “Type 2” decisions using “Type 1” means. Type 2 decisions need to be made only a few people.

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The Richest Man Lives 2-3 Years in the Future

Wide range conversation between Jeff Bezos and David Rubenstein. Many great thoughts and ideas.

One take-away for me: Jeff Bezos lives in the future, his thinking is focused 2-3 years ahead. One goal is to offer products and services 2-3 years before any competition comes in. He had many of these 2-year advantages, including Amazon.com and the Kindle. The one outlier among the competitive gains was AWS, where it reigned 7 years before a credible competitor entered the market. While his efforts initially started small, many grew to enormous size. All along, Bezos monitored progress with key metrics.

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Whom Would You Bet On?

I can across this great talk by Conor Neill.

Watching it is more worthwhile than reading my summary.

 

He asked if you could invest €1,000 in one individual to get 10% of the person’s income for life, who would you invest in? What are the criteria? He suggested 3 criteria to select the person (in the following order and importance):

2. Energy (healthy, and bias toward action)

3. Adaptive Intelligence

1. Integrity (be true to how you commit your limited time; this is tied to the psychology of how children behave when given a marshmallow)

He suggested a tool for each criterion:

1. Tool for Integrity: Know that you have little power on your desires and nature. Say “no” to most decisions, focus your time on the important things in your life.
2. Tool for Energy: Focus on achieving each small step. Earn the accumulated results over months and years, instead of the result of the day.
3. Tool for Intelligence: Write down your day, every day. Your life documented is your valuable resource.

While you invest money in someone else who has these 3 criteria, there is someone from whom you could get 100% of the person’s earnings. That’s you yourself (yo mismo). You are the one you bet on: maximize intelligence, maximize energy, maximize integrity.

 

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Want to be an Entrepreneur, Get a Cat

If you have live with a cat, you’re more likely to be an entrepreneur.

This statement is derived from a correlation study by Johnson, Markus, et al showed 3 correlation studies where people who are infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii are more likely to be an entrepreneur or go in the business field. This protozoan microorganism infect most vertebrates, but only reproduce in wild or domestic cats.

Study 1: infected university students are 1.4x more likely to choose a business degree

Study 2: infected entrepreneurs are 1.8x higher odd of started a successful business

Study 3: T. gondii infection differs by geography and country. The populations in countries that have higher infection rates show more entrepreneurial intentions.

People infected tend to exhibit more risk taking behaviors, which are more associated with entrepreneurship. At the same time, people with the infection are more likely to have higher car accident rates, more likely to suffer from mental illness, drug abuse, and suicide. Over 2 billions people in the world are infected, and many of us might already have the infection.

Another evidence that hints at the idea that each human is more than the individual consisting of genetics, background, and upbringing; but also a composite of the individual and the other trillions of organisms that live inside the body.

If you are not yet an entrepreneur, but want to be one, maybe get a cat … Be sure to get one that has the parasite.

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2 Great Risks

                “There are 2 great risks in life:  risking too much, risking too little.”

I first heard in this quote by Jimmy Chin in his ending video on Greenland at the DJI Mavic Pro 2 launch. DJI has remove his section of the launch from the official video, as Jimmy was not very dynamic at the launch. The quote, though, was worth the time.

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3-1-3 Method, … Less is More

Ryan Foland:

Address any business idea with 3 questions:

• What problem you are solving?
• How you are solving it?
• What markets you are solving it for?

Answers each question with one sentence. Turn the 3 sentences into one sentence, and eventually 3 words.

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Inspiration Video: Thriving with Uncertainty

I’m inspired by this video from Saras Sarasvathy, very clear description of risk vs uncertainty. Quoting Frank Knight, risk could be managed with probability and statistics, while a great deal of situations have so much uncertainty that are not possible to characterize. Professor Sarasvathy suggests an approach that makes it possible to thrive on these types of situations:

 

 

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Inspiration Video: What Makes Great Leaders

Simon Sinek shows us a simple idea that illustrates what makes a great leader.

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Inspiration Video: Faking It Till You Becoming It

Amy Cutty shows us how the physical body actions could change how we think and feel and especially how we could us that to change ourselves.

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SCRUM Product Owner

I just completed the training for SCRUM Product Owner with Agile Learning Labs. Chris Sims was a very good instructor. He explained the what, the how, and the why of a Product Owner (PO), as well as the PO’s responsibilities to the stakeholders and to the development team. Successful PO needs to regularly prioritize user stories relative to the potentially changing requirements and valuation of the stories from the stakeholders. At the same time, the PO needs to fit an appropriate number of stories, by story points, relative to the capacity of each sprint. Asides from various exercises, the training included a half-day simulation that ran thru 4 sprints. That helped me understand what really is needed and expected from the product owner in the SCRUM process.

Chris also showed a video from Henrik Kniberg that illustrates the process of SCRUM from the perspective of a product owner. I found this video succinctly explains the process of SCRUM as well:

 

 

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Managing Humans

I just finished reading this book Managing Humans by Michael “Rands” Lopp.  Great book for software managers, managers, and individual contributors.  I find Rands provide realistic and practical advice on dealing with people who run your company, the person you work for, and people you manage.  Rands also provide interesting insights on people and classify them in his terms:   NADD, incrementalists, completionists, organics, mechanics, inwards, outwards, holistics, free electrons, joe.

Like usual, I borrowed this book from the library so I’d read it, as I tend not to read books I buy.  With this book, I purchased a copy via AllBookstores.com after I’ve read it.  It’s worth the purchase, if only for future reference.

Rands published other articles and blogs, including “What To Do When You’re Screwed“.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

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Black Swan, Remaining Parts

Just finished reading NNT‘s Black Swan.

In parts 2, 3, 4, Taleb went into further details on actions and decision making in face of the unknown unknown.  He contrasts the lopsidedness of how things work and how Black Swans changes things.  Winners tend to win more often.  The winners might have gotten there by luck, not skills.  So life is not fair.  At the same time, due to Black Swans, those on top could be toppled quickly, unexpectedly.  In that sense, the world offers opportunities for the little guys. 

Central to his theme is that we tend to look at the world by creating or believing in theories to fit the world to the theories, rather than looking at what’s happening.  This could apply to math, science, religion, history, and especially more so with economics and social sciences.  And, when economists apply flawed theories to real world finance and governance, dire consequences could happen. 

As we do not know the level of risk and extent of uncertainty of the future, Taleb suggests the following approach to deal with that uncertainty, to avoid the negative Black Swans, and to increase the likelihood of catching positive Black Swans:

• Be prepared for all relevant eventualities
• Barbell strategy:
  • Be extremely conservative (very, very safe) with 85-90% of your assets, in your approach
  • Be extremely, wildly aggressive with 10-15% of your assets
• Modest tricks:
  • Make a distinction between positive contingencies and negative ones
  • Don’t look for the precise and the local.  Don’t be narrow minded, be open to possibilities.
  • Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity.
  • Beware of precise plans by governments.
  • Don’t waste time trying to fight forecasters, …

Taleb also writes an entire chapter on his mentor, Benoit Mandelbrot, who introduced fractals to the world.  Fractals have scale-invariance, which is an interesting property that Taleb says is prevalent in how we compare things.  Further, Taleb says looking at the world in terms fractals could make Black Swans gray.

Taleb speaks like an outlier, not part of the mainstream.  That’s what’s appealing about the book.  He forwards arguments that make the mainstream and those in power, as mostly the result of randomness.  After reading the book, I feel less afraid of those in power.  In the end, they are not that different from you and I. 

Taleb practices an open minded approach to view, think, and act about the world.  You have to read the book to get that approach.  He drills these notions into your head.  The last advice (don’t run after trains) in the book is especially uplifting.  Read the book.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Long Tail and Fat Tail

The Long tail is the concept that there are large number of customers who’s unique needs (in small quantities) are not addressed by the high-volume products.  It is often represented as a the power law distribution curve.  The idea goes further with internet technologies and other happenings, which lower costs for product development and/or distribution.  Over time, the demand curve could shift away from the high-volume product, making the tail longer and fatter.

The Fat tail is a different concept where the probability of events away from the mean might be significant.   Traumatic events (e.g. oil shock, political turmoil) could disrupt the well-behaved mathematical models of financial investments, incurring considerable more risks than estimated.    The variance might not be finite.  In some situations, achieving six-sigma might not provide the comfort of high quality or the feeling of being safe.

Both concepts are part of the evolving maturation of our outstanding of uncertainty and risk.  The world may not be simply be modeled by the bell curve and/or the Central Limit Theorem.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Five Questions

In a short book, Peter Drucker and friends pose 5 questions for organizations to pose for their own self-assessment:

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

I’d ask the same questions of myself.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Fooled by Randomness

Just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Ed.  Taleb illuminates simply, with stories, that reality is embedded with randomness (not predictable), nonlinearity (not easily forecasted using past data assuming a straight line) and skewness (not symmetrical), yet we humans often get confused by our biases and mis-apply statistics to describe reality.   Experts could be multiply fooled by the same biases and mis-applications.  

We confuse what’s noise and what’s signal; and our news and social sciences (in attempts to apply scientific methods incorrectly) inject more noise into the system.  On top of these are rare events, some black swans, that are rare and happen unexpectedly.  The bad ones cause havocs in the “normal” progression of life, while the good ones could reap great benefits to those who could catch them.  But these rare events could not be foreseen.

We don’t know “what we don’t know”, whilst we think we know.  According to Taleb, success is often the result of luck, or randomness, but we attribute success to one’s skills.  This is especially more prevalent with professions that involve randomness, like securities trading, or upper level management (big decisions are make infrequently and the consequences of the decisions are not seen until years later).  Even a streak of successes could be the result of randomness if the sample size of people in the profession is large.  Only repeated actions over a long time would one really distinguish between luck and skills.  Such is the distinction between a securities trader and a dentist.

Biases:

• hindsight bias – overestimating what one knew at the time of a rare event due to subsequent information:  “I knew it all along”, when we did not see the rare event coming
• selection bias – misinterpretationof the statistics from sample selection
• attribution bias – cognitive bias that affects the way we determine who or what was responsible for an event or action
• survivorship bias – the tendency to excluded failed companies from (finance) performance studies because they no longer exist

As Taleb is a voracious reader and reads in many fields, he injects lots of ideas into the book.  Most notable is that Taleb reveals himself to be a disciple of Sir Karl Popper, who challenged the singular reliance on observations and inductions to form scientific theories — any theory could be overturned by just observing a counterexample that was not previously observed. This last point hints at Taleb’s Black Swan, described in another book of his.   There is much to grasp as one reads Fooled by Randomness.

I highly recommend this book, as Taleb challenges us to be vigilant of what we don’t know, and maybe on occasions, be less a fool to randomness.  Very insightful, yet readable.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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“…be greedy when others are fearful…”

Warren Buffet wrote an opinion column in the New York Times.  The essential message is:  convert cash to US equities, as equities would appreciate from today’s low prices, whereas cash would depreciate due to inflation.  He wrote in the paper:

• “A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful,”
• “if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.”
• “Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. … They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays … nothing and … depreciate in value. … the policies that government will … prove inflationary … accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts. …Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade…”

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Kai-Fu Lee Spoke

Kai-Fu Lee, 李開復, spoke to over 280 people at the Google Crittenden campus today.  He spent two hours talking and answering questions about what Google China is doing. 

 Some highlights:

• Google strategy in China:  5,000 years–patience; humility– understand the users, Chinese internet user behaviors are different those in the US; build local expertise; advertising based business model
• China might be more advance in development and application of cloud computing because of software/media piracy
• Google creating Chinese specific tools, e.g. Google Chinese input IME that uses search results and latest search data to improve selection of Chinese words with same sound
• KFL’s advice to those who want to do a startup:  be hungry, i.e. you’ve no safe alternatives and it’s live or die.
• He mentioned his blog

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Honest Signals

Waiming's interpretation of the article

Unconscious, automatic mimicry (listener emulating the speaker’s gestures and facial expressions) in salary negotiations and sales have shown to improve financial results by 20%-30%.  Mimicry is a form of Honest Signals, which are unconscious human behaviors that show the rhythms of interaction in a group of people.  According to Alex Pentland and Tracy Heibeck in SMR, Fall 2008 (pp. 70-75), these signals can be measured with a “sociometer” device.  The measurements can predict accurately the results of job interviews or salary negotiation or sales success.  Honest signals include influence, mimicry, activity, consistency and these have associated brain structures and biology.  The authors postulate that with more sophisticated statistical models and sensor capabilities, we would see the creation of a quantitative, predictive science of human organization, leading to the possibility of social engineering.  Farfetched?  Controversial?  Maybe that’s why I do not see the article mentioned in the SMR web site.  In any case, more info are here:

• MIT group (http://hd.media.mit.edu)
• book Honest Signals, MIT Press, 2008 by Alex Pentland
• wikipedia on Honest Signals

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Think Small

“Think Small” is the advice Milton Chang gave to aspiring entrepreneurs.  Focusing on a niche and delivering value there, tend to result in minimizing resources, competition, burn rate, and risks and maximizing potential.  Once there is success, then expand and grow.  This philosophy applies to new products entering new markets as well.  This is the same message in Susan Friedmann‘s “Riches in Niches”. 

She references the following authors:

• Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail”
• Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, “The Blue Ocean Strategy”
• Seth Godin, “All Marketers are Liars…”, “Purple Cow…”, “Small is the New Big…”, “Unleashing the Ideavirus”

The rest of her book spoke about 7 strategies for experts to establish themselves for consulting businesses:

1. Naming your business
2. Building your media muscle
3. Getting involved with the industry
4. Catching writing fever
5. Producing products and systems
6. Teaching:  workshops, webinars, and more
7. Offering services

She also refers to mastermind groups, which are helpful for entrepreneurs.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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Quotes from HYSTA

HYSTA held its annual conference today.  Some quotes:

Milton Chang:  “Give, to take.”; “Business is about relations.”

HP Jin:  “In time of turbulence, stay calm, see the opportunities.”

Bill Huang:  “Time … to incubate:  cost to start business is low”; “Information industry is going thru huge shift in technologies (web, …, cloud)”

Ping Wu:  “If yon have money, you can buy a business.”

Hong Chen:  “(Now is) best time to get people to join you.”
“(If you’re going to China,) sharpen your Chinese communication skills-Chinese have confidence now, …”; “When the storm comes, the stronger survives.”; “Business owner: be stingy; cash is king today.”

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

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