Welcome to The Nightcrawler, a weekly collection of thought-provoking articles and analysis on technology, innovation, and long-term investing. The Nightcrawler is written and published every Friday evening by Eric Markowitz, Worm Capital's Director of Research. You can catch him here on Twitter—or at eric@wormcapital.com. Feedback and new ideas are always welcome.
In this evening's email...
In pursuit of the holy grail
I'm of the view that autonomy's impact on the economy (i.e. via self-driving cars, bots, generalized AI, etc.) will be this century's version of electricity—an inflection point of profound GDP growth, a deflationary boom, and a colossal redistribution of wealth. (I also think it will trigger an equally colossal destruction of wealth among many incumbents and asset classes...) This MIT Technology Review article highlights how a few startups are pursuing an end-to-end path of reinforcement learning for autonomous vehicles. It's a good primer for those interested in this subject; it also offers a framework to understand the different technical approaches being pursued.