Category: Uncategorized

I have always been interested in how American politics had degenerated to the current state of facts doesn’t matter and it’s us against them mentality. We see a total distrust of the political system and media leading to the widespread belief in conspiracy theories and the “trust no one” mindset.

This led America down the path of Trumpism and divided the nation into the current fractious “us versus them” fight for power. Each side is so embedded with its idealogy that anything the other side champions has to be brought down regardless of whether it is for the good of the majority or not. The rest of the world looking into America wonders how it has gone to this state as it becomes the laughing stock of democracy going mad.

I have always been a fan of the insightful writings of Kishore Mahbubani and this has been reinforced with the reading of his 2020 book “Has China won?”. He has also started to appear more often on my TikTok feed as some of his speeches to Western audiences argue with simple facts on how the world is underestimating China and not giving it the due respect of a rising superpower. He also advises the US on what he sees as wrong from an outsider’s point of view and provides possible solutions.

Recently, I came across another book from him that he had offered for free online called “The Asian 21st Century” which I am currently reading:

“This open-access book consists of essays written by Kishore Mahbubani to explore the challenges and dilemmas faced by the West and Asia in an increasingly interdependent world village and intensifying geopolitical competition.

The contents cover four parts: Part One – The End of the Era of Western Domination. The major strategic error that the West is now making is to refuse to accept this reality. The West needs to learn how to act strategically in a world where they are no longer the number 1.

Part Two – The Return of Asia. From the years 1 to 1820, the largest economies in the world were Asian. After 1820 and the rise of the West, however, great Asian civilizations like China and India were dominated and humiliated. The twenty-first century will see the return of Asia to the centre of the world stage.

Part Three – The Peaceful Rise of China. The shift in the balance of power to the East has been most pronounced in the rise of China. While this rise has been peaceful, many in the West have responded with considerable concern over the influence China will have on the world order.

Part Four – Globalization, Multilateralism and Cooperation. Many of the world’s pressing issues, such as COVID-19 and climate change, are global issues and will require global cooperation to deal with. In short, human beings now live in a global village. States must work with each other, and we need a world order that enables and facilitates cooperation in our global village.”

He often used the term Plutocracy to explain the reason behind the current state of American politics. Plutocracy is a state governed by the wealthy for the rich that ignores most of its citizens’ wishes. The bottom 50% had grown to distrust the government as the rich got richer with special tax cuts while they had been ignored and seen a decline in their living standards. They do not trust whatever mainstream media is telling, calling truths alternate facts and rebelling against anything that the other side may say.

Kishore cited the Jan 2010 Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” decision to allow unlimited campaign spending to ensure the election of candidates sensitive to the donor’s interest as a major turning point to turbocharge plutocracy into American politics. Corporations with much bigger pockets can overwhelm individual voters to command decisive victories of elected officials to do their bidding and favour the company’s financial agenda. Take, for example, the gun lobby and pharmaceutical companies. They overrule the majority’s wishes for gun control and lower medical prices.

This in turn has led to a despair of hopelessness and feeling that the common people are screwed over yet again by the elites. Enter Trump to stir up their emotions to form a strong voter base of the disenfranchised. They will follow him to the end of the earth, regardless of the lies he feeds them.

The American 2-party system has made the situation worse by pitching us against them, an attitude of always trying to oppose whatever the other side is trying to do. The whole population suffers as nothing gets done even when bipartisan support for bills is achieved. Everyone is fighting to make the other side look bad as a main objective.

The upcoming Nov presidential elections will deepen this wide divide even further. Kishore argues that the first basic action to resolve must be to recognize that plutocracy exists in American politics. But no politician has the guts to openly admit this because it will be political suicide. They can only continue to play the game till its bitter end.

This is a sad situation that is unravelling a superpower nation from within. We outsiders are watching the decline of America. It is like watching a soap opera drama with a predictable end result. Can America come out of this? We all hope so but the probability looks slim. Ballooning deficits spent on the rich and newer military conflicts with zero plans for infrastructure development (zero new roads/bridges, no high-speed rail system or new airports)… The signs are all there of a decaying society bent on self-destruction.

There is just so much AI-related news coming out every week that it is so hard to track which are the ones that will change the world and which are just the flavour-of-the-day types that will fade away.

But the trend is clear newer innovations will continue to amaze us and set the tone for material changes on how we see and do things in the future. Just on productivity and creativity, AI will easily outshine any normal human being with its speed and think-out-of-the-box moments that were only unimaginable a year ago.

Take, for example, OpenAI’s reveal in the last 2 weeks. When asked recently about AI threats from other major players, Sam Altman had hinted cryptically that “you have never seen anything yet”. And they delivered with a bang – an update on Sora plus their latest Voice Engine sneak peek.

OpenAI provided an update on Sora called “First Impressions” that showcases what creative minds can do with their video creation product. Short videos made by AI without a single human actor let us know how threatened the Hollywood industry can feel. All it takes is a computer to create videos via word prompts. The first short video featured: Air Head by Shy Kids (a multimedia company) is a quirky story of a man with a ballon as his head and the challenges he faces.

Given that Sora is only beta-tested by a few selected creative types, one can only imagine the possibilities once this product is rolled out to the public. Actors will get a threatened sense of redundancy. AI-manufactured videos can replace anyone in the creative industry.

Then a week later, OpenAI shocked the world again with its latest product launch named Voice Engine. It literally can clone the voices of anyone with just a single 15-second audio sample. Can you imagine the possibilities of doing deepfakes on just about anyone? Combining with Sora, a teenager can do serious mischief to convince a naive audience of certain narratives and conspiracies. OpenAI is treading carefully and has yet to decide how and if they will deploy the technology at scale. It is not releasing this to anyone for fear of the power it can unleash until it can determine what guard rails it can put in place first.

Last weekend was a long 3 day break thanks to the Good Friday holiday. My wife and I took advantage of the break by opting to go for a short overnight vacation at JB (Johore Bahru). The night before on Thursday, an all-time high record was set when 510,000 persons crossed the border into Malaysia.

Many S’poreans are taking advantage of the strong SGD against MYR (MYR 3.5 = SGD 1) for shopping, buying everything they can find. The currencies used to be on par many years ago. S’pore has become such an expensive place to live in and JB is just a short hop away to enjoy luxuries at a fraction of the cost.

We parked our car at the Turf Club and walked to Khatib MRT station to take the CW1 bus to bring us to the immigration checkpoints of both countries on Friday morning. From leaving home at 0930, we finally cleared the Malaysian customs at noon.

The rest of the day was mall shopping with a one-hour massage before checking into the Opero Hotel we booked at Southkey. Due to the long weekend, the cost was higher than usual at SGD 150 for the night. Transport was easily arranged with the Grab app and was relatively cheap when we compared it to SGD. Evening time was a happy hour drink and then dinner near the hotel.

We had a leisurely morning (gym and breakfast) before getting a 2 hours massage, followed by a nice late lunch at a Michelin-mentioned famous fish soup restaurant before heading back to S’pore after 3 pm. It was a refreshing short break for us and we felt that out bodies were loosen up and relaxed after 3 hours of massages within 24 hours. The tight knots around my neck were eased up thanks to the final hour of painful kneading.

I am optimistic that JB can become like Shenzhen to HK for S’pore. Hopefully, a meaningful SEZ (Special Economic Zone) MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) can be concluded soon. The past failures and false alarms of growth should be lessened as the current Malaysian king from Johore is pro cooperating and the current government’s thinking is aligned with him. There is so much mutual benefit that can be had with closer cooperation between Johore and S’pore.

Just when you thought that Nvidia cannot surprise the market anymore, it did it again at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on Monday. CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote announcement of its new products blew the competition away. Again!

Just less than a month ago, Nvidia’s stunning quarterly financial results (which I wrote about in an earlier blog) proved that the whole AI community is beholden to Nvidia’s Hopper H100 chips. It had such a stranglehold on this niche GPU chip that the US government had to ban China from buying it.

Never in the history of financial markets had we seen a Top 5 company in the world announcing it had just tripled its revenues, net income surged 769% and earnings per share up 486% year on year… Wow!

Analysts are still trying to catch their breath to recalibrate what the expected share price will be as earnings blew up the old forecast. We saw its share price jumping by more than $100 overnight to reach new highs as it’s capitalization breached $2 trillion.

And now they have to redo their spreadsheets again after seeing on Monday for the first time what Jensen Huang has in store for their pipeline. The lineup was amazing and would bring AI to the next level. While very technical in nature, his presentation indicates that Nvidia is ready to bring the world to a never before seen level of compute power which would turbo charge new breakthroughs in tech.

Jensen announced 3 items on Monday that were earth shattering: (1) Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell superchip with 208 Billion transistors. It is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion parameter models. Nvidia said that the system can deploy a 27-trillion-parameter model. That’s much larger than even the biggest models, such as GPT-4, which reportedly has 1.7 trillion parameters.

Blackwell is also 2.5 times faster than Hopper in training AI (feeding AI models data to improve their performance). And it’s five times faster than its Hopper architecture at inference, the process by which AI models can draw conclusions from new data.

(2) DGX SuperPOD purpose-built for training and inferencing trillion-parameter generative AI models and (3) Project GROOT a general-purpose foundation model designed for humanoid robots, enabling them to learn from minimal human demonstrations.

Before competitors like ARM can even try to catch up to Nvidia’s Hopper chip, Jensen has just upped the game again to another level with the Blackwell chip that would be multiple times faster than the H100. Coupled with Project Groot that will ease the programming and transformation of robotics training, the whole development process will be sped up by leaps and bounds.

The new GPU speeds will also help to accelerate AI development as an increase in computing speed will greatly enhance the LLMs neural network’s deep learning absorption of unlimited data.

Analyst now have to evaluate the company in new light and assume that the demand for Blackwell could create a stampede of new orders. That could mean a repeat of another amazing quarterly result of revenue. The stock price has just crossed $900, a new high. Forecast of Nvidia stock is now into the 1.2 to 1.4k range as profits are expected to blip up again.

There are also as many new AI news coming out this week again. Seems like Apple is trying to pair up with Google Gemini to head off the OpenAI onslaught. ChatGPT 5.0 launch is expected to be around the corner soon. Multi-modal input/output is the minimum standard now for new entrants to this highly competitive AI war where only the big boys can play in and invest billions of funding. Everyone wants to be number one as being second is like admitting defeat.

There is a fear that AI governance, guard rails and boundary settings are being pushed aside and ignored for the sake of being a champion in this high stakes I-win-you-lose game. Data is plentiful and LLMs will crunch trillions of variables easily very soon with the help of the new Nvidia Blackwell chips.

What is a career pivot? It is a planned, purposeful change in career direction. It can be a move to a related field, or to something completely new. Whatever its direction, a pivot is a meaningful change that requires thought and careful planning.

An ex-colleague had recently asked me why I hadn’t considered writing about my pivot, given the new role I had just started in. He had already successfully pivoted from an investment banking role to a career consultant, written a book and had 3 million LinkedIn followers. My new role was a complete departure from my previous banking career. While it is too early to say that the pivot was successful, it started me thinking about writing about this topic.

One wonders if it is even possible for a mid-career person in their late forties to early fifties to make this transition. The probability of succeeding is low as many factors are in play here that could easily derail the journey. Many of us are uncertain as to what we what to do next when reaching this stage of our lives. To do something more meaningful and purposeful as oppose to just aiming for financial gain alone.

I often wonder about this as I wanted to do something different, since 2018 when I left my last banking job. It was a disastrous 9 months there,where I tried my best shot at trying to do a decent job but failed miserably. 3 months into this new job, the new supervisor saw me as a mismatch to the role, compared to the person that had originally hired me but lost his job due to office politics.

At that point in my halftime moment, I was at a loss as to what I wanted to do next. I didn’t want to go back to the banking world as I knew that there would be hardly any available roles for me and that my age (52) then would have been a disadvantage. Ageism is very real in the financial sector where bosses are getting younger nowadays. Who would want to manage an old fart?

Luckily, 2 opportunities happened during that time that enlightened me and showed me the way to the next stage in my life journey. These 2 trigger points helped me stay focused towards the beginning of my career pivot into my present job as a CEO of a sustainability startup.

The first trigger point was the pivot into a part-time consulting career. An ex-colleague wanted someone with treasury experience to help him with a Myanmar microfinance company. He had recently become the CEO and needed experienced bankers to visit the country monthly as consultants to train his team. Subsequently, I stayed in this role for atotal of 4 years until COVID-19 and a military coup disrupted everything that made me decide to end the engagement.

During this time, I actively sought out other project based consultancy jobs which could fill my time. Through the next few years, I managed to secure a few, thanks to personal contacts and networking. One was a 4 months project linked to an upcoming Neo digital bank that was most rewarding to me .

The second trigger point also happened at the right time and place. Given that I had a lot of time on my hands as consultancy contract work is usually either for a short period or just a few days a month, I had to focus my energies on a new and separate venture.

The timing was perfect as the government had just launched the Skillsfuture program. With big subsidies, it encouraged mid-career citizens to learn new skills, to stay relevant to the workforce and market trends. I just had to narrow down to the topics I thought were important and become a student again.

I decided that with my previous work experience, I could use technology to help me analyze data to become a better business consultant. I also wanted to challenge myself, to prove that an old dog can learn new tricks.

After taking a few short courses, I decided to be more ambitious. I signed up for a 1-year part-time course to earn a diploma in Business Analytics via evening classes. It was challenging at first to be in a class where I was the oldest and the average age was below 30. At the graduation ceremony, which my wife kindly made time to attend, I was so proud that an uncle like me could complete a diploma after having left school 28 years ago.

That led me to take up more challenging courses that interest me. At that time, AI, Blockchain, Cloud Computing and Big Data (A B C D of Fintech) were subjects that consumed me. There were so many Skillsfuture options that helped me deep dive into them.

I did overseas study trips in 2018/19 to Hangzhou and Seoul to learn about Alibaba e-commerce and Blockchain, plus as many short courses as I could. I was hungry for new knowledge and they excited me. I discovered that I knew very little and there was an infinite lifelong learning opportunity for me to pursue.

The following course I took up was the 6 month full-time IBM AI course which happened during the pandemic in 2021. I learnt to attend classes, do project discussions and exams using Zoom and other online tools effectively. Because of Covid, we only had one face-to-face meeting with my class of 20 during that time!

In early 2022, I signed up for a more technical course to challenge myself further. It was a 4 month NUS Fintech innovation course that tested me to the fullest. I was probably lost during most of the online classes as one programming mistake would throw me out and I would be unable to catch up.

My Myanmar consultancy job exposed me to the ESG aspect which deepened my understanding of Impact investments on the Social side via microfinance. It complimented my years with a sovereign fund from 2012 to 2016 investing in the operational management of companies in developing countries like China, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam.

Another ex-colleague started to approach me in late 2022 with the idea of setting up a group of companies focused on sustainable investing. He wanted to set up a fund management company and apply for a license with the authorities. He invited me in to participate in the application process to help set up the company.

Things seemed to be coming together for me as the last few years of consultancy and Skillsfuture courses were aligning to help me grasp this new opportunity. I had a passion for these areas and they felt meaningful for me to pursue further.

We got the approval late last year and I am now in my 6th month of working full-time. I had stopped work and went into semi-retirement mode since 2018. There are still many things I would need to do before I can say that we have successfully pulled this new opportunity off. There are so many moving variables which can go wrong. Raising funds from investors and getting projects lined up is no easy task.

Have I successfully completed a career pivot and do I have a good story to tell yet? Only time will tell. The finishing line is still ahead but my half time journey looks very exciting ahead.

This week was the planned Opening Ceremony of our fund management company on Wed. The founder had chosen a few auspicious dates/times for us about a month ago to pick one out of 3 dates with a specific timing of between 1100 to 1300. We decided to go for 06 Mar, this Wed.

It was raining quite often a few days before and we were worried as the venue was to be held at the outdoor space located on the 6th floor of our office building. Thankfully, the morning turned out to be sunny and we managed to kick start the event promptly at 1100.

I had to do 2 speeches, one short one at the start to welcome our colleagues and guests before the Emcee led our founder and guest of honour to strike a huge traditional Chinese Gong to kick start the event. He had received it as a present previously and we thought it would be auspicious for him to finally use it in our ceremony. It was a bonafide Chinese Gong as he used all his might (and he was a big guy) to strike it and the sound was awesome. Standing beside the gong, I could feel the sound waves going through me like the after-effects of a grenade explosion during my BMT days LOL.

We then had several group photo-taking sessions before the lion dance began. It was a 20-minute performance where the new lions had to get their eyes and body dotted to come alive. It was the first time I witnessed this eye-dotting ceremony. The dance was followed by the lion dancers framing vegetables and oranges into characters and finally revealing Chinese banners with auspicious wordings for a great photo opportunity.

It was then my turn to do my second speech. I highlighted the key senior persons within the firm who helped make all this happen before introducing our team members. I related to Climate Change/Global Warming and how this led us to our strategy of wanting to create Sustainable and Purposeful Investment funds. Finally, we had a ribbon cutting session to officially announce the grand opening of our company. Everyone then proceeded to another floor for a networking buffet lunch.

The event turned out to be much better than I could have imagined. We managed to spend time with our founder/sponsor and got to know him better. Hopefully, he is happy with the opening ceremony. Other subsidiaries of our group of companies were also present for the event. Our external service providers were also invited so that we could put a name to the faces. This will help cement the working relationship to ensure that we can all work together going forward.

The other big thing that happened this week – Taylor Swift came to town! She had been contracted to perform for 6 nights of sold-out concerts for a total crowd of more than 300,000+ attendees. Visitors had arrived in S’pore from all around the Asia region to attend her concerts. It was a proud moment for the authorities as they pulled off this coup and executed it after more than a year of planning and negotiations.

This tiny red dot is aiming to position itself as a prime spot for marque events to attract overseas visitors after the pandemic. It is the first country within ASEAN to try to jump-start itself after COVID-19 to attract the tourism dollar.

Seeing the results of the first 5 concerts – tonight will be the 6th and final one – I can safely predict that this had been a smashing success. It has been forecasted that the country will benefit to the tune of at least SGD 500+ million of tourism revenue, thanks to all the attendees from our neighbouring countries. Most had planned a vacation here, just to make it for the concerts.

There had been politicians complaining about S’pore getting an exclusive deal with Tay Tay. But hey, that is strategic business planning, no? It’s a deal that her team had accepted, with whatever subsidies they were given. One central location to cater to all her fans in one of the most populated regions in the world.

Hats off to our authorities for having the vision and foresight to plan and boohoo to the sore losers… Their opposition politicians may not even allow them to spend such amounts in the first place. May the place with the best infrastructure to host win future concert events.

Finally, more AI news this week. Anthropic is made up of people who had left OpenAI due to disagreements on the direction of the firm a few years ago. They then decided to create a new AI company to craft the vision they wanted for AI to develop. FTX’s SBF famously invested $400 million in them during his wild spending days and this investment has grown in value to at least 3 to 5 times now. Anthropic has quietly positioned itself as the small guy that was planning to come out with an AI giant killer.

Anthropic just unveiled its Claude 3 model family consisting of Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Claude 3 Opus outperforms GPT-4 and Gemini. It is multi-modal and can process charts and technical diagrams. It also has a 200k context with support for up to 1 million tokens for select users. It also has a near-perfect recall.

Some users planted tiny sentences within the huge stack of data and Claude 3 could recall them when questioned about them. Amazingly, we see new AI systems going one-up against the top competitors every other week. An AI war is ramping up and no signs of a slowdown any time soon.

Lastly, an update on the saga of Elon Musk suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for promises made and broken previously. The big news of him stating that the founders had all decided on a non-profit venture at the beginning. Later, he quit in dismay when they could not stay true to the non-profit path after he sunk in millions of his own money to jumpstart OpenAI in the first place.

OpenAI took some time to respond and when they did this week, they revealed another side of the story that Elon had conveniently forgotten to mention. Elon is known to be an impulsive guy who sometimes cannot recollect the negative aspects of himself as he will block it out from his memories. It’s like Steve Jobs’s “Reality Distortion Field” – a strong will and the ability to bend any reality to fit the desired purpose.

OpenAI revealed some damaging internal emails where Elon was gunning for-profit and insisted that they merge with Tesla and not the big boys like Google. He wanted to arm twist his way to bring them into his fold but did not succeed.

With egg on his face now, I suspect that Elon is going to drop the case soon. He probably wanted his lawyers to teach OpenAI and Sam Altman a lesson but did not give them all the facts of the case to begin with. I guess whatever the richest man on earth wants, the best lawyers will line up to serve him.

Just like what happened to Twitter (now called X), it started as an impulse and then he got stuck with it. Anyway, he hinted that X is now months away from being able to handle financial transactions soon… AI news will continue to be exciting and unexpected for the months to come as US election fever will bring its use to another level…

Remember the days when we were told about El Nina and El Nino? Some years were supposed to be hotter and the other year will be cooler. Nowadays, we have started to see wild swings in temperature within the year and even weeks. We have Climate Change to blame.

2023 is now officially the warmest year on record based on 174 years of data. The average temperature has risen by +1.2 degrees Celsius and it is on track to be +1.5 very soon. If nothing is being done to slow it down, we might see +2.1 by 2030 according to world climate bodies like COP28 in Dec 2023. The 10 warmest years on record are now 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Everyone assumed that the global shutdown due to the pandemic would have slowed Climate Change but the rising temperature trend is accelerating.

Everyone around the world is experiencing this phenomenon first-hand. We are starting to see very short winters with little snow in ski resorts this year while some parts can experience sudden temporary drops in temperature. America and parts of China just had -50 degrees Celsius weather recently in Jan.

I had also personally experienced wild swings of temperature that were very unusual and had not happened before. We were in Osaka last Aug and it was 36 degrees C at noon while we were trying to run around Universal Studio. Then in HK last Dec, we arrived at 7 degrees temperature and in less than a week, it rose to 22 degrees.

Based on the latest article from Reuters, Feb 2024 seems to be on track to be the hottest Feb on record. Even the expected annual Cherry Blossom is almost a month earlier this year because of it. The sudden warm weather is wreaking havoc on travel plans as no one can rely on traditional reliable historical data to plan for vacations anymore.

There is now an urgency by scientists and governments to address Climate Change head-on before it is too late and becomes irreversible. The main focus is two prongs – to generate more renewable energy sources and to promote carbon capture initiatives.

On the renewable front, there is the push to use natural sources like solar, wind and hydro to provide clean energy instead of using traditional dirty materials like coal and gas that pollute the atmosphere. The long-term effect of using carbon fuels is that it will cause Earth’s surfaces to capture heat, resulting in a greenhouse warming effect.

Many governments are also introducing Carbon tax to strongly encourage corporations to switch to cleaner forms of energy. But without global Carbon standards, it is very difficult for corporations to buy carbon credits to offset their carbon-negative activities to reduce their tax burden.

The Greenwashing saga of the last 12 months also did not help. What was supposed to be Green investments turned out not to be, creating more investors’ distrust looking to enter into this Green space. There is an urgency for a co-ordinated push to slow climate change on a global level but we see so many obstacles along the way. No country is certain if their country’s efforts alone can help to move the needle. Yet if we don’t try, the global warming trend will be inevitable.

We are seeing climate change news everywhere nowadays. It is competing with AI (Artificial Intelligence) for space as newspapers report irregular changes in weather patterns that cannot be explained away that easily. The facts are indisputable that Mother Gaia is a sick puppy in need of draconian measures to reverse course before it is too late.

Can we do it? The crystal ball is very clouded and unclear at the moment. We will need a champion to direct global efforts to make it happen. The fact that this is so visible around all of us should have been a hard wake-up call to start doing something now.

I wrote about AI and what to expect in 2024 a few weeks back. I predicted that it would be a crazy and bullish year of AI advancement given what we had seen over the previous 14 months when ChatGPT was introduced. Little did I expect that within the last 2 weeks alone, there was so much mind-blowing AI news that I could hardly keep track…

The biggest explosion was reserved for Nvidia, which on Wednesday after market close announced spectacular financial results that exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations.

Its total revenue from a year ago rose 265%! Never had a large-cap stock (> $1 Trillion) ever achieved a 3x jump within a year! Net income during the quarter was $12.3 Billion ($4.93 per share) which was up 769% versus last year’s $1.4 B (57 cents per share). Year-on-year gain in earnings per share for its fiscal 4th quarter was up 486%! It expects the first quarter revenue of about $24 Billion, easily beating analyst estimates.

Nvidia’s share price jumped almost $100 overnight in the after-hours market from below $700 to almost hitting $800. It briefly touched the golden $2 Trillion market cap. The stock price rise added $277 Billion to make it the biggest one-day market cap addition in US history – see chart below. This makes Nvidia the world’s 4th most valuable company by market cap now.

Its Hopper H100 chips had a stranglehold on AI GPU that is so complete that demand has shot off the roof. The US even had to ban them from selling to China, terming it as a strategic asset to slow down China’s AI push. Ironically, all of the chip production is outsourced to 3rd party manufacturer TSMC, hence America’s strategic interest to “defend” Taiwan against China…

Analysts all over the world now have to remodel their price estimates given the quantum leap in financial results achieved within such a short time. There are no signs that its growth will slow down soon as AMD and Intel are beginning to try to compete. Nvidia already has more than 10 years of headstart in GPU development. AI wars are happening and all the big boys like Google and Meta are positioning to roll out their versions of AI urgently to stay one step ahead of each other.

Meanwhile, OpenAI fired a bazooka by previewing its latest text-to-video AI called Sora. The resulting videos created by using just a one-sentence prompt were amazing! They were so life-like that I swear that it could have been real… The humans and animals moved in such a way that it looks natural and I cannot tell that it is a deepfake. The way the snow lands on the puppies and the detailed creation of the surrounding environment of a crowded road blew my mind.

Google’s Bard was rebranded as Gemini. The top-of-the-line version is called Gemini 1.5 Pro. It also introduced new state-of-the-art Open Models based on Gemini called Gemma (7B and 2B configuration) while adding it to Workspace. Google tried to go full-on in its AI tools introduction but just got an earful about its Gemini AI image generator for being too “woke”. It refused to provide historically accurate racial profiling images due to its diversity settings and Google had to shut that down.

Then another company called GROQ (not to be mistaken for X’s AI chatbot called GROK) announced that they had turbocharged the speed of processing successfully. It outran the competition with blazing-fast chat responses, wowing everyone on the internet in the process.

Groq had developed a Language Processing Unit (LPU) which is an alternative to GPUs that is purpose-built for LLMs and token generation. It can reach speeds of 500 tokens per second. For comparison, GPT-3.5 can do 30-50 tokens per second. One can experiment and compare it with Meta’s Llama 2 (70B) or Hugging Face’s Mixtral 8x7B for comparison.

Will Groq give Nvidia’s GPU a run for their money now? I bet one of the AI big boys will be urgently trying to acquire Groq or seek collaboration at an obscene valuation any day now. The AI war is intensifying and shows no sign of slowing down at all.

Just a side story. The tech-heavy Magnificient 7 stocks consisting of Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Tesla, Apple and Amazon have single-handedly been responsible for the bulk of the market rally to date. They account for 75% of the S&P 500 gains this year! But Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang believes that AI has hit a tipping point, the beginning of a new evolution of growth? Hmmm….

On Valentine’s Day this week, an article from Bloomberg struck me as a high probability risk that a black swan moment may be approaching us. I have been observing this sector for the last few weeks as many banks around the world have been adding loss provisions and reserves to their property portfolio, particularly for commercial buildings like office space.

I have been watching this story unfolding since the Fed did multiple aggressive interest rate hikes of more than 500 basis points (5%) from late 2021 into 2022. I was wondering when the dam will break for highly leveraged investors as borrowing costs skyrocket at least 5x, especially for property-related plays.

Before that, Covid had hit us in full force by Mar 2020 and global demand collapsed due to country shutdowns as supply chains stopped functioning. When we saw light at the end of the tunnel in late 2021 as the vaccines were introduced, it was inevitable that the inflation monster would have happened, based on hindsight. Because of a lower base of demand caused by the pandemic, a small increase and turnaround in demand would have easily set off inflation red flags.

This in turn triggered the Fed to act accordingly. The low-interest rate environment caused by the 2008 GFC could not be sustained after 14 years. The Fed had to stay ahead of the inflation curve and hike very fast to tame the beast – a textbook move.

Before the rate hikes from 2008 to 2022, traders and investors have been taking advantage of the low-interest rates to make leveraged bets on all asset classes as a sure win and profitable move. Buying any dips was the main strategy and leverage provided a winning combination of maximizing profits.

But the bets began to unravel into 2023 as borrowing costs skyrocketed by a factor of 5 to 8 times. A 1% loan to buy a property on leverage had become 8%. Most of the trades are not sustainable as interest costs began to outweigh revenues.

Coupled with hybrid work that continued into the endemic, companies have started to reduce office space too. In the era of Zoom meetings and hot desks, demand for commercial rental fell off the cliff. It was a disaster waiting to happen for the highly leveraged big players of real estate around the world.

Some real estate funds began to walk away from their loan obligations in 2023, forcing the banks to repossess the buildings and begin loss provisions for non-performing loans. Several banks have recently announced setting aside big reserves for these loans. We are seeing a wave of them lining up to update the shareholders on these new potential liabilities and losses.

It is a global phenomenon as real estate plays are beginning to crack under the pressure of higher interest costs and collapsing rental demand – a double whammy.

“The shakeout in the $20 trillion US commercial real estate market has long been delayed for a simple reason: No one could figure out just how much properties were worth. And, more crucially, few wanted to.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-14/real-estate-lenders-confront-falling-us-commercial-property-prices?srnd=premium-asia&sref=TCJIUe33

The Bloomberg article cited a Blackstone-owned office building in Manhattan that was offering a 50% discount. Many other buildings were also being sold at fire sale prices. With $1 Trillion of commercial real estate loans set to mature by 2025, there is more urgency for companies to unload.

The same picture is being played out all over the world from Europe to Japan. Investors have to write down their properties or walk away from their loan obligations when left with no options. Banks that backstop the original loans will be forced to sell into an already weak market while provisions surge.

Even as the stock markets are reaching new highs thanks to the AI boom, the commercial property sector could trigger a reassessment of the rosy situation. Hopefully, the global contagion effect from this sector will not turn into a tsunami that puts the brakes on the party.

Expectations of rate cuts had been dampened by sticky inflation numbers. We are never returning to the good old days of low to zero rates again. It is more likely that we will return to the historical levels of where the long-term rates should be, which will be between 3 to 5% range.

As of today, the outstanding commercial loans could be a ticking time bomb that is waiting to explode as maturities come due in the next 12-24 months. Opportunistic real estate fund managers now wait on the sideline to buy over these highly discounted buildings. Hopefully, the purge would be happening in a controlled manner, rather than as an avalanche of selling. That tsunami may tip the stock markets and cause the economy to turn bearish.

But in the overall scheme of things, this asset class alone may not tip the boat over. There have been so many assets that were inflated because of the low-interest rate environment for so long and it will need a number of them crashing at the same time to trigger a major down move.