W25 - A Small Surprise GPT Gave Me

Sharing a recent case of using GPT that pleasantly surprised me.

I had previously noted three clever designs; instinctively, these three unrelated things seemed to share some similarities. If abstracted and generalized properly, there might be a common pattern—though there might not. The three unrelated examples are as follows.

1. In Chinese youth soccer development there's a well-regarded academy founded by Sun Jihai called “Hi Ball Youth.” It offers free training, matches, and overseas study. It signs contracts with players so that if they become professionals they share part of their earnings. The model closely resembles venture capital.

2. There’s an approach to encourage teams to adopt AI: promise that workload remains the same for a period, encourage everyone to improve efficiency with AI, and let the time and resources saved belong to the individual—use the time for personal pursuits and the resources for projects you’re interested in.

3. There’s an investment method in value investing: selling puts. You earn premiums when the stock price rises, and when the price falls you can buy the stock at a lower effective price.

I fed this fuzzy idea to GPT to see what it would produce.

GPT’s reply was: “lock the downside + asymmetric upside.”

Locking the downside means securing an acceptable “worst outcome,” even assigning intrinsic value so losses are capped. In the academy case the worst is at most sharing or covering costs; with the AI incentive the worst is maintaining the original productivity; selling puts means the worst is holding the stock at a discounted price.

Asymmetric upside means creating a right-skewed (convex) payoff curve. Upside/improvement/success → all excess gains go to you; downside/failure/no change → losses are capped and won’t sink the system. Mathematically, it’s structuring investments to have positive expected value plus asymmetry.

One-sentence summary: Exchange a small, controllable cost for a “limited loss, unlimited gain” structure so that probability and payoff ratio together raise the long-term expected value.