Warren Buffett famously said, "Shackles of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken".

The first chapter opens with this chart which made the book very interesting to me:

If a person gets 1% worse every day, in a year they will be 3% of the person they were.

If a person gets better by 1% every day, in a year they will be 37.78% better.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little dif- ference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

The Book in Three Sentences

An atomic habit is a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do but is also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.

Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

The Five Big Ideas

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

Detailed summary here:

https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/self-help/atomic-habits/

In Where Is My Flying Car?, engineer and futurist J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer the deceptively simple question posed in the book’s title. What starts as an exploration of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an examination of the global economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion and nanotechnology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder.

https://www.amazon.in/Where-Flying-Car-Storrs-Hall/dp/1953953182/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?crid=TZU60YR8O2HR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.2yyVlO_5WkNKbD7C2wAwDl0wscU1e7u5ibQ_B2DMryU.VIE5nXVVdDO7tzWZ3CLrUBdoJgdpsBOuItXDM6kLXuk&dib_tag=se&keywords=j+storrs+hall&qid=1731679509&sprefix=j+storrs+hall%2Caps%2C279&sr=8-2 

Is DeepSeek inaccurate? … claims of plagiarism … how DeepSeek’s technology works … the risks it represents … a roundtable discussion with our experts

The DeepSeek story continues to evolve with new information emerging.

Let’s begin with Reuters:

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting in an 83% fail rate, according to a report published by trustworthiness rating service NewsGuard on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, as to how it caught up with the U.S. incumbent AI platforms so quickly, the answer might be “stealing.”

Here’s The New York Post:

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says it has proof that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek used its technology to create a competing artificial intelligence model — fueling concerns about intellectual property theft in the fast-growing industry.

OpenAI believes DeepSeek, which was founded by math whiz Liang Wenfeng, used a process called “distillation,” which helps make smaller AI models perform better by learning from larger ones.

While this is common in AI development, OpenAI says DeepSeek may have broken its rules by using the technique to create its own AI system…

Security researchers at Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI, discovered last fall that individuals with possible links to DeepSeek were harvesting vast troves of data through OpenAI’s application programming interface, or API, sources told Bloomberg.

Despite this, Microsoft has been gracious and supportive of DeepSeek.

From Bloomberg:

“DeepSeek has had some real innovations,” [said Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella] during an investor call after Microsoft reported quarterly results on Wednesday.

“Obviously now that all gets commoditized and it’s going to get broadly used.”

Stepping back, let’s not rush to conclusions about what DeepSeek’s technology means for U.S. AI sector. New information and perspectives are emerging fast, and the story will continue evolving. 

Source: InvestorPlace Digest 

January 30, 2025