The Hillsberg Report

Quote of the week

A monk once said: "Imagine being bitten by a snake, and instead of focusing on healing from the poison, you chase the snake to understand why it bit you and to prove that you didn't deserve it"

Nvidia at CES 2025

The world’s largest tech showcase has once again transformed Las Vegas into a hub of cutting-edge innovation and possibility. From AI-powered solutions redefining industries to smart home ecosystems promising seamless living, this year’s event was packed with announcements that are set to shape the decade ahead. I want to focus on the headliner keynote from Jensen Huang.

What you see Jensen holding in the image above is the Grace Blackwell NVLink72, improving performance per watt by a factor of four and performance per dollar by a factor of three from the current top-of-the-line chips. This keynote was simply a masterclass on staying ahead of the market and maintaining a competitive moat. Jensen unleashed a swath of new products, built around Nvidia's vision for the future. There are too many details to call out in this short newsletter, but here are some I found interesting:

• The new RTX Blackwell family of chips, ushering in a new era of video game engineering possibilities, at an incredibly low price
• The RTX Blackwell 5070 Laptop, enabling powerful AI model usage on the go
• The least-creepy creepy AI voice I've ever heard
• A definition for AI Agents: AI that can Perceive, Reason, Plan, and Act
• A discussion on the three (discovered) AI scaling laws
• An AI agent ecosystem powered by Nvidia
• The announcement of Windows WSL2 as THE OS for Nvidia's vision of the AI future
• A quote from Jensen: "The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future"
• A new open-source physical world foundational model - Nvidia Cosmos
• "Thor" chips designed for usage in autonomous cars and robotics
• Lastly, a desktop supercomputer smaller than a Mac mini

You can find the full keynote here.

Meme of the week

Southern California wildfires: A policy, science, and economic perspective

The SoCal fires have been all over national news for days. During this week's episode of the All In podcast, David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya broke down their perspectives on the science and policy behind this catastrophe.

High-wind events, including Santa Ana winds over 100 mph, are becoming more frequent, while extreme heat, flooding, and drought add to the region’s vulnerability.

The following image reviews this year's rainfall in specific SoCal areas. The highlighted column represents the percentage of normal rainfall that fell this year. A 0% for the location means that the location received 0% of the normal amount of rain. That number sounds wild, but it should be known that this area has always experienced lengthy wet and dry cycles.

I am not going to take a personal position on the leadership, policy, and regulations, but from what I am learning, it is clear that California's regulations and policy have hampered the region's ability to maintain fire safety. Regulation on clearing out dead trees and brush, along with leadership decisions on water management, need to be evaluated.

Another angle to investigate is the role of insurance companies. It was widely reported that State Farm cancelled 1,600 policies in the affected area a few months before the fires occurred.

My stance is this: Who can blame them? Insurance companies are heavily regulated, and their prices are directly controlled by the states they operate in.

When a combination of 1) increasingly destructive weather events, 2) heavy regulation and poor decision making impacting location safety, and 3) an inability to raise rates all come together, it simply becomes impossible for an insurance company to make a positive return.

So how do we handle insurance moving forward? For one, people may stop choosing to live in areas where major weather events are becoming more common. Additionally, state residents will likely be looking for changes to leadership and policy to ensure their safety.

If there was any insurance regulation addition to be investigated, it would be a requirement of insurance companies to have slower cancellation policies with decreasing premiums and coverage over time to zero. When someone has been paying their premium for 30 years only to have it cancelled three months before the worst event of their life, that's a problem. Who knows, that may be a terrible idea, but it feels similar to crypto rug-pulling to me.

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone impacted from this terrible event.

How to measure stuff

The worst thing a business can do is not represent goals with metrics. KPIs and OKRs are two tools for this.

Tech Byte - Train your own models

I've been training custom models on a platform called Replicate. This tool is great for non-super-technical folks to get really cool applications and results. How I recommend attacking this is: 1) identify what kind of output you're looking for (image, text, sound, video), 2) search Replicate for top used models, 3) search YouTube for training tutorials for that specific model.

As an example, check out this AI-generated image produced by a model called FLUX, which I trained on images of my face.

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