weekend notes

Hope all goes well… “When we are young, we don’t appreciate so many of the things,” said Vincent, the two of us winding our way high into the alps, his son up ahead, carrying our ropes. I had business in Switzerland and snuck back to Argentiere for the weekend to see my old friend. “Maybe we climb with our grandparents, and we think they go too slow, but so much we don’t know,” said Vincent, his l

Anecdote: When we started One River in early 2013, I had been a global macro investor for 24years. The number of transistors you could fit on a silicon chip had grown from 1.2mm to 4.32bln in that time (a 3,600x increase). You want to embed that kind of mega macro trend into your business. So, I figured we should build a quantitative capability, and felt if we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t have a f

Hope all goes well… “The FSD V14 release will be a dramatic gain with a 10X higher parameter count and many other improvements,” wrote Elon Musk on X. I started using Tesla’s full self-driving 5yrs ago. In the past 9mths the pace of performance improvements has gone vertical. A 10x parameter jump dramatically expands the model’s representational capacity – roughly akin to a 10x increase in m

Anecdote: “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” It is one of my favorite quotes from General James Mattis, our former Defense Secretary. My son Jackson and I were discussing the unusual meeting that Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of War, had called

Hope all goes well… “Would I want my eldest son, who is 15 years old, eventually joining the types of formations that we are currently wielding,” asked Pete Hegseth, rhetorically, to 150 high-ranking commanders gathered in Quantico, Virginia. America’s new Secretary of War outlined his plan to lift standards across our armed forces. “Every parent deserves to know their son or daughter that joins o

Anecdote: When the story broke, I knew a few things for sure. The first was that this wouldn’t be the last. When the world’s most valuable company invests $100bln in its best customer to help it buy more AI chips, it’s not a one-and-done sort of transaction. The second thing I knew was that bearish traders would see this news as a definitive sign of the bull market top, kind of like they called th

Hope all goes well… “You mentioned Einstein and general relativity, and I agree. I think that’s like one of the most beautiful things humanity has ever figured out. Maybe I would even say number one,” said Sam Altman, speaking to British physicist David Deutsch, a founding father of quantum computing. “If in a few years GPT-8 figured out quantum gravity and could tell you its story – the pro

Anecdote: I’ve spent my whole career taking risk. Which means I’ve thought about it from every angle imaginable. And I have a pretty good imagination. It also means I’ve suffered some soul-searching losses and enjoyed the windfalls that come to those who refuse to give up. One risk-management lesson I’ve learned above all others is that nothing good ever happens to dead people. So, the most import

Hope all goes well… “Guys, look at these videos we took of sunspots on the sun!!!” texted Liv to our family group chat, unleashing her inner nerd. She’s a space science major, which is part of the Physics and Nuclear Engineering Department (PANE for short). I asked if sunspots are solid or just so much cooler than the surrounding plasma that they appear dark? It’s one of an infinite number of thin