Silicon Valley – Great TV Show, Lousy Bank. GPT-4’s Secret Bada Boom, Heating Pools with Old Photos – Plus More! #157

Grüezi!?I’m Adrian Monck, and welcome to this newsletter featuring seven things that caught my attention this week.

Also in this edition – warmth from wasted warmth, repowering paralysed limbs, and flying carbon free.

Sharing is caring –?Please share this newsletter!

–––

1?? Silicon Valley’s Bank Goes Bust

Banks are meant to be boring. Even in Silicon Valley.

Why did Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) fail? Read financial crisis expert Charles Read.

TL;DR:

• SVB did what banks have always done: it borrowed short and lent long.
• But short-term interest rates shot up and its long-term investments dropped in value.
• This is the kind of risk boring institutions ought to hedge, but having not hedged that risk SVB needed to find more cash to balance its books.
• Those dollars were no longer coming via fresh deposits from exciting new VC-backed Silicon Valley startups.
• When your bank says it needs to find more money, most customers start looking for a new bank. Which tends to cause ... panic ...

In SVB’s case, Jimmy Stewart and his fiancee were not behind the counter with their honeymoon cash to tide things over.

Absent a reassuring Mr Stewart and depositors expect the government to step in.

There are no libertarians in a financial fox hole explains Martin Wolf in the FT:

“Few people are capitalists when threatened by losing money they regarded as safe and nobody is better than a capitalist at explaining how essential their wealth is to the health of the economy.”

??Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal and Dan Davies talk SVB here.

–––

2???Bada Boom Bada Bing!

Here’s a Secret About ChatGPT-4!

Bing, the Pepsi of search engines, is suddenly cool!

Bing has been secretly supercharged with the horsepower of the hottest AI tool in Silicon Valley, Chat-GPT 4.

Wharton’s Ethan Mollick (a must-follow for this stuff) figured this secret out a while back, and wrote a handy guide to using Bing for research, ideas – pretty much anything in fact. And the waitlist is off...

Meanwhile, the un-Binged version (which doesn’t connect to the internet) is previewed here, and if you’re paying for GPT-Plus you can play with it right away.

On the minus side, disinformation purveyors have a new tool to play with.

Image AI is getting better too.

Just don’t look too closely...

??Reid Hoffman’s already used it to write a book.

–––

3?? Warmth from Wasted Warmth

As Europeans leave winter behind, a reminder of the heat they left behind.

? An English swimming pool is getting heated by a data centre – your old photos are warming bathers.

–––

4?? Flying Carbon Free?

Coming to skies near you by 2050...

? Although the journey may be harder than the industry thinks.

–––

5?? It’s the Home of the Galapagos Islands

But Ecuador wants to be known for something else.

??Ecuador – also the world’s biggest shrimp exporter.

–––

6???The Arms Race Pays Off

This isn’t weaponry. It’s tech helping people move limbs.

??Once you’ve fixed arms, fix hands.

–––

7?? The Alternative SVB Explainer

This one’s a little funnier.

From the brilliant Dan Toomey of Morning Brew.

??Entertaining reading on Beatrice di Caro’s?book club podcast.

–––

If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!

Best,

Adrian