Tag Archives: technology

Random ramblings on AI

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You didn’t ask for it but you get it nevertheless: Some random thoughts on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Spoiler: No actionable insights (I think).

Gemini 3.0. vs. Nvidia

Google Gemini 3.0 seems to be a really good model. I am currently using it with my prompts and it seems a little bit better but not that much.  NotebookLM seems to have improved a lot.

However, according to various sources, the model was trained and runs exclusively on Google TPU chips. The Nvidia Bulls keep saying that Nvidia has such a large advantage including their software, that those ultrafat margins will persist for many years as there is no alternative. I am not so sure about this. 

This is the EBIT margin development of NVIDIA since 2002:

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Private Equity (Mini) Series 6: Private Equity for the masses – Y2K edition

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Previous Episodes of the Private Equity (Mini) Series:

Private Equity Mini Series (1): My IRR is not your Performance
Private Equity Mini series (2) – What kind of “Alpha” can you expect from Private Equity as a Retail Investor compared to public stocks ?
Private Equity Mini Series (3): Listed Private Asset Managers (KKR, Apollo & Co)
Private Equity Mini series (4) : “Investing like a “billionaire” for retail investors in the UK stock market via PE Trusts
Private Equity Mini Series (5): Trade Republic offers Private Equity for the masses (ELTIFs) -“Nice try, but hell no”

Time Machine: Y2K

Some of the older readers of my blog might have active memories about the year 2000. There was the so-called “2YK Scare” in the late 1990ies, the fear that computer systems (and planes) would crash when the year 2000 would start. Of course it didn’t happen, the Dot.com bubble got pumped up once more and the rest is history.

Another event that got less attention was the that back in the year 2000, the now long gone Dresdner Bank issued a Certificate (which is a popular structure in Germany to give retail investors exposure to anything) that was actually a bond linked to the long term returns of an underlying Private Equity Portfolio managed by Swiss PE manager Partners Group. The very same Partners Group that now has teamed up with Deutsche Bank to run an ELTIF.

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Book rewiew: “Gambling Man – The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son”

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Content:

This was clearly one of my “must read” books in 2024. The author, Lionel Barber, is the former editor of the financial times and as such clearly has access to people who might have otherwise not spoken to a more unknown journalists.

The book goes back to Masa-son’s very humble roots as part of the Korean minority in Japan which clearly was not an easy childhood. His father earned the first money by breeding pigs in their garden in a “slummy” area in their hometown. The father seems to have been quite an entrepreneurial character himself, moving into “loan sharhing” and then into Pachinko, low scale gambling game very popular in Japan. Similar to Masa later, his father used risky leverage and often risked it all to win. In any case, the family got decently rich with these gambling halls.

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Some thoughts on DeepSeek- The Black Swan for MAG7 or something else ?

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For various reasons, I was able to spend much more time on this topic since Sunday than I would usually have. On Sunday morning, the topic somehow picked my interested and I have been trying to understand as a Non-Expert what is going on here.

For full disclosure: I have no positions in any of the MAG7 stocks, but that might make me equally biased than someone who has mortgaged his family home to invest in NVDIA.

On Sunday Morning, I initially used mostly Twitter, but during the day this was overflooded with MAGA Crap. Twitter is still a good place at an early stage for “virally developing situations”, bit it gets washed with (AI written) turd pretty quickly.

The DeepSeek topic is interesting on many dimensions. Here are some facts (taken from Wikipedia, but confirmed by other sources):

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