Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Oh no.Oh no:If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this chartbook should save you from reading 25,000 of them.That counts for something in a week when so many millions of words have been written about the surprise arrival of China’s DeepSeek AI model.AI has come of age in the era of the meme – and it turns out memes are one of the best ways of explaining where it is going.Deutsche Bank is Europe’s second-largest bank by assets. Measured by 2024 fees it’s the number-nine investment bank globally. Here are its first two memes in the slide deck it has sent to clients about DeepSeek:Here is Deutsche Bank’s third meme about DeepSeek:And here is Deutsche Bank’s fourth meme about DeepSeek:OK, fine. We have absolutely no right to criticise anyone for oversimplifying financial trends and concepts with overused images. Ditto being too online. Everyone here at FT Alphaville acknowledges that glass houses can’t throw shade. And the points Deutsche has memed are fair. The car-at-a-junction one is to show how, because of DeepSeek, the industry focus shifted overnight from training ever-bigger LLMs to optimising inference and extracting more value out of smaller models. The galaxy-brain one is to show how gen-AI deployments are moving from chatbots to autonomous interconnected systems in which the LLM is just one engine. The bus-view one is to show how Meta, Alphabet and Amazon have relied more for AI-related revenue on advertising than on subscription sales, which is opposite to how the wider software industry has been going.The following two Deutsche Bank memes probably don’t need that much explanation:Also, there’s this one:Have we mentioned there are 25 of these? There are 25 of these.And credit where it’s due. There are no easy ways to illustrate in one picture the economist Daron Acemoglu’s forecast that productivity growth may only reach 0.7 per cent over 10 years (based on cost savings from tasks that can be performed economically by current genAI) in the context of US productivity rising at 2.6 per cent over the past six quarters from an average since 1900 of 1.5 per cent. This is a fair attempt:Deutsche Bank also has memes that cover AI copyright disputes, hallucinations, human bias feedback loops, sovereign-state protectionism, and EU overregulation, none of which are likely to add to common understanding of the issues at hand. A more notable (and unusual, for sellside research) meme acknowledges public antipathy. Deutsche Bank cites its own survey that just 40 per cent of US customers, and 20 per cent of European ones, completely trust AI with their personal data:The IMF’s finding that almost 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to AI, and 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies, has been memed thusly:And Glassdoor data that showed the average annual base salary for an AI prompt engineer was more than $178,000 as of October, with bonuses of up to $130,000, gets this treatment:Honestly, this is all fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.“Financial markets analyst” is very high on the at-risk list of job titles. If the response is for analysts to do weird stuff, like putting Hide-The-Pain Harold in their slide decks, that’s OK. Being weirder than AI is the added value. Computers are much better at numbers than jokes. The same could be said of Germans, of course, but well done to Deutsche Bank for giving it a go.Further reading:— FT Alphaville’s meme awards: 2013, 2019, 2022, 2023 and probably other years we can’t find— The public can’t cope with our dank memes, FCA says (FTAV)— Apollo is now using memes to diss private equity rivals (FTAV)
