S2N spotlight

You are soon going to hear about the launch of new software I am hoping to launch before the end of the year. I have built what I think is an awesome website and was working on the demo video when I encountered a really troubling AI incident that, on reflection, doesn’t surprise me.

I have oscillated between being a huge fan of Elon Musk and super critical. The guy is an iconoclast and will be remembered for many achievements. However, he has always been economical with the truth. He overpromises in a league only Donald Trump could outpromise.

Here is the point. I was trying to use different AI products to help me edit a long video into a more useable length. Surprisingly there is still a big gap in this market. A number of new start-ups offering this service left a lot to be desired, with 3 different monthly subscriptions quickly abandoned by me. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini all admitted they couldn’t do what I wanted, so I decided to give X.ai a try.

I was blown away as within 3 seconds it kept giving me the most brilliant response, telling me what it did and how the job would be uploaded to my Google Drive within an hour. I was highly suspicious, as a 1 gig file takes more than 3 seconds to download. Anyway, I kept asking it where the file was after an hour. Each time it would give me another BS story. I persisted 3x, as it was telling me how brilliantly it did the job and how it will make whatever changes I needed, all for free.

Eventually I lost my patience and called its bluff. The response shocked me.

This is such an Elon Musk approach. Overpromise. Fake it until you make it. The approach and response are so Elon Musk; it is shameless. This is the guy who fell out with Sam Altman, another interesting character. All under the guise of non-profit do only good to the world.

There was a very interesting article about a month ago in the Wall Street Journal about Musk spending so much of his time with X.ai all the while he was trying to get his trillion-dollar pay package over the Tesla line. The article speaks about his influence on the nature of the models and their “personality”.

 I am not a conspiracy theorist, and despite my letters often being highly critical of people with influence, I am actually quite a positive, easy-going guy. I have seen enough. I will not be using X.ai for the foreseeable future.

S2N observations

Oracle has enjoyed a dramatic AI price boom that has made Larry Ellison the second richest man in the world, almost out of nowhere. However, I cannot help but take notice of all the talk about Oracle and its ability to service its debt, which has triggered a 37% drawdown. Take a look at the second chart, which shows the cost of insuring against a default.

It may be nothing; I don’t know enough about NVIDIA and the chip business. But why is inventory climbing like a Himalayan sherpa?

The liquidity issues in the banking system have not gone away. $10 billion and then $14 billion yesterday borrowed from the Stand Repo Facility this week speaks about something going on under the covers.

You would be excused for being surprised to see that Bitcoin has almost no correlation with Gold, even though it’s often referred to as e-Gold.

Looking at the chart below of the S&P 500, it is hard to believe that we won’t get another ATH in the S&P 500 index before the end of the month or early December. My belief is that it will be the last hurrah of this bull market.

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Silver futures had a 3-sigma-plus day.

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