#artificial-intelligence

For most of my life, I thought writing meant choosing the words.

Not merely having an idea and communicating it successfully, but deciding exactly how one sentence should lead into another. Whether this word was better than that one. Whether a paragraph needed one more sentence or one fewer. Whether some thought sounded too formal, too blunt, too sentimental, too vague.

I cared about these things partly because I was lucky enough to begin reading seriously when I was young, and partly because I had English teachers who made writing feel like something worth taking seriously.

Language wasn't just packaging for thought. The packaging was part of the thought.

That makes my current writing process slightly strange.

These days, I often begin with the ideas and outsource much of the composition.

I explain what I am thinking to an artificial intelligence. I describe the argument, the uncertainty, the examples, the tone I am after, the things I do and do not want the piece to say. Then I get back a draft.

I read it.

And surprisingly often, my reaction is simply:

Yes. That's basically it.

Maybe I change some things. Maybe I push back against a sentence that goes too far or ask for a section to be reworked. But if the words adequately represent the structure that was already in my head, I increasingly feel little compulsion to replace them merely so that I can say I personally typed every sentence.

For years, one of the most common pieces of investing advice has been remarkably simple: buy a broad market index fund and hold it for the long run.

There is a great deal of evidence supporting that advice. Index funds offer low costs, broad diversification, and a way to participate in the growth of the economy without attempting to outsmart the market. For many investors, they remain an excellent choice.

Still, there is a subtle detail that is easy to miss.

Many investors think of a fund tracking the S&P 500 as a basket containing five hundred companies of roughly equal importance. In reality, that is not how most major indexes work.

The largest companies receive the largest weights.

This means that although an index fund may hold hundreds of businesses, its performance can be influenced disproportionately by a much smaller group.

That distinction may not matter much during ordinary times. It becomes more interesting when a particular sector captures the imagination of investors.

In the current market, artificial intelligence has become one of the dominant narratives. Enormous amounts of capital have flowed toward companies seen as leaders or beneficiaries of the AI boom. Some of these firms have reached valuations that would have seemed extraordinary only a decade ago.

Whether this enthusiasm proves fully justified is a question for the future. The technology itself is undeniably impressive. The economic consequences may be equally profound.