Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would get cited in the Financial Times.
Last week, I read an FT Alphaville article on the circular deals in AI. The data behind it came from Sona Asset Management, and it was so deep and rich that I wanted to turn it into something people could explore. So I built a website that shows who has promised money to whom in AI.
By every measure, my original post about it flopped. It sent some ~150 people to the site.
Then, within a day, the FT reporter who wrote that article emailed me to say he liked the work. I did not expect that at all.
Another day later, I opened my website analytics and nearly fell off my chair. Over 1,000 people had visited all of a sudden, and the analytics showed the FT as the top referrer.
Turns out, FT Alphaville had listed my site in its daily Further Reading and credited me by name. My link sat in the same list as Oaktree Capital, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Bloomberg. I was clearly the odd one out.
Now I understand how circular financing works. Sona gave its data to the FT, and the FT wrote an article. I turned the FT's article into a website, and then the FT linked back to my website. We made a circular deal of our own, minus the trillions of dollars.
What a wild ride. You never know who is reading your work or where it will travel, so keep making things and putting them out.
Explore the site: ai-money-map.vercel.app. The original post about it is here.