May 2024

Here's another edition of Inflexion Point, where we look at why your brain craves for music, lessons from US Navy SEALs on leading amid chaos, Jerry Seinfeld's theory of comedy, myths and realities of being a product manager, and how large language models do some amazing things that nobody quite understands how.

Why Your Brain Craves Music

Research suggests that music triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens, the same brain structure that releases the “pleasure chemical” dopamine during sex and eating. Music also activates the amygdala, which is involved with the processing of emotion, as well as areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in abstract decision making. When we’re listening to music, the most advanced areas of the brain tie in to the most ancient. It has an emotional and cognitive effect, and that's why most people put listening to music as one of the top five most positive experiences. (Source: Time)

A Navy Seal Talks About Chaos, Leadership and Innovation

US Navy SEAL Bob Schoulz talks about how to lead under chaos, which is typical of any war situation. He opines that how well the team innovates when they’re in trouble is largely a function of HOW the team has trained together - how well and how hard, and how creatively. Leaders need a strong and pervasive skill set and plan that addresses current circumstances; but also a readiness to quickly change and adapt your thinking when it's not working. A lot depends on how creative a leader is in finding patterns and guiding her team towards those. (Source: Forbes) 

Jerry Seinfeld’s Theory of Comedy

Jerry Seinfeld is as disciplined about writing jokes as a pianist would be about her art form. He really lives by the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, that is everything he has done means nothing. As he says, 'My normal day is just—I like to write and work on standup. That’s my favorite thing to do. It’s like a woodshop. It’s like doing Lego. It’s like a world of Lego to me. I just take plastic pieces and play with them all day. Not all day, but for a couple hours a day.' In this interview, Seinfeld talks about how he gets ideas, the discipline it takes and his overall life's philosophy. (Source: New Yorker)

The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager

In this piece, Apoorva Mishra, a product manager at Amazon for two products, one related to ad technology and another related to billing and automation for podcast creators and advertisers, talks about the non-glamorous aspects of the role. It's a role with lots of responsibilities, but limited authority. An adept product manager must have a combination of technical skills, domain expertise, customer empathy, and the ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics. Good writing skills, being able to get into the data and code, and being close to the customer are more vital than banking on fancy frameworks. (Source: HBR) 

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

Researchers have realised that large language models seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on. This phenomenon is called Grokking. Models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini learn to do a task—spot faces, translate sentences, avoid pedestrians—by training with a specific set of examples. Yet they can generalize, learning to do that task with examples they have not seen before. How exactly it's done isn't well known. (Source: MIT Tech Review)