Rags To Riches
AI, stonks, and a couple weekend reads for your enjoyment.
I was looking at some AI-related stonks this week. In part, because I’m seeing more crypto-proxy equities magically becoming AI-proxy equities in recent months. The never-ending quest of the capitalizing on the moment… I digress…
But I came across this chart when I was doing work on one of the companies that I covered this week and I laughed out loud when I saw it. “ChatGPT may be the fastest-growing app of All Time.” Well, turns out that’s not true based on the chosen barometer of 100 million global active users. That honor now goes to the Meta Platforms META 0.00%↑ owned “Threads” app. Which achieved the feat in less than a week.
Of course, one could argue the growth of Threads might be sort of fugazi because Threads is benefiting from users that Meta already has simply opting into the service. But that might be picking nits. It’s impressive any way you look at it. But I also wanted to look at how much interest there still even is in something like ChatGPT. I’m not seeing nearly as many listicle threads about all of the wonderful ways AI will destroy the universe increase the production capabilities of the managerial class. What I have noticed anecdotally is more awareness of “AI” as either a threat or a game-changing technology with real people who I engage with.
So I went to (of course) Google GOOG 0.00%↑ to see if my experience checked out broadly as well. Turns out, there may be something to it:
Broadly, search interest in “AI” is still near 12 month highs while “ChatGPT” peaked in May and has been coming down fairly quickly. I briefly touched on AI in a recent podcast with James Foord over at
this week:We covered a variety of things in the chat including Gold, Bitcoin, and the macro economic outlook domestically. Check out the show and James’ publication. He’s doing really nice work over there.
Meanwhile, the US stock market continues to mock my bearishness as equities notched another 700 bps this week. Some names are outperforming others… one name that did actually pullback some was a certain tech darling:
NVIDIA NVDA 0.00%↑ is still crushing it year to date. Is 43x sales expensive? I dunno. Nothing matters in the era of the money printer. Speaking of the Federal Reserve, FedNow went live this week. The US banking sector now has the ability to process transactions as quickly as Venmo between institutions. This is great if you wanted banking to catch up to 2013 shitcoin distributed ledger networks. Trojan horse for a CBDC down the line? Only time will tell.
And in case you missed it, I dropped a banger deep dive on one of my favorite crypto networks yesterday:
The Future of Finance Must Be Permissionless
As Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Want an example? Physical gold is wonderful. It’s nobody’s liability, doesn’t tarnish, truly permissionless, and is a nearly perfect monetary instrument. I say “nearly” because there is one major flaw; it can’t scale in physical form because it’s expensive to move far distances. That means trading it globally either requires shipping it, likely with a third party carrier — or — trust in a third party custodian to settle the transaction on some centralized ledger with metal held in a vault somewhere that never actually moves.
Hope you all have a great weekend! If you’re looking for a fun read over the weekend, here’s a little reminder that citizen journalism matters and Substack is the best place for it:
Disclaimer: I’m not an investment advisor.
Rest in Peace, Tony.