Surveilled no. 88: Standard Chartered takeover; the limits of ML; managing a team on a creative project
Just a quick list of five interesting items that I came across this week.
First Abu Dhabi bank is/was considering a takeover of Standard Chartered, in what would be a demonstration of the financial firepower of the emirate. StanChart is a perennial takeover target, owing to a structural constraint: it generates revenue mostly in Asia and Africa, but is a UK-regulated bank, which puts it at a competitive disadvantage compared to the domestic lenders it competes with. However, actually taking it over would involve dealing with hugely disparate regulatory frameworks across StanChart’s markets, and so in practice I reckon a deal is unlikely to happen… (FT $)
This conversation on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast, on the structure and dynamics of the microchip industry, is one of the most interesting and lucid things I’ve listened to recently. The parts on the state-of-the-art technologies involved and how they translate into a hugely capital-intensive industry in particular were fascinating. Perfect for a commute. (The Verge)
AI image generators like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad at generating realistic hands in pictures, largely because of the photos they’ve been trained on. This is a good reminder of the limitations of ML models, that also applies to ChatGPT for example, except that the blind spots there are harder to identify. (BuzzFeed)
An AI-startup called ElevenLabs launched a voice generator that can effectively clone a voice with a few seconds of input from the original. It took exactly 2 microseconds for bad faith actors all over the internet to start misusing it. At this point, launching any AI service like this without safeguards is shockingly negligent. (The Verge)
Interesting article on how to think about individual contributions to a creative project (like software) and how to manage a team in this context. Came across some unexpected novel ideas here, such as thinking of your work as subtractive vs additive, your “shape” in the team, etc. (Tynan)