📈 first Derivative [105]

🔮 2024 forecasts—💬 AI copyright—🇨🇮 banker turned politician

Midjourney v6

🎄🕯 Hope everyone had a happy holiday!

I did a recap on the first 100 issues of fD recently so it feels too soon for an fD Wrapped. But here are some forecasts for 2024. Think of these less as predictions and more as things that shouldn’t surprise you. I will grade myself at the end of 2024 though.

• A fatal crash involving a major airline in the US. The last one was in 2009. I hope I’m not right but I wouldn’t be surprised if that 14-year streak ends next year. I wrote in June about the spike in close calls this year. I don’t see an easy solution to the shortage and overworking of air traffic controllers.

• Some sort of formal or de facto armistice between Ukraine and Russia along the lines of control. Ukraine’s counteroffensive is turning into a positional war of attrition. There’s increasing domestic division in Ukraine about Zelensky’s leadership. There might be Russian willingness to negotiate a cease-fire although it would make sense for Russia to wait to see the results of the 2024 US presidential elections, whereas Ukraine may not want to wait for a Trump reelection. Also, I just saw a harrowing documentary called 20 Days in Mariupol (full doc), about the first days of the war, that’s well worth watching if you can stomach the graphic content.

• Approval for the long-awaited Bitcoin spot ETF in January. Following up 2023, in which Bitcoin rose ~155% and some cryptocurrencies like Solana rallied over 900%.

• Trump reelected in 2024. PredictIt has him about equal with Biden with Nikki Haley a not insignificant third.¹ A key lesson I learned in 2016 was to be aware of how my dislike for a possible result affects my thinking about how likely that result is. I could be overcompensating now but I think people are underestimating the likelihood of a Trump reelection. He’s currently leading Biden in seven key swing states. I think the deciding factor will be the economy and people’s perceptions of their living costs.

  • Another thing to keep an eye on is the movement to keep Trump off ballots because of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. Maine just joined Colorado in barring Trump from ballots but California and Michigan have ruled not to. We’ll see a crucial decision from the Supreme Court in 2024 on how that clause should be interpreted and if it applies to Trump and the office of the president. I realized recently while watching John Adams that the US will celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026, under the next presidential term. Something to think about.

• In the short term, I think the proliferation of Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonist drugs is a far more meaningful development than ChatGPT and other large language models. Barring the discovery of more serious side effects, the use and cultural profile of Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonist drugs will only continue to grow in 2024.

I’ll never forget scrolling through Twitter in January and February of 2020 and reading reports about a new virus in China that was causing the government to respond on a scale that was hard to fathom. Whole cities being locked down, mass graves being dug, scores of hospital being built as quickly as possible. On top of that, my extended family in Korea was sending early warnings that this was something serious. Looking back though, I didn’t do nearly enough to think about second- and third-order effects both on the world and how my beliefs should change my behavior. I thought it was overkill when my parents sent me N95s and I’ll never forget telling my friend in March of that year that I thought starting a mask company wasn’t a great idea (sorry Roger). So I’ll try to focus more in 2024 on thinking through some of these forecasts to how others will, or I should, act on them.

📚 I just finished Rachel Cusk’s Outline for my book club as well as Rob Copeland’s The Fund. That brought me to 11 books this year, one over my goal. I’d like to get back to the ~30 range I was at during college. I think I’ll set my goal for 2024 at 15.

🎬 I updated my 2023 movie and TV lists with a few more things I saw after I first published. I’m going to go for the same goal next year of trying to watch under 100 movies with >50% in theaters. More importantly, I’m going to try to focus on quality and only read or watch things that, I think going in, I’d rate 3.5+.

🥂 Happy New Year!

—Teddy

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📰💬 The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

Besides seeking to protect intellectual property, the lawsuit by The Times casts ChatGPT and other A.I. systems as potential competitors in the news business. When chatbots are asked about current events or other newsworthy topics, they can generate answers that rely on journalism by The Times. The newspaper expresses concern that readers will be satisfied with a response from a chatbot and decline to visit The Times’s website, thus reducing web traffic that can be translated into advertising and subscription revenue.

The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft placed particular emphasis on the use of Times journalism in training their A.I. programs because of the perceived reliability and accuracy of the material.

Cecilia Ziniti had a great thread breaking down this case

I think we’ll get a landmark case on this issue. From my understanding, the existing case law isn’t sufficient to deal with LLMs but the closest precedents we have are cases surrounding search engine copyright issues from the 2000s.²

Looks like Apple is trying to get ahead of the issue by opening negotiations with publishers upfront for the right to train on their content

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🇨🇮 Former Credit Suisse CEO, Tidjane Thiam, is running to become president of Côte d'Ivoire.

Thiam, who stepped down as Credit Suisse chief executive in 2020 after a corporate espionage scandal, is running to become leader of one of the country’s main political parties, the centre-right Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI). If successful, he has a strong chance of becoming the party’s candidate in the 2025 elections…

Thiam’s mother was the niece of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country’s independence leader and first president.

1. That being said, PredictIt also slightly has the Dems winning the White House

2. Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.; Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation