What I Read This Week…

President Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, the S&P 500 reaches an all-time high, and scientists find evidence that non-brain cells in the body can 'remember' patterns in the environment

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Caught My Eye…

• President Donald Trump achieved a historic victory in the 2024 presidential election, securing 312 electoral votes to Vice President Harris's 226 and completing an unprecedented sweep of all seven battleground states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. This marked the largest electoral victory margin since Obama's 2012 win. The scope of Trump's victory extended beyond electoral college votes: he secured over 74 million votes, the highest raw vote total ever achieved by a Republican presidential candidate, with a margin of approximately 4 million votes over Harris, making him the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. Particularly notable was Trump's performance in traditionally Democratic states like New York and California, where he secured 44% and 40% of the vote respectively, marking improvements of 12 and 6 points from his 2020 showing. President Trump addressed supporters after the race was called, outlining his vision for what he termed would be the "golden age of America."

• The S&P 500 reached an all-time high this week, passing 6,000 points on Friday. What drove this all-time high? First, Trump's election victory drove broad market optimism as the market priced in tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment more conducive to business. Bank stocks exemplified this trend, with stock prices for JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs rising by 8-13% this week on expectations of deregulation and increased deal activity. Second, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 25 basis points this week, marking its second consecutive rate cut in this rate-cutting cycle. Jerome Powell indicated at Thursday's FOMC meeting that the U.S. economy was doing well, citing strong activity and labor market strength with unemployment at 4.1%. Powell also indicated that, given the data he was seeing, the Federal Reserve would exercise patience before making further rate cuts.

• Banks have loaned more than $11 billion to cloud computing companies using Nvidia's H100 chips as collateral. Because H100 chips are such a valuable asset today, cloud computing providers like CoreWeave and Lambda are borrowing billions of dollars, partly to buy even more H100s to expand their AI infrastructure. For these loans to be paid back, the underlying assumption is that somewhere along the value chain—namely, the AI companies building on these cloud platforms—must create products and services that generate enough revenue to eventually repay these loans.

• Scientists have found evidence that cells in your body (not in the brain) "remember" patterns in their environment. How did they find evidence for this hypothesis? Scientists performed experiments with two types of human cells—kidney and neuroblastoma cells—to see how they respond to chemical signals that activate specific protein pathways. For both types of cells, they compared one group that was exposed to these chemicals for one 12-minute period versus one group that was exposed to the same chemicals for four 3-minute exposures. The group of cells that received the four short exposures showed nearly 400% higher activity than the untreated group after 24 hours, while the group that got one long exposure showed only about a 30% increase. This was evidence that the group with multiple breaks gave the cells enough time to "remember" and build up their response to the chemical exposure. Before this experiment, scientists thought only brain cells could detect these kinds of patterns. The discovery that regular body cells can distinguish between one long signal and several short ones, and respond differently, suggests that pattern recognition is a basic feature of all cells, not just those in our brains.

Other Reading…

• AI Groups Rush to Redesign Model Testing and Create New Benchmarks (Financial Times)

• ChatGPT is Transforming Peer Review — How Can We Use It Responsibly? (Nature)

• The U.S. Ordered TSMC to Halt Shipments to China of Chips Used in AI Applications (Reuters)

• Everything I've Learned So Far About Running Local LLMs (Null Program)

• Bitcoin Breaks Record, Hitting $80,000 for First Time (Bloomberg)

• Taiwan Considers Big U.S. Defense Purchases as Overture to Trump (Financial Times)

• India is Undergoing a Stock Market Revolution (The Economist)

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