Where do the smart, furtune-seeking graduates go?

The answer to this question goes in waves, according to the zeitgeist, and mirrored by the (ridiculous) starting salaries on offer.  Someone might put approximate years to these, but by my reckoning these are what we've witnessed over the past several decades, in rough chronological sequence of their peak vogue.  There's obviously overlap.

-  McKinseys and the like

-  Tech, of the NASDAQ tech-boom vintage: (various flavours during that run, but at one time B2B was the thing)

-  Investment banks

-  Green investment vehicles

-  Hedge funds

-  "Blockchain" (as a buzzword) /  crypto

-  Commodities trading (as a specific hedgie emphasis)

-  "AI" (as a buzz-phrase) / LLMs

Now, it seems, space flight has a massive vogue.  This one differs a bit, because to enter this field at least a high percentage of recruits will need to be decent engineers of one stripe or another - actual hard graft!  For some of the others, BS + "potential" were the criteria; although the ability to do Hard Sums also featured.

So - what do your bright young acquaintances all aspire after?  What is going to cream off / trendily waylay the next generation of ambitious wannabes?

ND

DeepSeek: capitalism at its finest!

Trump is right that DeepSeek is a wakeup call.  For a very long time many on the capitalist side of the argument (including myself) have taken a degree of complacent comfort in the highly derivative nature of Chinese technology.  One of out BTL commenters even went so far as to say that reports of a Chinese stealth fighter couldn't possibly be true.  Of course, we've long noted the undeniable, gargantuan successes of China's mercantile strategy, but hey, that's how Japan, S.Korea and Taiwan joined the club. 

And now, DeepSeek!   Assuming it isn't a fake - and I think we may - it represents an all-time classic example of capitalism at its finest:  people with strong commercial motivation, creativity, and sufficient political freedom - highly qualified, but sufficient - to give rein to it;  and the innovations flow!

And of course in a frontier space like LLMs, random disruptions and breakthroughs are to be expected.  We just need to recognise that a western cultural backdrop is not the only fertile context.  

So 'wakeup call' is all we need to say.  Provided that those who hear it are not just the complacent, comatose denizens of Silicon Valley.  Now, what was it about that stealth fighter again?

ND

Unsettling AI, Right Here & Now

I'm sure we are all fully seized with the potential of AI and related developments, positive & negative, and have all read what internet uses the Chinese intend for it.  Much of it seems a little way in the future.  But here's a first-hand tale from this week.

I belong to a UK-based organisation that has a branch in the US.  I correspond by email very frequently with the UK Hon Secretary, we'll call him Martin; and only occasionally (maybe once a quarter) with the US Hon Sec whose name, coincidentally, is also Martin.  Recently I was told, verbally only and as a piece of breaking news not generally disclosed anywhere, that Martin (US) proposed to float an idea for a new type of activity involving his US members - and (before he told anyone else) what did we think of it?  

Having slept on the idea (but not communicated it further) I emailed the person who'd relayed it to me that I thought it was a good one.  I referenced 'US members' but no names.  I then hit the cc button to Martin (UK), something I'd done a thousand times before, because he'd been party to the original verbal discussion.

My email system immediately flashed up: "Did you mean Martin (US)?"

FFS !  If its algo was (as one might expect) based on past behaviours by volume, and indeed context at a basic level (i.e. comms within the organisation in question), the simple probabilities were very heavily stacked in favour of my intending it to be Martin (UK), as I'd actually intended and clicked.  But presumably it had "seen" a reference to US members, and "knew" Martin (US) was associated with US members; or "seen" an email on the same subject between Martin (US) and my addressee ...   This is clever and useful, but ... well.

I recall the first time when I was "asked" whether I meant to append an attachment when I'd mentioned such a thing in the text, but hadn't appended anything before hitting Send.  That seemed quite clever at the time.  Things seemed to have moved on a bit ... 

And this is all real-time stuff with (obviously) no human intervention whatsoever.  Cunning bastards.  God alone knows what the real bastards (China, FB, ...) are doing with this stuff.

Any stories you'd care to share-and-scare?

ND

Weekend Reading: IT, Productivity and Values

Just recently, FT Alphaville has carried some excellent essays by our old friend Izzy Kaminska.  (Back in the old days, she used to link to us ... *sighs*).    Here's one for the weekend: after starting out on cybercrime she gets to the vexed issue of whether IT actually drives productivity, or just redistributes wealth around the place.  It (or even IT) may be all about the metrics: how is 'productivity' measured (and valued)?  That question can be posed two different ways.

-  If we understand (and value) productivity in the usual economic ways, then in the light of that value-paradigm & its metrics - what's the answer on productivity?  
-  Or, flipping that on its head, does it (IT) point us to valuing things in different ways to how the economists traditionally do?

"The technologists instead claimed the economists were too set in their ways to recognise the real truth: the world was experiencing the dawn of a ‘new economy’ in which ideas were becoming more highly valued than material resources."

Well: maybe, on a good day ... but then again, I am sure we have all seen examples of IT projects chewing up productivity however defined, along with material resources, 'ideas', reputations, careers, sleep ...  and on a grand scale, too.    Anyhow, read on!

ND

End of the Apple Bubble?

Of the few technology concerns that I have, one is the competing issues in the household between apple products and android products. Apple's insistence on no interoperability has made it a fortune, but it is very annoying to be a consumer of devices and equipment that make you waste money; buying the same app twice for similar devices etc.

For all its irritation though, the fact that Apple managed to re-invent both the Music and Phone industries after having been so mediocre at computers is quite something and a piece of history that cannot be undone. Then the Ipad too has done a huge amount to define the tablet industry too.

The future is less certain, it is said to be working on TV but has been saying that for a long time without much success. Plenty of people wonder if the well of creativity is a bit drier. The latest release of the Ios7 is one such example. it's just an upgrade, and a free one at that, to an already successful system. Microsoft even manages to get people to pay for software upgrades!

Anyhow, the Apple shareprice has tailed off from its once great momentum...I wonder if it will ever quite get back its previous allure if this is all there is to offer?