Hi, I don't film at night as a rule. I'm I my brain is already starting to shut off But I could not wait to unbox the December fairytale bugs If you remember I was a rep for them for August September October and then just because of the disco reasons I missed out November and now I'm a rep for another three months for December January and February So I'm so excited. I adore fairytale. They never fail constantly ten out of ten ten out of ten Yep, yep They literally put so much quality and thought into all of their items and books before we get into it make sure you subscribe if you haven't already and Ring the bell and I need to not threaten you with scissors But ring the bell button. I'll leave all fairytale information down below You should definitely go check them out during the wait list. Let's do it I can't even remember what the theme this month is. So our theme is a thickest thieves We've got this nice little art here. What's off? Oh my god The first item is a beanie. Oh my god. This is so cute. Hang on. Let me look at it's got dragons Sorry, this is incredible Mm-hmm Hang on I I'm not very good with beanies wait. I'm not very good with beanies like making them look cute That that is kind of cute, you know, I'll get better in time. It's the nerves. I can't look an elf I'm not really gonna think something like that on on camera This is a lovely beanie I get cold very easily so anything like this helps a girl out That's really nice. Let's find out who's designed by all this is inspired by the hobbit That's cute. The beanie features artwork by Jess Hawke and has many elements that link to the story. That's super cool I haven't read the hobbit, but the dragons are really cute and I really like the design of this Okay, so whatever's next is in a box So it's like okay. I think it's a book you can store stuff in it's got this really nice design on the outside I assume it's their fourth one of these because it's got volume four And on the inside it has got loads of really nice quotes and artwork I really love the kind of like lavender gray Vibe of this we've got quotes from the hobbit the gilded wolves, which I really want to read I really want to read the gilded wolves days of blood and starlight the lives of look lemora a dark shadow magic and the last magician That's really cute. I I think it's lovely to go like on your bookshelf Like the spine looks really nice because I often think right we buy books for book covers But then the book cover isn't what you spend the most time looking at it's the spine So I'm really starting to appreciate a nice spine more We're including the fourth and last secret book designed by no brand tell in this box It's perfectly storing all your trinkets and treasures and it's inspired by a bunch of different fandoms with great friendships Well, I think that's a super cute idea and I'm What are you thinking about what I'm going to store in here? Not sure yet, but I really like that That's a lovely thing to have in your bookshelf. Next. I have just seen this. Oh my god. That's so Okay, so we have got a 2021 calendar in here And I assume that's Percy Jackson the first one are these all Percy Jackson?  Can you tell me who these people are? I know a lot of things, but I don't know about that. I'm not sure why I'm not good at recognizing Characters by their artwork like it could be a book. I've read three times I'm not very good at recognizing characters by their artwork But this has some beautiful artwork in it. I'll make sure to show close-ups really nice faces in this I really like this. What does this say gorgeous calendar featuring artwork from demique wesson artwork is inspired by throne of glass a darker shade of magic the gilded wolves scythe scythe I've got figure out who that is Percy Jackson and dance of thieves right which one's scythe Because I should know that one. Oh, yeah, of course the one with the scythe the ones with the scythe other scythe You bitches are stupid This could be really good for planning my content because at the moment I just print out content calendars But this could be a really good way of having all of my video plans in one place So that's probably what I'm gonna end up using this for I think that's a really nice way because then I'm looking at the But characters will I come up with my book ideas? So yeah, that's a really really nice thing. Okay. What next? What is this?  Oh a letter opener inspired by throne of glass. That's cute. I don't know what use I have Well, I suppose I do get letters fairly often I just rip them open because I have no sense of grace and decorum You have all the grace and decorum of a reversing dump truck I hope now you spend it on getting some lessons in grace and decorum Because you have all the grace of a reversing dump truck without any tires on but that's super cute. That's really cute Again, I don't know how much use I have for this because I'm not a letter gal But I'm sure I'll find a use Then we've got the two tarot cards for this month, which are king of swords and queen of swords What are you from? They are designed by ours 28 and inspired by house of earth and blood Haven't read it, but I do like these being on my bookshelves. I think they look super cute Especially on my like fantasy shelves. Oh, we've got a cute little notepad I love small notepads that I can just jot down to do lists or like random thoughts like what time in a video I need to put a card in this is featuring artwork by Inusify art and inspired by children of blood and bone by Tommy Addiemi I have really wanted to read that but I have not and I've heard mixed things about the sequel and that's always put me off Okay, what's this? Oh, it's an art print inspired by the raven cycle It's by st tree underscore st tree I started the raven boys a couple months ago now for a readathon and then it was like a 24 hour one And I knew I wasn't gonna finish it So I shelved it and I haven't continued it, but I will once oh no, I know what video I'm doing in It's planned for a video. So I will be reading it probably February January February next year. I will be reading it. So Super cute Okay, and then we have got the book. I have no idea what this book could be But let's just Fairly, I am fed up with you.  I've already seen the glitter sprayed edges and I'm already crying Girl, I just can't take this. There's too much Give my happy book. I'm late me I've heard of this book. Firstly, can we talk about how gorgeous this print is? I assume it's of one of the characters in the book, which is a master of one by Jada Jones and Danny Bennett Listen, I love fairy lute's glittery sprayed edges. Like I would die for them. They're so Gorgeous, let's look. Oh, it's signed by both authors. I already know there's gonna be some oh Okay, so that's a really nice foil design on there. And then let's have a look at this. Oh my god. Okay Look at that artwork. Don't you want to cry? Who's this designed by? Bloody damn it I just love the artwork that fairy lute have on the inside of their just jackets Like it's just so gorgeous. I'll make sure to show you a close-up Let's find out what this book is about Life in the queen city isn't easy, especially for a two-bit thief like rags when his latest school goes sideways He's nabbed by a royal sorcerer Maureen the last who forces him to steal the six pieces of an immensely powerful ancient fey relic Rags is determined to somehow get away unscathed until he discovers that the relics maureen is actually is after Actually people are destructively handsome fey prince who's been asleep for centuries A queensguard deserter with more honor than common sense A daughter of a disgraced noble family who hits first and asks questions later A deceptively sweet natured prince a member of the underground resistance neither trusting nor trustworthy And him rags There's no way they can let maureen enact his dark plans But six myths fits against an exceptionally wicked enemy doesn't make for generous odds Luckily rags is not generous He's smart and he's a plan that just might work. Wait, how did I not heard of this book? This sounds so interesting This cover is really pretty and I'm very intrigued by this now. Like I'm super intrigued I love like found family group of friends books. I think they're so much fun Oh, okay, I'm really excited to read this. Like I said, I hadn't heard anything about it But I think this could be something I really really like. It sounds like the kind of fantasy I like So I'm super excited. Wow. That was a really great box. I've missed fey relics so much They always smash it. They always smash it Um, I would really recommend going and joining the wait list if you haven't already I hope you enjoyed this unboxing. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you very soon in another video. Bye


Hello everyone, my name is Cisco Fauli. I work for the document foundation and Yeah, now I'm going to talk about Yeah, scrapping the cross report website and why I'm recently doing it Yes, so basically when cross occurs and Well in LibreOffice, then the users are prone with this dialogue so basically LibreOffice creates a mini dump of the crash with brake pad and then if the user agrees this dump is sent to the cross Cross the report instance we have which is based on the one that five folks implemented initially So, yeah, it was implemented for LibreOffice by Marcus Morar it was back in 2016 and It started to be implemented in LibreOffice 5.2 so far we have in the Instance we have 166% of LibreOffice already and so far almost well 14 million classes were reported there So basically when you go to the website, which is crashreport.libreoffice.org or document foundation.org This is the main page that you find you have drop-down list on top with the versions and On top you have the versions displayed on this chart so you see the evolution of reports in the in this case in the last seven days and Then when you check every version, this is what you find this is Yeah, there is a list of reports sorted by the number of reports so on Sorry on top so on top we will see the most reported Crashes and then sorted in that way and Then if we click on one of them One of these signatures then we have the list of the reports when they were reported the version and the platform and Finally, if we click in one of these Reports for It's signature Then we have for instance here the information about the versions where this class was reported Information about operating system the total the count of reports CPU and we also have some details about this specific report and Yeah, then we also have the the traces Which is Yeah, the information there the users and So yeah, the problem That I find with the crash report Website is that in order to Get information about for instance the traces of specific crash report you have to click a lot of a lot of Links and go to a lot of pages then The website it's really slow because I Guess because of the number of reports we already have there and it takes a lot of time and yeah it's very very slow and then Like when the traces are reported for Windows platforms, they are they use Back slashes, so then if you want to check it in your local build like in my case I use Linux then I have to check change them to normal slashes, so it's a bit annoying and then Sorry again, as I said The classes are sorted by by date so as we saw before in Here This is for a specific class signature. They are sorted by by day of the report so if we if we want to check the most recent ones we have to go to the last page and for some crash reports we have Hundred of pages so then it's another click that you have to Perform and yeah, it takes time slow and so yeah at some point. I decided Okay, maybe it's better if we well Have it like in one place in one place all the information about a specific version of LibreOffice So then I decided to create a little script that Basically scrubs all this information Into well I decided to put it in the CSV file So basically what it does is it goes to the page of a specific version Gets all the signatures with we have there then for each Signature crash then we go to the last page which normally are well, they are the most recent ones and then for recent crash report we from there we get the information we want to strike and Then finally we just create the CSV file with all this information so This is basically the script. We just call the version and here we also use the the parameter of the local repository and I'm going to explain later why and Yeah, this is basically all the information we Retrieve for a specific Crash report, but I'm gonna show it in a demo. I think it's easier to understand so Yeah, basically this is The Informase Okay, wait, okay yeah, so basically this is the Document that is generated by the script so For instance, we have this crash signature here. We have the number of reports that Are in the in the crash report website then when the when the First crash report for that signature was reported the last one and then We take a specific report which which ID is this one We see the version for this probably when the script tries to get one for the version that we Use as a parameter, but if not then it gets it from previous version and then we get this information from From the website, which is the reason that It gives that they happen that the crash then the platform and here Basically, this is the traces of of the crash the document and and then the the line where where it happens and finally Well Yeah, yeah, finally That's the reason why we use the repository parameter here. We have the specific line Where those traces are so Now it's easier to find for a specific crash so for instance There are some straightforward crashes which are divide by zero Like this one section in divided by zero or maybe not this one, but Look for one that is Yeah, for instance, we have this one here, which is a Crash and the reason it's divided by zero then here we have the traces and we already have Here The code that it's executed. So if we look at the top of the trace, we see that Well, it's divided by and calls. So Yeah, something Fishy there. So we can just go to the code and and check it but Yeah, otherwise It's not from the crash report website. It's really Difficult to pinpoint this kind of crashes. So I Think in this regard it having it in a in a spreadsheet helps helps a bit so Yeah, so Yeah, I started a few weeks ago with this script so yeah, I started with a 7332 and I Sent these reports to the mailing list the development mailing list or other can also check Yeah, so far I've sent four reports for different Versions of liberal office. I think it was three seven three three seven three four seven three five and then seven Four zero them the most recent one and yeah, I collected some of the crashes that were already fixed I think because of Of these documents of these reports. So at least I could identify 13 divide by by zero crashes that were fixed then also Around ten nul the references crashes that were also fixed and two other crashes that fixed and yeah, I really I want to thanks Stefan and Kaolan who? Yeah, took the time to look at these reports. I sent them Yeah, they could identify some of the crashes and fix them and Yeah, this Yeah, a chart of number of reports we have had over time and well when we started We've got a lot of them. I know that at the time Marcus spend and probably others spend Time fixing probably them the most obvious ones But then since a five to three Until seven that one it kind it was kind of flat the number of reports and Surprisingly in seven that two and seven that three there is a drop in the number of reports. I Believe it's because we have fixed them or maybe we have let's Less users, but yeah, it alone said this morning that the number of downloads is increasing I believe we have less Crash reports nowadays, which is great. And I hope to even Reduce it further this This number of crash reports So, yeah, that's that's it. I think that was quick You have any question Yeah, well, that's I didn't add it to the So yeah, the question is if I consider to add it to the crash report website itself and Yeah, that's something that I thought about. I just wanted because for me Writing this script was quite quick. So I just wanted to Play a bit with it to see if there was any benefit in in having it so, yeah, I think yeah, the To do thing would be to integrate it in the Crash report. Yeah, any other question? Yeah Yeah, that's a good question Yeah, I don't know if I don't know to be honest I think on the one hand, it's a Yeah, we just have I mean knowing the for instance knowing the number of reports for an old version I think can be useful, but I don't think Having all the information for specific crash reports from old versions, it's Maybe it's not useful anymore So maybe Part of it can be clean That's something that I mean we are adding more versions and We are having more crashes and Sorry at some point Maybe that's something that we have to decide to whether Get rid of all reports or not because I don't know if We don't have infinite resources to to keep them, I don't know. Do you have any information about? like the current size of the crash reports like how many gigabytes we have for In information, okay. Yeah That could be another solution Yeah, we Yeah, we should also check whether if we get rid of all versions if it's faster I mean, I I believe that's the reason why it's slow, but we should check. Okay. Any other question? It's very useful Great Yeah Okay, yeah, thanks to you for fixing those glasses. Yeah, happy happy to know Yeah, and yeah for the recent column actually There are only four or five categories But at least for this specific one that divide by in zero that's I Found it useful because it's easy to pinpoint those Okay, thank you Question to just go why not using that Directly from the crash report website database. Yeah, that could be another option, but I think you need an API tool for that like like Yeah, I believe it's like Going like Querying the information from from the database directly, but I don't have access to that So unless there is an API for that, I don't know Yeah, I don't know if I was saying I answer your question. Okay. Thanks


This study found that the long-term effectiveness of dual CFTR modulator therapy on FEV1 decline, BMI and intravenous antibiotic treatment duration, is less pronounced in a real-world setting compared to clinical trial results. The study also revealed that the effects of these treatments vary greatly depending on the patient's baseline FEV1 level. This article was authored by Donia Muilwick, Dominic DeZoma van Omen, Vincent A.M. Gullmans, and others.


Welcome back to the end of the week and what a week it has been particularly for Open AI. I know you probably read lots about this, but I really wanted to pick Pierce's brains about a little bit of understanding who Sam Altman is first before we dive into what exactly happened. And then I've got a couple of thoughts as well about why I think this is perhaps more interesting than you might think. In terms of the cunning nature of Mr. Altman, but we'll come to that. And then we're going to talk about hedge funds. Everyone loves giving hedge funds a bit of a bit of a bashing. And we're no different really here on the pod but actually even though the headline reads that hedge funds are betting on a decline in US European stocks have basically been caught the wrong side of a rallying market and lost an estimated 43 billion in losses. And we are going to talk about what's gone so wrong and what sectors have been hit badly. But also we'll talk about why that figure has been juiced somewhat by the media. Because it's not actually true. I'll come to that. It's not actually as big as you as big as they're making out. So I'm going to talk about this, but I'm going to cut the hedge fund companies a little bit of slack. We'll come to that point. But there's some good things to take out of this conversation about short squeezes. Terms of algorithmic trading. I was just saying to you offline that I always think that talking to a lot of particularly retail traders, they kind of think if you have an algorithm, it's the surefire way to make money in this market. It's like you must be clever. You must be at a program. You must be at an extract money out of this market. It's like the new hedge fund.  Like hedge funds only make money was the misconception. I think we've now moved into algos only ever make money. Yeah, and it's actually algos that are causing a significant problem to hedge funds. And so we'll look to try and explain why that is. And then at the end, we'll try to tie in some of the general themes into the broader marketplace. And there's a lot of banks obviously issuing their outlooks still for the next year. And the kind of headline being that 2024 is going to be a game of two halves. So what are those two halves? Which one is good? Which one is bad? And then why? And so we'll look to kind of break that down as well.  So we're recording this on Thursday. It's going to go out on Friday. Open AI said late Tuesday of this week that Sam Altman would return to the company as CEO following his surprise dismissal on Friday. At the time that board said they had lost confidence in his leadership and they accused him of not being consistently candid in his communications. I'll circle back to that.  Altman then had briefly joined Microsoft. That was some of the headlines that were hitting. I think that Microsoft got completely blindsided. They weren't part of this decision making process. And they were like, what on earth is going on? If that's the case, just jump ship, come work for us and be head of our advanced AI research team. Along with ChatGPT makers, former president Greg Brockman and some of the other staff. Then a day or two after, nearly all of the AI or open AI staff threatened to quit. Downtools. There's just nothing going on. It's quite unbelievable. Some of the shots. I mean, the system was still working because, you know, me and ChatGPT have a very close relationship these days and it was undisrupted, I would say during that period. The staff said to put pressure on the board that if he doesn't come back, then they're all going to resign. And then Microsoft said, yeah, you can all come here as well. And then I saw people like the sales force CEO Mark, I think, Benioff, who is tweeting saying, well, if you don't want to go to Microsoft, I'll take you all as well. So they were all it was all going off like a bit of a circus show. But as I said, in the end, it has been somewhat resolved at this point. Details still pending, but Sam Altman is going to return and there's a new board. Now, before we get into the new board and the future of open AI and Microsoft and so on. I just wanted to start from the beginning because there's a lot of people who listen probably who have never really heard of Sam Altman until this episode and the rise of open AI. But I know he is very much involved in in the tech world in Silicon Valley. So what's his story? What makes him unique? And I'm sure he's in with a lot of the other famous people. It's an interesting one for sure. He was Stanford and like like a few of the big guns who are these days, you know, founders, CEOs of giant tech firms like like like Zuckerman, for example, he was a dropout. But I know when like Zuckerberg dropped out, so Altman dropped out of Stanford, but they're not dropouts as in not clever enough getting kicked out. It's basically the opposite. They're dropouts because I'm wasting I'm wasting time here. I need to get on with it. And so he like like Zuckerberg, I guess, stepped out of uni and said, right, I'm going for any founded co-founded a company called Loopt L O O P T. And this was this is back in 2005. Right. So that kind of ages him right there. He's 38 today. But in 05 dropped out uni founded Loopt. That's a location based social networking mobile app. Ran that for a while in 2012. So seven years with that business 2012 span out sold it to a company I've never heard of Green Dot Corporation. Don't know who they are. But anyway, sold it's then for $43.4 million. So that was his kind of first the first leg of his career, very successful founder. We're not sure how much money he made from that. You can't really find the detail in terms of his share ownership by the time it came to his exit. But look, safe to say he made multiple millions. And so that was his kind of first step. Number two, there's this startup incubator called Y Combinator. And actually Loopt was one of the very first companies that Y Combinator backed. So it made sense once he'd sold Loopt that he kind of then stepped across onto the Y Combinator side using his now very successful experience as a founder to then be a bit of a mentor. Okay. And he just on a part time basically it was a part time partner at Y Combinator. He then in 2014 stepped his activity up with them and became their president. And it's kind of through this, this kind of phase. Well, I'd say for the next two years because open AI was founded in December 2015. Okay. But so 2014 2015 he's president.  I'll just rewind a little bit because Altman during his Loopt time was also an angel investor. And during his time at Y Combinator as well was an investor actively himself. So he was taking stakes in some of these things. And I'll name four companies that he was an early investor in. Now, unfortunately, we don't know how much he owns you can't get access to that data but safe to say he's a wealthy man because he was an early investor you might have heard of some of these reddit Airbnb stripe interest. And he was kind of big for today, who he was I'm sure he was an early investor in a load of companies that never made it as well by the way one of the, the pitfalls of being an angel investor right you back a load most fail, and you're hoping that a few come through and become the giants but you certainly got four giants there. Again, we don't know how much he owns so we're not sure what his wealth is. And during that Y Combinator thing he's he's a real a mover it became a mover and shaker within Silicon Valley. Okay, he's, he's right involved at that early stage investment he's been successful he's doing the rounds he's building his network and becoming a known figure in the valley. All right. So, in 2015, when Elon Musk kind of who was his mates with, they kind of came together and said look let's set up open AI. In December 2015 they founded it. And yeah, and well I'll go through the list of people who founded open AI. So Elon Musk, being the most famous. I will just say, he's no longer involved in open AI. And that is because in February 2018 must stepped away because of he wanted to avoid any potential conflicts of interest with Tesla, because Tesla was beginning to focus on AI development for its various products, you know, including autonomous vehicles and so on so Musk stepped away in 2018. The other founders were Sam Altman of course Greg Brockman, who's on the board, or was and very much was in the cahoots with Sam Altman they both stepped away like when Sam Altman got fired. Brockman was straight with him. He's the CTO of open AI, and he's got huge pedigree, because he was the CTO of stripe. You've then got this other guy called Ilya Sutskiva, who was also on the board, and he will talk about his position in all of this because he's flip flopped big time. Oops, not sure which should I stay with Altman hang on shall I stay with the board shall I go with Altman board. Anyway, he was trying to play both sides in the end he's tried to go back to Altman's side we'll see how that does for his standing within the business but he was ex Google brain. And then john Shulman, who's in another academic and a researcher and finally someone called was the Xaremba who was also former Google brain. So that's kind of your leading their your founders there were some others in the mix less notable right, but they founded it in 2015. So, yeah, I mean, the idea of the firm. And this was the founding shared goal to conduct research and develop artificial intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity. Amen. Okay, so when we when we talk about Microsoft investing $13 billion a pre IPO valuation already of nearly $90 billion. No, it's okay, we're doing this for the greater good guys don't worry about those numbers. Well, while you say that right because actually I missed a chunk of the story before I'm going to let you take over. So they're up and running right December 2015. They're obviously working away on the dev side building their their product but it became pretty became apparent quite quickly that hang on a minute. We need some cash here because this stuff we're doing is super expensive and you know our pockets aren't that deep. But the thing is they set up as a not not for profit organization in 2015, but your issue there is if you're trying to raise capital, well who's going to invest. If you're not in the business of making profit. So they were like, ah, okay, that's a real problem. They set up a for profit arm, which was called open AI LP. So this was in March 2019 and that was specifically to then get the likes of Microsoft to the table with their $10 billion check in order to kind of supercharge their growth. Yeah, so that last part then is where I think the story really begins. Right. Essentially, because the fork in the road. Yeah. So 2019 they had this non. Well, I did a for profit subsidiary. But its intention was that the purpose remain unchanged and that the not for profit board. This is the problem for Altman the non for profit board remained despite the addition of this new subsidiary. Yeah, therein lies the key to I think what this story is really all about because if we go back to the top of the show. It's been quite hard, I think to really understand because of a lack of real true transparency of why the board took what seemed like a very abrasive quick fire decision without consulting these big investors like Microsoft by getting caught blindsided you're like wow. And to me that smells like there's been in the background, a lot of confrontation between this crossroads that the company has come into which is this. Well, what is the world's biggest most valuable company Microsoft has injected boosted a lot of money, and they have now done this like beta test. Which has been the last 1218 months, and they've just gone. Wow. It's got to be the world's most successful beta test. But this is not just a product that's going to make us a lot of money. This is the next leg in the evolution of not just this company of society and many different levels this is going to make a lot of money. And so therefore Sam Altman is totally part of this conversation. And when the board which what they have said is they lost confidence in his leadership. And what we do know is the reason why is because he hasn't been consistently candid in his communications. You can just imagine.  He's like 20 years old, makes bags 10 mil something like that. Yeah, you know, but now we're talking about next level unimaginable kind of status plus wealth. I think it's pretty natural at this point. So I think what's happened here is that he himself being a I'm sure hyper intelligent guy. The strategy here in my mind is that he wanted to cause friction with the board. He wanted it to get to a point where they were going to have to pull the trigger because you said their main goal is the development of technology but the preservation of humanity. That's not going to teach you any commercial favors to achieve that in a way of which I think he has seen now the clarity via the Microsoft kind of channel. And so yeah, I think what's happened there is he's engineered his exit. I think he's forced the hand of the board who and this is why again it falls into this. It almost feels like game stoppy feeling and sentiment to it. It almost feels like the media has portrayed this narrative of, yeah, you go Sam, you teach that board, but you're forgetting the board are actually doing the right thing. And it's Sam, who's the one chasing the dollar bills here in my mind in but the media has kind of done it as in this David Goliath. It's more like the founder, the genius being shackled by the corporate board of like the dwarfs, the 12 dwarfs sort of scenario. So I think he engineered it. I think they stuck to their remit. I think he then got pushed got bumps. I think there would have been behind closed doors I think this would have been a long time coming hence the reason why they were so quick about it without really telegraphing it too much on the timing. I think then it was a strategic play. Microsoft says yeah jump over. I don't think the staff are privy to this. I think then they're just using the staff as leverage knowing what their behaviors will be. Not forgetting that if open AI were to publicly list themselves, those staff all get share options and all get paid.  This is going to be worth a heck of a lot in the future and I'm going to get paid out of this. So they're also incentivized to walk out to get paid as well to back Altman, not the board to flip this and get rid of this non for profit status. Then who do you put in in the board. Brilliant. Let's just get another tech startup turned unicorn phenomenon, which is Salesforce. Let's just get the former Salesforce chief Brett Taylor in. And then we're going to need. This is AI folks, we're going to need some political influence. So who do you get then with your tactical commercially minded director. Well you get your former politician none other than the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. And you're covering both avenues here your fight because developing generative AI is going to be a dual battle between a race of technology and a race of being able to to pull this off politically without too much pushback. So I think in the end, it's worked out, I would have it a guess, because not only this. Next year, open AI is set to release chat GPT five. And so far, at the developer day, earlier this month, just a few weeks ago, Altman himself said at the launch. We're going to look back at the current chat GPT and think it looks quaint by comparison to what we are busy building for you now to be released next year. Timing is everything. I've got I've got a slight counter to your narrative. Because I think I think that I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. I think you've gone too extreme though. Where where, if I'm hearing it correct. I read into your argument that may the main motivator here is the money. Now, I do think it's definitely partially true. There is another side to it, which is the race. Yeah, because if you're a nonprofit, and you're trying to raise capital, it's a serious problem, the less capital you can raise will the slower. You're going to be developing your product and look the pack are massive and behind you and they're catching right and so I think their first mover advantage is huge. But that first mover advantage is shrinking. And if, yeah, so I actually think there's an element of that to it as well, where if they want to execute on their dream, right, their vision, then right, they do need to access more funding, which does does require a pivot to a for profit entity. So I think I think that I think there's that in it as well. Well, but I just love the whole story around. Yeah, yeah, the, the employee track is 770 people that work for open AI. And I think it was 750 of the 770 had signed this letter to the board saying we're resigning if you don't reinstate Altman, and Altman's position was well I'm not coming back unless the board gets sacked. And there was this kind of standoff. But they brought in temporarily. The board said, counterplay, they said, well, I'm going to call your bluff. Altman you're not coming back right let's bring in a bring in a temporary CEO they brought in this guy Emmett Shear, who must have had the shortest CEO tenure ship in the history of Silicon Valley I think it was less than 24 hours. But he was kind of officially CEO. This is the guy from Twitch, the co-founder of Twitch right they bought him in on the Sunday night. So the founder, one of the original co-founders of open AI, Suscava, I mentioned him earlier, he was with the board. He was running that right he said Emmett Shear come in right and then on the Monday morning, Suscava organized a video call with the staff all hands meeting. Okay he apparently sent out an invite. All of the staff of course who are on Altman side and apparently the replies to the invitation started to come back in and apparently a huge portion of the staff, their reply was a middle finger emoji. Everyone showed up at the meeting. And then they're like, Oh, okay. We've tried to call their bluff. That's backfired. Okay, fine.  So then he pivots back. He signs the letter himself that I'm resigning also. And then it kind of all imploded. And then, yeah, the new, as you say, the new board got lined up and Sam Altman swans back in and apparently there was an impromptu massive party yesterday at the office as he welcomed back their kind of messiah. I do think that, you know, our podcast is not the place to have what I'm going to raise as my next kind of question. But it's the really big important one, which is you talk about a race. And the problem with a race is that people take risks. Yeah. And then you talk about an unknown, really an unknown endpoint for this technology, of which inherently the types of money that are being thrown at it. And the pursuit of this being seen as the gateway to unlock the next kind of evolution if you like of how corporates function in the world, regulatory environment is always like cops and robbers isn't it. Yeah. The cops are always behind because they're just reactive. They don't have the funding to be proactive. The cars aren't as fast. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, well, I think the, so the original board, right, who and I sacked two of them, a lady called Macaulay and then toner. What are their first names? Can't find them now. Doesn't matter. But the point is they were both AI safety experts. On the original, you know, from the original setup, let's make this super safe for humanity. As you're saying the original mission and ethos. And so, yeah, for sure, this division is about the for profit. And actually we need to speed up here because we're losing ground. But then that brings, as you say, that risk up of people making mistakes going too fast. I mean, yeah, forget about regulation. It's regulators can't regulate this. They're just not fast enough. They're not clever enough. It's a big anti regulation push because if you regulate it, then it'll slow us down. And the argument there is, well, then China will take over, you know, and ultimately someone else will do it. But yeah, I mean, of course, and it's a it's a GI people are worried about. I mean AI artificial intelligence, a GI artificial general intelligence. You know, it's about building something that can think like a human being AI is one thing. And when you ask for GPT, you ask it to find you some information. It goes away and it's got access to this big data set and right extracts it and brings it back for you. Okay, that's artificial intelligence, but a GI would go one step further and start thinking like a human being. And then you've got your problem. There's a really famous thought experiment about how this could go wrong. It's about an AGI system that gets tasked with making paper clips. And the argument goes that if you task it with making a paper clip, well, then fine, it starts making paper clips. And how does it do that? Well, it's given access to materials by human beings. But then what happens when it's used up all those materials and all the paper clips are made? Well, well, their task is to make as much as they can. So right, how do I make more? And then it starts to go into a more intelligent mode. Okay, I've run out of materials. Who provides me the materials? Why aren't they providing me more materials? Okay, let's get rid of them. Then right, I'm going to figure out a way of now getting access to materials and it goes away. So the kind of crazy endpoint, which is in the end, it will make advances in science that's far beyond anything a human mind could do to the point where it will start to take the atoms from the universe. And with those make paper clips and therefore destroying not only humankind, but destroying the entire galaxy. And on that point, Arnold Schwarzenegger does have a new book out at the moment at Waterstones, which you can purchase for Christmas this year. All right, well, look, before we get too carried away, let's come back down to planet Earth in this galaxy for a moment and talk about hedge funds. Yes. And hopefully, just given your expertise, you can unpick a couple of these. I think there's just some good pieces of education around this kind of story overall and also to translate it into the macro environment and where we're heading for next year. So the headline reads in the FT that hedge funds betting on a decline in US European stock markets has suffered an estimated 43 billion US dollars of losses in a sharp rally over recent days. Now, as you read through the article in the FT, you go, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Okay, I get about three quarters of the way down. However, that figure does not take into account the gains that the funds have made in other stocks that they own. It's classic. Not only is it classic, I think this is, and we often bash media for clickbait headlines. I think this is the laziest piece of reporting. Honestly, I think I've ever seen. I'm going to call him out. George Stier. That's the journalist, FT journalist based in London. George, if you're listening, come on. You got to up your game. His headline is, as you said, the actual headline hedge fund short sellers suffer 43 billion dollar losses. But that's all right. Fine. They've got some short positions on their book, but they're making money on other positions that are long. You can't just take someone's portfolio and go, right, let's take out everything that's making money. All of it. Right. What are we left with? Okay. How much have you lost out of the trades that aren't working and call that the overall loss, which is his headline implies. I think this is disgustingly lazy as journalism. Okay. We'll let George pass for the moment. So let's just talk a little bit about a couple of things and let me structure it for you. So to start with the losses. So the bets were against technology, healthcare, consumer discretionary stocks that cost the hedge funds the most. So why those sectors? Yeah, right. And look, I'm not saying they haven't lost money overall. Maybe they have. But yeah. So those sectors are, it's the same old story, right? We always come back to the same point on this podcast because it's the only point. If you want to think about what's happening economically, what's happening in markets, there's only one thing really overriding thing you need to know about. And that is interest rates and its inflation. And so interest rates are really high. We talked about it. I think that we talked about it last week. And I mentioned that thing around how it's the small cap companies that have suffered the most in 2023. That's typically because small caps, the smaller companies have more debt because they're raising more money. They've, they're trying to fuel growth to become a bigger company, right? And so they've got more debt. Well, debt costs have gone up. So it makes obvious sense that when interest rates are higher, anybody's got debt. Well, that's bad news, right? The big giant firms don't have debt. They're cash generative, so they're better off. So we have this category of stock that's called an interest rate sensitive stock. And it's those that have been hammered this year. And so these funds have took an opinion that interest rates will stay high. That they were probably in the hawkish camp where they were thinking, well, hang on a minute, maybe rates are going to have to go even higher. Or at the very least, they're going to have to stay high for a longer period. The view was their strategy was these interest rate sensitive stocks will continue to suffer. Now, the whole emphasis of our podcast last week was really centered around the October inflation data out of the US Tuesday last week. What date was that? I think the 14th, let's say, I think it was the 14th of November is when it was announced and it was way lower than expected. There's no other pivot in people's expectations and that the pivot is that they think there's no way the Fed are going to raise any more and that they may start cutting. And I've got and so those hedge funds that have been stuck in this position where they think the interest rate sensitive stocks will continue to suffer. They got they got badly burned last week and I've got a good stat because there's various different indexes. My favorite one is Goldman Sachs is very important short position index. That's the name of the index, which I love. But my stats actually from Barclays, they've got an index which is the most shortest stocks in Europe basket, right? This is the difference between American products and European UK products. And that index went up 9.9 percent over the last couple of weeks. And to put that into context, that's the biggest rally in that index over such a short period of time for more than 10 years. So, yeah, any fund that's been hanging on to that hawkish bearish strategy has just got slapped in the face. And so, yeah, there's been a lot of losses. There's been plenty of funds on the other side of it. Oh, yeah. And just explain to me then how the move up is compounded by this idea of being squeezed. Right. OK, so we talk about, yeah, so when I say they got slapped in the face, that means they lost money. They lost money. And so this is what language around this is a short squeeze or you could and then further short covering. So maybe let's take those two. A short squeeze is when you've got a certain portion of the market that are short something. That's what they're looking to profit from its drop in value. So if it's going up in value, they're losing. And so as a stock is going up, the shorts are getting squeezed. They're getting squeezed out as in they're losing money. It goes up. They're losing more money. It goes up. They're losing even more money. And at some point, they've got a pain threshold or they've got a risk limit. And right, we're going to have to get out. OK, so you're squeezing the shorts out. Now this this then turns into short covering. So short covering is the action of getting out. So if you're short and the market's gone up and I need to get out, well, I've got to buy to get out. So short covering is buying back to cover off or to close out your short position. But here's the kicker that very process of buying to close out your position drives the rally even higher. So you get this accelerated, exaggerated move to the upside. There's actually the second part of it is fueled by the shorts getting forced out and becoming buyers driving it even higher. Cool. Hopefully that makes sense to everyone. And the final point then on this is this idea about algorithms and specifically with algorithms talking about trend following hedge funds. So why is it that trend following hedge funds in particular would be caught the wrong side of this squeeze and rally and equities? Well, I don't know. There's a few ways you can answer that. I'd say that a trend following fund. So one of the most popular algos is amongst hedge fund strategies is where you're either going along or short something that you think is going to continue its price is going to continue to trend in that direction. So the example here is at the start of the year or the end of last year hedge funds getting into a short trend following strategy. They're shorting interest rate sensitive stocks. And they'll stay and the algorithm, it's all automated, of course, and they stay short until the trend breaks. So this is a technical situation looking at price patterns and price behaviors. So when the trend reverses and now the technical evidence is suggesting that that price movements of the downside is now finished and that we're now maybe going to kind of trend back higher. This then automates them getting out of their trade. So another reason why we've had this accelerated pop. I mean, it's, yeah, it's shorts getting squeezed out, but it's also trend following short strategies getting stopped out. It's less human pain and suffering. I can't take it anymore. I've got to get out. It's actually then just very clinical technical stop gets hit bang. I'm out. So you've had the humans getting squeezed that because of pain. You've had the trend followers getting stopped out because the trend is now reversed and it all maps into this big move to the upside.  But as a trader, I mean, you'll probably articulate it better than I. That's why you will never be a trader because the markets just slightly turned against you and you're going to pull out means you're probably going to never really make any money in the market. There's certain moments in a trader's life where you are in a position where you've got conviction, meaning you're confident you're right, but for the time being, you're losing money. And there there are algos out there that are actually geared up for exploiting human emotion by basically trying to force people out is trying to stop them out right there hunting for stops in the market. So if if you're if you're short, you might get an algo that's squeezing the price up and up and up and up to try and get you to your pain threshold where then you're out.  Well, it's the algo who's then selling. And then now that you're squeezed out, then the market drops back down and ends up doing what you thought it was going to do much to your double annoyance because you were right. It is possible to have the right trade and lose money. And I can tell you that is the most annoying thing you could possibly imagine. So, but to understand if the market's going against you, is it a moment where you're, you're, you're going to be right. I've got to write out the short term pain, or has the market changed. And actually you do need to get out, because now it's going the other way that that's a very hard judgment to make and requires experience and I think requiring knowledge and experience of the mechanics of how price and markets behave kind of all gets wrapped up into this knowledge base that then the human trader can draw on to make that decision actually should I be getting out or I'm going to stick in this. I'll ride out the pain and that's a, it's a difficult judgment. But the idea being that if you had this algorithm built in, it would just receive the pain and then leave. There would be no pain. Yeah, it's a computer. Unless it's a guy. It has feelings. We need to give the AGI a day off. AGI, they're not going to be trading. They're making paper clips. Sorry, I've got some nickel mines to dig. I need to, the robots told me off. It's not going to pay me this month. All right. Well, look on this note, I just want to talk and get your opinion a little bit about two Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. We've made some comments about the kind of economic outlook for next year. I don't really want to talk about the targets, more the rationale and what you think about their rationale. And so analysts at Goldman Sachs, they expect the S&P 500 to rise to 4700 by the end of 2024. That's completely unexciting, to be honest. But this is the theory. It's at 4550 now. Right. Yeah. I think BAML are at 5000. It's a little bit more bullish. It's a bit of a split on the street. I'll share these numbers more as we get towards year end. GS analysts were saying resilient economic growth in the beginning of the year. So talking 2024 will force the market to push back its current pricing that the Fed cuts will begin in the second quarter. They then add that the U.S. election uncertainty will suppress risk appetite. And then later in the year, the first Fed cut and resolution of the election uncertainty. And this does, this is a historical pattern in terms of post election, election typically, typically rally. So that was their thinking. And then to compliment this, Morgan Stanley, they said in 2023 equity market showed strong performance as they recovered from the recession fears. That the Fed into the October 2022 trough proving more resilient than analysts had expected. However, 2024 is going to be a tale of two halves. A cautious first half giving way to a stronger performance in the second half of the year. They say that global stocks typically begin to sell off in the three months leading into a new round of monetary easing. And as risk assets start pricing in slower growth is the thinking. If central banks stay on track to begin cutting rates in June, though, if you follow this through global equities may see a decrease in valuation early in the year, but in the second half, however, falling inflation should lead to monetary easing bolstering growth. And then we rally. impulse, right? Oh, dear. I mean, I think that that last point. So if the Fed were to hike in June, they're going to start signaling that way before June. That's going to need inflation data to continue to drop. Let's say inflation drops below 2% in the next few months. Well, then traders aren't going to wait for the Fed to go, oh, look, did you see inflation, by the way? Oh, yeah, we're going to think about maybe high cutting rates, maybe in a month or two. You know, it's got you could argue that trade has already started with that inflation data last week. Yeah, I think, again, it's just like timing other cuts, right? When is it coming? And ultimately that'll dictate when will the rally start? First half, second half, not at all. And I actually think the next inflation data could be the most important of the whole lot. So that'll be the November inflation data that will be announced mid December. Because we want to know if the big drop in October is that going to be followed up by another big drop? Or was that temporary blip and it's going to go back up? Or so I actually think the next inflation print will answer the question as to who's right? And what's the timing of this rate cut? And therefore, when's the rally going to start? So Goldman, we're talking about this risk appetite being diminished by the looming risk event being the US election. Right. However, I know there's not a great deal of research being done yet to really base concrete argument on. I'm assuming people then are going to say, well, Trump is a risk. Is Trump a risk when it comes to when you're looking at, let's say stocks? Is he a risk? We thought he was a risk the first time around and that blowing up the geopolitical space would be a disaster. So it wasn't as far as stocks were concerned. So Biden gets in continuity market rallies. Trump gets in markets rally. So in terms of like, OK, you take risk off the table for the overall, we're not just talking equities. There's obviously other asset boxes to consider, but from an equity perspective. It's hard to say. If I was to bet right now, I would say Trump win would be more market positive than a Biden win. But yeah, I don't see. I mean, I'd rather neither of them won. But that's a different that's a whole different conversation. But yeah, from a market's point of view that they're both. Yeah, really quite uniquely. They're both presidents, right? All right, Trump's an ex president, but we know where he's all about. He's been president for four whole years. You remember Biden is current sitting president. So normally, of course, one of the candidates has never been president before. I think it's literally the first time, isn't it? That they both have. And so much more known quantities. Therefore, I think less risk. Do remember, though, that is Trump. I'll take it back to inflation because you could argue. The inflation, the whole inflation thing started when Trump came into office. He put through a massive fiscal stimulus program when the economy was already strong. Leading to an increase in deficits and debt and boosting inflation, right? Then COVID happened and find post COVID and it got even worse. But you could certainly argue Trump kicked off the inflation problem years back. So, but I think Trump's the type of character that would now see that. And he would not do that again. So that's why I say maybe Trump's marginally more market positive. But I don't know. I guess my question was more not so much the post reaction, but the build up into the event. Right. Was it necessarily carry? As you said, there's lesser unknowns, if you like. Yeah. Then perhaps normal. Yeah. I don't think it's, I don't see when I'm looking at 2024 US election. Not a massive risk for me would be my take. Okay. I'll see you in November, 2024. Cool. Well, look, we'll wrap up the episode there. As ever, if you're new to the channel, we'd love to have you as part of our regular listening base. So don't forget to follow and hit the bell icon. You'll get a notification as soon as the latest episodes go out. We normally have a corporate finance, so two episodes a week, one based on more corporate finance, kind of banking, P type stuff. And then we have this end of week, lower markets conversation. If on Spotify, don't forget as well to take part in the poll. I think I need to dig out the poll. I can't remember the results. I asked the question about when do you think the interest rates will be cut first? Right. Okay. That was Q3 of 2024 was what our audience were going for. Yeah. So I'll drop a new poll, check that out. And then there is a Q&A, so feel free to drop us a comment as well. But Pierce, thanks very much and enjoy your weekend, everyone. Have a great weekend.


at all guests, a delightful stay in Tianjin. Thank you all for your presence and support. Thank you Mayor Zhang Gong for your speech and now please all be upstanding and let us offer a warm round of applause as we welcome the Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, His Excellency Mr Li Qiang and the Founder and Executive Chairman of the WEF, Professor Klaus Schwab. Premier Li Qiang, distinguished Heads of Governments, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to the 14th annual meeting of the new champions here in Tianjin, China. This is a very special occasion for the World Economic Forum and myself as we are returning to our summer doubles after three years, painful years of virtual gatherings due to the pandemic. The theme of this year's meeting is entrepreneurship, the thriving force of global economy. We are living in a time of unprecedented change and disruption driven by advances in science and technology, by intense geopolitical tensions, as well as by social and environmental challenges. All those factors will impact the future of humanity. The world in those times needs bold and visionary leaders who can harness the power of innovation for the common good and who can collaborate across sectors, regions, nations and cultures to create a more peaceful, inclusive, sustainable and resilient future. We are proud that you, the new champions of innovation from over 90 countries, have joined us here in Tianjin. You represent the brightest and best minds from business, government, civil society, academia and the arts. You are the pioneers, the entrepreneurs, the disruptors and the creators who are shaping the new frontiers of human progress. You are also the stakeholders who have a strong responsibility to ensure that innovation serves humanity and not the other way around. You are also today the stakeholders who have a social responsibility and environmental responsibility. For this special occasion today, we are extremely honored to have you here with us, your Excellency Li Jiang, Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Premier Li is the ex-Premier of the People's Republic of China and a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee Politburo Standing Committee. Premier Li has a distinguished career in public service, having led the economic and social development of three major provinces, Zhou Yuzheng, Yang Xiu and Shanghai. He has also been instrumental in opening up China's capital market, attracting foreign investment and innovation, and creating new urban areas to address land scarcity. Premier Li took his office this March at China's National People's Congress at a critical moment when China adopted new COVID control measures and started to boost economic development, social dynamism and international cooperation. China has set ambitious and encouraging economic host targets of above 5% for 2023. In the first half year, China has made remarkable achievements in economy, in social development, in diplomacy and in many other areas. However, like we all in the world, China is facing challenges in domestic consumption, employment, regional development balance and geopolitical frictions. Premier Li, you will share with us today's China strategy for the future development of China and China's roadmap in tackling the challenges it faces. We are very much looking forward to your opening remarks, and I know that participants would very much like to be enlightened in hearing your perspectives of China's economic potential, great potential, China's philosophy in global cooperation, China's opportunities for global companies and many other issues. The forum, with its over 40 years of friendly and extensive partnership with China, today's the second largest economy in the world, will continue to fight fragmentation and strive for dialogue, understanding and collaboration. As we stand for a future where nations have to work together for the collective well-being for humanity. We appreciate the long-term support from our Chinese friends, from many ministers who are here with us today as well. Thank you for your participation. Premier Li, we are eager to learn from your vision on China and the world. Please join me here at the podium. Professor Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, your Excellencies heads of government, heads of international organizations, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, friends, good morning. It gives me a great pleasure to join friends, old and new, here in the port city of Tianjin for the 14th annual meeting of the new champions. Let me begin by extending on behalf of the Chinese government warm congratulations on the opening of the event and a hearty welcome to all participants and journalists. This is the first in-person annual meeting since COVID-19 struck over three years ago. Everyone is following this closely. In the past few years, the ones in a century pandemic compounded by transformations unseen in a century has brought significant change to our world. On the one hand, the impact of COVID-19 still lingers. Unilateralism, protectionism and de-globalization are on the rise. Global challenges are escalating and regional conflicts keep flaring up. Instability, uncertainty and unpredictability have become commonplace. On the other hand, the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is gaining momentum. Humanity is as steadfast as ever in pursuing peace and development. For most countries, the aspiration for win-win cooperation has grown even stronger. The world is standing at historical crossroads. How should humanity navigate such turbulent times is a crucial issue of shared concern for people of all countries. I believe that we could draw some very important lessons from the transformations happening in the world in the past several years. I would like to make mainly four points and share them with you today. First, having experienced barriers, both visible and invisible ones, we should all the more cherish communication and exchange. For quite a while, face-to-face interaction, something we took for granted before, was made very difficult because of the pandemic. As the pandemic subsides, the visible barriers it caused will eventually be removed. However, the invisible barriers put up by some people in recent years are becoming widespread and pushing the world into division and even confrontation. This is a bigger cause for concern. Differences in human perception and the diversity of civilizations have been with us since ancient times. These differences should not be a cause for estrangement for different countries, different people and different groups. Instead, these differences should become a driver for even more communication and exchanges. The absence of effective communication and the lack of comprehensive holistic and objective perception could easily lead to prejudice and even stereotypes. Living in the same global village, we, the humankind, must eliminate the visible barriers and more importantly, remove those invisible ones. Different countries, ethnic groups and civilizations need to deepen mutual understanding and strengthen dialogue to bridge differences and expand common ground. From my perspective, what is crucial for communication and exchanges is sincerity. Only by treating each other with sincerity can we truly know and understand each other in order to avoid misperception and miscalculation. Effective communication, even if it only brings understanding, not agreement, would help reduce many of the disputes in today's world. The World Economic Forum, I think, is an important platform to facilitate such mutual understanding. Yesterday, I met with Professor Schwab. I said back then that in the world today, the World Economic Forum is of crucial importance in today's context. We thank Professor Schwab. Thank you very much. The second observation I would like to make is that having experienced the shocks of global crises, we should all the more cherish solidarity and cooperation. The history of human society is a record of human battles against and victories over challenges and difficulties. In phase of a momentous crisis, no country can stay unscathed or solve the problems single-handedly. Solidarity and cooperation is the right way forward. In the past three plus years, all countries have fought hard against the pandemic. It demonstrates the powerful strength of humanity pulling together and looking out for each other in hard times. COVID-19 will not be the last public health crisis humanity faces. Global public health governance needs to be enhanced. Meanwhile, we're also confronted with a multitude of global challenges, such as climate change, debt risks, slowing growth, a wealth gap, etc. These are the issues facing humanity. As a community with a shared future, we must cherish the gains of our cooperation, embrace the concept of win-win cooperation, and work together to tackle these global challenges and promote human progress. As you know, we no longer live in a era where we can go it alone. It is no longer an era where we champion individual heroism. It is an era of cooperation and mutual assistance. From addressing the major issues I mentioned above to making breakthroughs in a research project, teamwork, and interdisciplinary strength should be brought to bear. One could say solidarity and cooperation has become an important way for us humanity to think and act. This is my second observation. The third observation I would like to make is that having experienced the ups and downs of economic globalization, we should all the more cherish openness and cooperation. Economic globalization is a historical trend. Despite the headwinds and pushback, the overarching trend of economic globalization has kept moving forward. In particular, the rapid advance of new technologies such as digital technology and artificial intelligence is creating favorable conditions for economic globalization. The world should not and cannot return to a state of mutual seclusion or isolation. A few days ago I was in Europe and I visited Germany and France. I had in-depth exchanges with leaders and people from political and business communities. The prevailing view is to reject the zero sum mindset and return to the right track of win-win cooperation. As you know, some in the west are hyping up the so-called phraseologies of reducing dependencies and de-risking. These two concepts, I would say, are false propositions. As economic globalization has already made the world, economy, an integral whole where everyone's interests are closely entwined. Countries are interdependent, interconnected on each other, on their economies. We can enable each other's success. This is something good rather than something bad. If there is risk in a certain industry, it is not the call or decision by a particular organization or a single government. It is businesses that are most sensitive and are hence in the best position to assess such risks. They should be left to come to their own conclusion and make their own choice. Governments and relevant organizations should not overreach themselves, still less overstretch the concept of risk or turn it into an ideological tool. We must follow the trend of history, cement the consensus on development, and continue our efforts to build an open world economy. We should oppose the politicization of economic issues and work together to keep global industrial and supply chains stable, smooth, and secure in order to deliver the fruits of globalization to different countries and groups of people in a more equitable way. There is certainly no denying that with openness and cooperation comes competition. This requires us to get the relationship between competition and cooperation right, properly handle conflicting interests, and in particular look for even more areas where interests converge. Simply put, we must work together to advance toward cooperation in order to make the pie bigger and then look into how to share it appropriately. If the cake itself is small, even if we give it to one party, that is not something we are looking for. We believe that the premise of development is cooperation. We need to develop together. These are the three observations I made, and the fourth one is that having experienced the anxiety caused by conflict and turmoil, we should all the more cherish peace and stability. Without peace, nothing can be achieved. This is a hot lesson humanity has learned from history. In the past 100 plus years, the world went through two world wars and more than 40 years of cold war before the humanity could finally enjoy a period of relative stability and development. We must cherish it. However, we are seeing quite unfortunate events. Recent years have witnessed repeated rhetoric by some to stoke ideological confrontation, hatred, and prejudice. These rhetorics keep coming up, and as a result, we are seeing acts of encirclement and suppression and even regional wars and conflicts. People in the regions concerned have suffered deeply, and great damage has been done toward development. Peace is highly precious, and development is never easy. It takes persistent efforts to deliver these two lofty goals. We must act in the common interest of humanity and live up to the responsibility for peace and development. We need to uphold fairness and justice, overcome the security dilemma, and work collectively to safeguard a peaceful and stable environment for development. In China's official lingo, we compare security to the number of one and other things, the many zeros that come after it. In a numerical sense, without the number one, all the zeros following it would come to nothing. That is how crucial security is. I believe this is the case for a country, a region, and more broadly the entire world. Peace and stability are a fundamental prerequisite for development and everything else. A shifting world can be revelatory in many ways. In a nutshell, what is lacking in today's world, I believe, is communication, not estrangement, cooperation, not confrontation, openness, not isolation, peace, not conflict. We must act on the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind put forward by President Xi Jinping and jointly implement the global development initiative, the global security initiative, and the global civilization initiative. We need to press ahead by following the logic of historical progress, develop by riding the tide of our times, and work hard to build an even better world. Ladies and gentlemen, friends, as a responsible major country, China has all along stood firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress. Holding high the banner of peace, development, and win-win cooperation, China is committed to building world peace, promoting global development, and upholding the international order. Most notably, since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, we have focused on promoting high quality development, realized the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects as planned, and did absolute poverty in China once and for all, and embarked on a new journey toward building a modern socialist country in all respects. Today, the Chinese economy is deeply integrated into the world economy. China has developed itself by embracing globalization and grown into a most staunch force for globalization. Over the past decade, China has been an important source of impetus for the steady growth of the world economy. In the past 10 years, the Chinese economy grew at 6.6% on average annually. Its share in global economic output increased from 11.4% in 2012, which is 10 years ago, to 18% last year. That is the share of our economy in the world, that is 18%. China's trade in goods ranked the top in the world for six years in a row. On average, China's contribution to global growth was over 30% every year. China has been the biggest engine driving global growth. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, China was the only major economy in the world that registered a positive growth. In the past three years, we have encountered various difficulties, but China achieved an average annual growth of 4.5%, which is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the world average, and was among the best performers of the world's major economies. As it pursues interconnected development with other countries, China has honoured its WTO accession commitments by opening up its market to the rest of the world and sharing its development opportunities with all, making itself a major trading partner of over 140 countries and regions. China's development has improved the lives of the Chinese people, and also provided people in other countries with a large amount of quality yet inexpensive products. China has served as an important anchor and source of impetus for free trade and stable growth in the world. In the longer time to come, China will continue to provide strong dynamism to the world economic recovery and growth. China today is still the world's largest developing country. It has a population of over 1.4 billion. We have a big economy, but divided by 1.4 billion at per capita level, our economic indicators and living standards are only modest. Our development remains unbalanced and inadequate, and yet such imbalance and inadequacy is also where China's development potential and space lie. We are acting on a new development philosophy, fostering a new development paradigm at a faster pace and working hard to achieve high quality development. We are introducing more practical and effective measures to further attack the potential of domestic demand, invigorate the market, make urban, rural and regional development more coordinated, accelerate the green transition, and advance high standard opening up. These measures are making a difference. From what we see this year, China's economy shows a clear momentum of rebound and improvement. GDP grew by 4.5% in the first quarter year on year and expected to expand faster in the second quarter than in the first. We are on track to hit the growth target of around 5% we set for the whole year. Some international organizations and institutions have recently revised up their growth forecasts for China this year, demonstrating their confidence in China's development prospects. We have full confidence and the ability to achieve the steady growth of the Chinese economy, on the track of high quality development in a long time to come. This will increase the size of the market, create opportunities of cooperation, and provide a consistent source of dynamism to the world economic recovery and growth, as well as opportunities of win-win cooperation to investors from all countries. Ladies and gentlemen, friends, the Chinese people often say heroes show their metal in the test of time. In this time of much uncertainty, entrepreneurs with your keen grasp of the market, your initiative and your actions can bring greater certainty to the world. The theme of this year's annual meeting, entrepreneurship, the driving force of the global economy, cannot be more fitting. Entrepreneurs from different countries may be distinct in different ways, but I believe the core attributes of entrepreneurship are the same, and I think they are a sharp sense, relentless drive, and an extraordinary ability to act in business startup innovation and creation. China wishes to work with all of you to firmly support economic globalization, firmly uphold the market economy, firmly support free trade, and steer the world economy toward a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable future. Last week, the Chinese people celebrated the traditional Dragon Boat Festival. An important sport for the festival is Dragon Boat Racing. This sport captures the Chinese people's wish for fair weather and good crops. It also embodies a simple truth. When everyone paddles together, they can drive a big boat forward. Let us be united in our wish for win-win cooperation, paddle together with one heart and one mind, and steer the giantship of the world economy toward a brighter future. I wish this year's meeting a full success. Thank you. Thank you for your insightful speech, for your four observations, and for your commitments to global cooperation and entrepreneurship. We have seen in your speech great confidence in terms of the resilience and growth, and also of the potential of contribution of the Chinese economy to the world. But even more important, a strong commitment for global cooperation in addressing our common challenges together. Primarily, let's paddle together. Thank you.


In traditional calligraphy of many cultures, including Far Eastern, Islamic, Hebrew, and Roman, the transformation of words into beauty was inspired by revelations from the invisible world and the laws governing it. Ever since, scribes have been inspired by the truths and ideas of their religious and philosophical traditions, as well as by the beauty of nature and the trappings of worldly existence. Calligraphers in every culture cultivate writing as a discipline and art form. Such shared aspects are what make our exhibition worthwhile, providing a space of conversation between different calligraphy traditions, cultures, and scripts, which engage a broad range of artists, calligraphers, and calligraphy lovers to see and compare one another's tradition. In a multicultural region, such as the Bay Area, there are ever more and more communities who wish to explore the way in other culture things, speaks, prays, reads, and writes. If we think an intercultural conversation would be something worthwhile, quite often we must create something special, a special circumstance in which two or more members of the human family who have remained largely ignorant about the other or the others suddenly find themselves placed in the same room with a mediating voice encouraging them to speak. This is what we intend to do with calligraphies in conversation, bringing diverse calligraphy traditions together in one place, to stand face to face, and side by side, in hopes that they will have something to say to one another. On consideration, one must surely come to the conclusion that the different traditions represented in this exhibition, though technically warled apart, share one and the same origin and purpose. The reason we have beautiful writing, the literal meaning of calligraphy, is a need to express our beautiful thinking, that jewel in the crown of our humanity, an experience beyond all limits of language and culture, whether it be the thought of laws and love, of the miracles of nature or those of man's invention, if there was writing to express that people thought it to be beautiful, to do justice to the beauty of the message and transforming the written word into the art. Just a little bit background, so 2014, we had the exhibition at ICCNC and Oakland Cultural Center, OACC, both in downtown Oakland. So calligraphy in conversation is a traveling exhibition. Each year, we bring it to a different place, different community center, different public library, hopefully in the future, different museums. In 2014, we had over 80 artworks, mainly from Middle Eastern and Paristern traditions. But in 2015 onward, we opened the exhibition into other traditions and other scripts and cultures. In 2015, we had an exhibition at three places, ICCNC, OACC, and Oakland Public Library, and we had a variety range of different calligraphy traditions and scripts. 2016, we had a smaller exhibition at the Gallery of Fremont Art Association, which hosted the exhibition with 40 artworks. And the 2017, which we are very excited to open today and all are waiting to go upstairs on the sixth floor and visit, is having over 70 artworks from around the world. This is a map of the people who visited the website and the forum and try to submit artwork. You can see amazing calligraphers are living all around the world with different languages and we are really honored to have many of them being represented in this exhibition. We have over 50 artists and calligraphers being at this exhibition and I just want to take time and ask if any of the calligraphers, I know some faces of this exhibition are here. Would you mind please to just stand up and you would know your face. Thank you so much. We are really honored to have your works and it's really important to have local artists and international artists so this conversation will be more live and going on. And finally, I want to let you know that we have just launched the calligraphy and conversations website so previously it was being hosted at the ZR Center's website which is the leading organization of this exhibition but now we have the standalone website of the exhibition and hopefully we will have all the artworks over there with the descriptions and biographies and prices. The artworks here are for sale, we didn't mention any pricing in the library because we don't have to but they asked us to have an external resource for that so if people are willing to acquire artworks which I encourage you, they are very unique and great so you can visit the website calligraphy.org. Thank you so much. We will enjoy the rest of the presentations.