This week was the planned Opening Ceremony of our fund management company on Wed. The founder had chosen a few auspicious dates/times for us about a month ago to pick one out of 3 dates with a specific timing of between 1100 to 1300. We decided to go for 06 Mar, this Wed.
It was raining quite often a few days before and we were worried as the venue was to be held at the outdoor space located on the 6th floor of our office building. Thankfully, the morning turned out to be sunny and we managed to kick start the event promptly at 1100.
I had to do 2 speeches, one short one at the start to welcome our colleagues and guests before the Emcee led our founder and guest of honour to strike a huge traditional Chinese Gong to kick start the event. He had received it as a present previously and we thought it would be auspicious for him to finally use it in our ceremony. It was a bonafide Chinese Gong as he used all his might (and he was a big guy) to strike it and the sound was awesome. Standing beside the gong, I could feel the sound waves going through me like the after-effects of a grenade explosion during my BMT days LOL.
We then had several group photo-taking sessions before the lion dance began. It was a 20-minute performance where the new lions had to get their eyes and body dotted to come alive. It was the first time I witnessed this eye-dotting ceremony. The dance was followed by the lion dancers framing vegetables and oranges into characters and finally revealing Chinese banners with auspicious wordings for a great photo opportunity.
It was then my turn to do my second speech. I highlighted the key senior persons within the firm who helped make all this happen before introducing our team members. I related to Climate Change/Global Warming and how this led us to our strategy of wanting to create Sustainable and Purposeful Investment funds. Finally, we had a ribbon cutting session to officially announce the grand opening of our company. Everyone then proceeded to another floor for a networking buffet lunch.
The event turned out to be much better than I could have imagined. We managed to spend time with our founder/sponsor and got to know him better. Hopefully, he is happy with the opening ceremony. Other subsidiaries of our group of companies were also present for the event. Our external service providers were also invited so that we could put a name to the faces. This will help cement the working relationship to ensure that we can all work together going forward.
The other big thing that happened this week – Taylor Swift came to town! She had been contracted to perform for 6 nights of sold-out concerts for a total crowd of more than 300,000+ attendees. Visitors had arrived in S’pore from all around the Asia region to attend her concerts. It was a proud moment for the authorities as they pulled off this coup and executed it after more than a year of planning and negotiations.
This tiny red dot is aiming to position itself as a prime spot for marque events to attract overseas visitors after the pandemic. It is the first country within ASEAN to try to jump-start itself after COVID-19 to attract the tourism dollar.
Seeing the results of the first 5 concerts – tonight will be the 6th and final one – I can safely predict that this had been a smashing success. It has been forecasted that the country will benefit to the tune of at least SGD 500+ million of tourism revenue, thanks to all the attendees from our neighbouring countries. Most had planned a vacation here, just to make it for the concerts.
There had been politicians complaining about S’pore getting an exclusive deal with Tay Tay. But hey, that is strategic business planning, no? It’s a deal that her team had accepted, with whatever subsidies they were given. One central location to cater to all her fans in one of the most populated regions in the world.
Hats off to our authorities for having the vision and foresight to plan and boohoo to the sore losers… Their opposition politicians may not even allow them to spend such amounts in the first place. May the place with the best infrastructure to host win future concert events.
Finally, more AI news this week. Anthropic is made up of people who had left OpenAI due to disagreements on the direction of the firm a few years ago. They then decided to create a new AI company to craft the vision they wanted for AI to develop. FTX’s SBF famously invested $400 million in them during his wild spending days and this investment has grown in value to at least 3 to 5 times now. Anthropic has quietly positioned itself as the small guy that was planning to come out with an AI giant killer.
Anthropic just unveiled its Claude 3 model family consisting of Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Claude 3 Opus outperforms GPT-4 and Gemini. It is multi-modal and can process charts and technical diagrams. It also has a 200k context with support for up to 1 million tokens for select users. It also has a near-perfect recall.
Some users planted tiny sentences within the huge stack of data and Claude 3 could recall them when questioned about them. Amazingly, we see new AI systems going one-up against the top competitors every other week. An AI war is ramping up and no signs of a slowdown any time soon.
Lastly, an update on the saga of Elon Musk suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for promises made and broken previously. The big news of him stating that the founders had all decided on a non-profit venture at the beginning. Later, he quit in dismay when they could not stay true to the non-profit path after he sunk in millions of his own money to jumpstart OpenAI in the first place.
OpenAI took some time to respond and when they did this week, they revealed another side of the story that Elon had conveniently forgotten to mention. Elon is known to be an impulsive guy who sometimes cannot recollect the negative aspects of himself as he will block it out from his memories. It’s like Steve Jobs’s “Reality Distortion Field” – a strong will and the ability to bend any reality to fit the desired purpose.
OpenAI revealed some damaging internal emails where Elon was gunning for-profit and insisted that they merge with Tesla and not the big boys like Google. He wanted to arm twist his way to bring them into his fold but did not succeed.
With egg on his face now, I suspect that Elon is going to drop the case soon. He probably wanted his lawyers to teach OpenAI and Sam Altman a lesson but did not give them all the facts of the case to begin with. I guess whatever the richest man on earth wants, the best lawyers will line up to serve him.
Just like what happened to Twitter (now called X), it started as an impulse and then he got stuck with it. Anyway, he hinted that X is now months away from being able to handle financial transactions soon… AI news will continue to be exciting and unexpected for the months to come as US election fever will bring its use to another level…
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