Ten from the weekend 11/03: A few interesting reads that I came across

Gopi Vikranth
Nov 4 · 2 min read

Focus areas: Blockchain| ML-AI| Data science/Analytics applications |eSports| CRISPR| Design thinking

1. Internet and the third estate: https://stratechery.com/2019/the-internet-and-the-third-estate/

2. Aerial autonomy (drones) is likely going to happen before autonomous cars -https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-drones-are-coming-11571995806

3. Half of firms are ill-prepared for a downturn -Banks Must Act Now or Risk Becoming a ‘Footnote’: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-21/banks-must-act-now-or-risk-becoming-a-footnote-mckinsey-says|| https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-banking-annual-review-2019-the-last-pit-stop-time-for-bold-late-cycle-moves

4. QR codes -They’re More Powerful Than You Think — For most of Asian marketing and analytics data, QR codes is must. https://a16z.com/2019/10/30/the-power-of-qr-codes/

5. Facial recognition, AI and the data it generates- there are many sides to the issue, but the tech is going to be a commodity very soon… https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/9/6/face-recognition

6. The combination of cloud, social, and mobile took gaming beyond a small base of just console- and PC-gamers to a massive player base. But the underlying business model — the concept of “free-to-play”, built on top of games-as-a-service — may have been the real innovation -https://a16z.com/2019/09/28/business-models-gaming-platform-shifts-blockchain-crypto-collaboration-creativity/

7. Product -User fit: https://a16z.com/2019/09/16/product-user-fit-comes-before-product-market-fit/

8. Pinterest Recommendation engine: https://onezero.medium.com/how-pinterest-built-one-of-silicon-valleys-most-successful-algorithms-9101afdfd0dd

9. Alpha star — Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z

10. Open AI’s — Agents play Hide and seek, definitely one of the more interesting AI papers in the recent past — https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/|| also a 3 min video summary on what they did and what the agents did — https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=177&v=kopoLzvh5jY

Gopi Vikranth

Written by

Associate Partner @ ZS, Data Science and Machine Learning

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