Peregrine

Close to 60% of the KOSPI are now Samsung and SK Hynix. Also this from the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/stock-market-ai-chips-taiwan-korea-01b7d385?mod=hp_lead_pos5

Using AI to write a white paper about AI adoption...what could go wrong https://www.ft.com/content/b3828e92-4961-4b39-84f0-c42f33be3c3f?syn-25a6b1a6=1

You'd be surprised how much of an echo chamber tech CEOs are in. Just take a look at what people on AWS or Amazon Reddit say about their managers - just blind top-down edict to deploy AI wherever possible even if it made no sense. The actual coders have been saying that force-feeding of AI into everything has been counterproductive but the message apparently doesn't get into the CEOs' heads until they see the bills and the mountain of slop created.

Jensen's pumping has become comical at this point. I wonder if it's possible for people to NOT get drunk on their own ego and hype when they're in the limelight this much?

Thanks for this. A succint description of AI's coding issues and aligned with all the data showing the proliferation of AI slop apps with 0 adoption.

I'm sure it is but I wonder if it's a glorified auto-complete and whether it'll ever be reliabily used on its own.

So what's the point of using AI to write all this code if it can't be used, needs to be reviewed and understood line by line and then debugged all over again? On top of that, you're paying ever escalating prices for tokens using the frontier models.

You should all take a look at the bulletin boards of Naver finance to take stock of the level of degeneracy in the Korean market.

All the AI labs (including probably SpaceX) now in talks with the Trump admin to use US taxpayer dollars to invest in them, presumably because private liquidity could be drying up to provide exit liquidity to insiders. Just incredible how much a bunch of these tech elites are seeking to fleece the public. Is there no shame? This might be on par with what Putin and the Russian oligarchs did following the fall of the Soviet Union.

I wonder if what ultimately deflates this bubble is all the bubbles crashing together to compete for liquidity. Two datapoints already: - Bitcoin now down 50% from the peak. Ethereum down 80% from 2024 levels. All other crypto: virtually no bid - Korea experiencing the largest single month of foreign selling ($30 billion out in May) and the largest single year of foreign net selling (~$100 billion YTD) likely because foreigners are selling out of memory for upcoming IPOs On top of this, Google is doing an $85 billion raise in advance of the 3 mega IPOs and S&P just shut off the spigots for passive flows into all of 3 IPOs, choking off the last source of exit liquidity. This may well get pretty ugly.

Head-scratching move from Berkshire.

Didn't see this topic on the front page so figured I'd create one. We've heard a lot about AI and its potential for efficiency - has anyone had any experience in using it to source investment ideas? If so, what were some of the learnings? Did it help at all in streamlining things or uncovering opportunities?

Korea and Japan are pretty similar demographically, economically and culturally. Yet, the Koreans react to stasis by margining heavily and going for broke while the Japanese keep stuffing more money under the mattress. Wonder why that is?

How are they centralizing? It's only Combs that has gotten the axe.

The numbers you posted are end of year so it's hard to get at what was the peak and trough in employee count. But yeah, I took that statement from Ajit at its face.

He fired more than half the people at GEICO.

Buffett praises but never criticizes pubicly. Take a gander at the Geico Reddit forum and you'll understand why he's probably the most hated man in the company's history.

Young coders straight out of school have always been a cost center for companies, especially the largest ones. But they still hired them to develop them so that at some point they could do higher level work. Unless you think that AI ultimately replaces that higher level work, companies will still need people to do that. Moreover, software engineers do a lot more than just coding. It's figuring out the solution even is, the design, testing, reviews, monitoring, troubleshooting, debugging, etc. etc.

I spoke to Microsoft software engineers who have said the complete opposite. The "last mile" work to getting code to actually work properly is still incredibly human-intensive. There is also a whole reddit sub-forum of software engineers working at big tech firms disputing the claims that their CEOs are making. At the very least, these anecdotes suggest that AI isn't gonna render obsolete an entire employment class. Improvements? Sure. 10x improvement? Probably not.

It's not even clear whether AI will bring any real positive benefit for the most obvious application and the one most often touted for obsolescence: coding. The only study I found measuring AI efficiency gains in coding showed that AI made programmers even slower. The coders spent so much time trying to figure out what the hell the AI was doing that they may as well just saved their time by writing it from scratch: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us-economy/684128/ So yeah, AI can write a crap load of lines. Doesn't mean that it'll be useful.

The build out of railroads and fiber optic lines of past eras were real, long-lasting infrastructure. Nvidia GPUs go obsolescent in 3 years. About 60% of the freakin spend on data centers are for these chips. People are trying to draw analogies of this boom to prior ones but it's not even close to the same. My broader point wasn't even about philanthropy but about how the ultra-wealthy in tech circles seem to live increasingly in their own delusion.

It's group think and the only company that doesn't fall for it is Apple. They never overhired during the pandemic so a bunch of Gen Z kids can sit around doing nothing, they never took sides in the dumb culture wars of this country, they never get involved in dumb moonshot projects and they're certainly not lighting hundreds of billions on fire in a race that no one knows how to measure or for what purpose. They're like the only sensible big tech company.

Because these are real problems afflicting the country that wouldn't cost even a fraction of what AI spend is costing now. More importantly, no one even knows what the hell this AI spend is going to be good for. The way these guys are spending money to create Digital God that will somehow solve all of the world's problems seems like a total joke. More like a huge amount of money being lit on fire in a speculative heap.

I'm of the belief that these tech founders/CEOs, master-of-the-universe types are so completely out of touch with this world that they might as well not be on it. In the US, we have a drug epidemic that's claiming over 70,000 lives a year and rendering nearly a million homeless, epic income inequality, completely inability to even fix a damn pothole or get a permit to build anything including housing and all these guys can obsess over is spending trillions to build a digital god? I feel like I'm living in a simulation.

At least fiber optic lines lasts a long time and has a very obvious benefit that people clearly wanted (high speed internet). Over half of AI CAPEX is going into NVIDIA GPUs that are only useful for 3 years and on top of that no one even knows what it's good for and if anyone will pay for it.