Gregory Curtis is the founder and Chairman of Greycourt & Co., Inc., a wealth management firm. He is the author of three investment books, including his most recent, Family Capital. He can be reached at gcurtis@greycourt.com. Please note that this post is intended to provide interested persons with an insight on the capital markets and is not intended to promote any manager or firm, nor does it intend to advertise their performance. All opinions expressed are those of Gregory Curtis and do not necessarily represent the views of Greycourt & Co., Inc., the wealth management firm with which he is associated. The information in this report is not intended to address the needs of any particular investor.
Look at What AI Can Do
“[Generative AI] bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing.” Henry Kissinger et al. Previously in this series: Poems and College Essays by Chat GPT, Am I a Bot? Part IV “I don’t think anybody’s job is safe. I am so excited to be …
Poems and College Essays by Chat GPT
“LLMs [that is, large language model generative AI systems] are essentially ‘conventional wisdom’ machines.” – Bruno Massarelli Previously in this series: The Bully Effect, Am I a Bot? Part III Why is generative AI – like Chat GPT – such a threat to Google’s internet search revenue? To understand why, let’s engage in a thought …
Banks – and Reputations – Go Poof
[I’m interrupting my series on generative AI for this bulletin on Silicon Valley Bank.] “How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.” — Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Is it just me or was there anything about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank that wasn’t annoying in the extreme? Let’s take a …
The Bully Effect
“I love you.” Bing/ChatGPT to tech reporter It’s almost impossible to overestimate the stakes for generative AI systems like ChatGPT. Google has long dominated Internet search, holding more than a 90% market share. Microsoft’s Bing, meanwhile, has been a pathetic also-ran, holding down market shares in the single digits and being not only largely ignored but …
Am I a Bot? Part II
ChatGPT is scary good. Elon Musk Every so often a technology captures the world’s imagination. The Economist [Generative AI] is as important as the PC, as the internet. Bill Gates I think it will be the most significant technological transformation in human history. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT AI relieves people of their …
Am I a Bot?
A month or so ago a reader of these pages wrote in to let me know she had concluded that my essays had been written by “a particularly dim-witted Artificial Intelligence bot.” Well! I’ve received many critical and intemperate responses to these writings over the years, but that was the first time I’d been accused …
Lord Joe Hardy
I’d assured Joe Hardy that his vision for Nemacolin was flat-out nuts. But Joe was as good as his word and over the years Nemacolin blossomed into a first-class destination resort. Joe’s hotel gained Triple A 5-Diamond status, the resort’s wine cellar grew into the largest in Pennsylvania, and his restaurant became the most expensive …
Joe Buys the Place at Auction
“I guess that all I can hope for is that, when people think of me, they think, ‘Hey, that jackass started out with only $5,000 and made a fortune. Maybe I can, too!’” Joe Hardy to Jeff Sewald in Pittsburgh Quarterly Previously in this series: Firings All Around! The Nemacolin property was being sold at a bankruptcy …
Firings All Around!
I had no choice but to fire “Harry” on the spot – and then have him carefully escorted off the property so he wouldn’t steal the silverware – but that left me with no one to run Nemacolin and four muckety-mucks arriving in a few days. “Don,” the weird private eye I’d hired, promptly offered …
The Plot Thickens
I’d hired a guy named “Harry” to run Nemacolin for me, and a private eye named “Don” to check up on Harry, but I wasn’t a completely hands-off boss. As Harry began improving the ambience of the place, I got involved, changing the named from “Nemacolin” to “Nemacolin Woodlands” and sketching out a logo that …
Joe Hardy, Nemacolin and Me
Some years ago I became the head of a family office for one of America’s wealthiest families. Very near the top of my to-do list, which the family had unceremoniously handed me on my first day, was something that read, “Sell Nemacolin.” As far as I knew, Nemacolin had been a famous chief of the …
Are Happy Days Here Again?
Given two back-to-back horrific years – 2020 and 2021 – you might have supposed that a kind God would have given us a break in 2022. No such luck – The Evil Years continued. War in Ukraine On the morning of February 24, 2022, the New Year having hardly gotten started, the vaunted Russian army …
Three Years to Forget
In my view we can take 2020, 2021, and 2022 and stick them where the sun don’t shine. I know, I know, I need to keep matters in perspective. Those three years weren’t actually as bad as, say, the Black Death (200 million dead), the Great Depression, World War II (120 million dead). They weren’t …
Final Thoughts on Cuba and Ukraine
“Never in history has Russia made such stupid decisions.” — Russian General Leonid Ivashov What can we learn from the Cuban Missile Crisis way back in 1962 that might be useful in navigating Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats today? Here are some thoughts. Previously in this series: Too Who Blinked, Pt VI Don’t panic Although the …
The Khrushchev Conundrum
“President Kennedy will] make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree.” — Nikita Khrushchev, predicting how JFK would respond to the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Previously in this series:Too Close For Comfort, Pt IV We’ve walked through the actual events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so let’s now look at the negotiations …
Too Close for Comfort
“This was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, it was the most dangerous moment in human history.” — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Last week we watched as the captain and political officer of a Soviet B-59 submarine agreed to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the US Navy ships that had located it. …
The Blackest Day
“It isn’t the first step that concerns me, but both sides escalating to the fourth or fifth step and we don’t go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so.” JFK to EXCOMM Previously in this series: DEFCON 3, Pt II On October 25, 1962, the world was very close to …
DEFCON 3
We are examining the nuclear threats propounded by Vladimir Putin during the Ukraine conflict through the lens of the nuclear threats propounded by his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Previously in this series: Ukraine through the Lens of Cuba, Pt I Last week we looked at the events that led …
Ukraine through the Lens of Cuba
“I’m looking forward to being an old man. I have to, you can’t look back on it.” — Jerry Seinfeld One of the good things about being an Old Coot – maybe the only good thing about being an Old Coot – is that you can vividly remember events other people only know about if they’ve studied …
Beating Long COVID
Vitamins. Okay, I know you are disappointed, you were expecting more. Maybe the rediscovery of a century-old drug everyone had forgotten about but that had magical properties when it came to over-active immune systems. Maybe a new concoction made up of equal parts lithium and kryptonite. Previously in this series: Poor, poor Pitiful Me, Beating …
Poor, Poor Pitiful Me
On December 28, 2021, despite being double vaxxed and boosted, I tested positive for COVID. So much for the vaccine’s 96 percent success rate. Over the following week my symptoms got worse and worse – basically, the flu-from-hell – and eventually I called my doctor. Previously in this series: Beating Long COVID, Part I He …
Beating Long COVID
Among the many things medical science didn’t anticipate about the pandemic was the phenomenon of so-called “long COVID.” People, many of whom who were double vaxxed and boosted, got sick and never got completely better. Symptoms vary, but may include serious fatigue, fever, cough, “brain fog,” vertigo, digestive troubles, loss of smell and/or taste, depression, …