SecretDreams

I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.

He's effectively setting the pace of the trends. Objectively, Bitcoin was a grift and money laundering scheme. LLM valuations vs what they've made so far is probably also quite a bit more towards the grift side (yes, I use them and yes they do good work in good hands). Robotics will probably be valued similarly, despite not actually having anywhere near the needed ROIs to make sense. The only time where revenue was actually grounded behind a sensible industry was gaming. But it doesn't matter because Jensen sells the shovels and, in the background, tells people where to dig. Dude's basically a genius at making money.

Make money while there's money to be made then pivot to the next scheme?

Gaming > Bitcoin > LLMs > Robotics

Jensen's job is to just be one step ahead of the market dynamics to keep the investor dollars flowing.

Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat?

It's China putting pressure on a financing strategy in the US that was always a house of cards. It could also be China democratizing something that should have ALWAYS been democratized. Maybe both when the history books on this get written and absorbed by the winners of the LLM wars.

For the younger generations, it's just called Tuesday.

but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.

Maybe today. I doubt it tomorrow. Legal and not legal, largely, has to answer to the population sooner or later. Ultimately, humanity decides legality. And I don't think the frontier labs will get a pass from humanity in the midterm, let alone the long term. I think you'll see the rules change towards something more "intent" driven. And there's absolutely no difference in intent between Frontier labs and everyone chasing them.

Frontier labs just want the door closed behind them, as do their investors, because they know the money will never be recouped if others can do the same magic tricks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxYUizQrAg8&t=4s

SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war).

True, if Twitter and xAI stopped existing, there would be an uproar from all the suddenly unemployed disinformation botters.

YouTube empowers millions of creators around the world.

Agree.

But it empowers them to vie for attention in mostly the worst ways possible and, overwhelmingly, has led to a lot of bad content. There's some gems too. But, by and large, YouTube is less desirable for me to use than it was 10 years ago and I think it's because of the transformation into an industry, rather than an indie platform that also paid out.

It feels like it went from a farmer's market with a lot of local farmers selling their goods to shopping at Walmart.

go around such perception shifts through money alone.

Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

Yes

that the reader loses the will to live.

My general vibe hearing about AI.

Anthropic and OAI are both looking for 1T valuations. Anthropic is projected* to make $500mil operating profit off 10bil annualized revenue. They need to grow these numbers 10-50x more for the valuation they're seeking to make sense.

Tough pill to swallow given they lack a moat and their compute is being subsidized by the companies they lease it from, all of which are INVESTED in Anthropic and have a desire for their growth story to look good because when they IPO it gives those same investors a better shot at making their money back.

That's the circular aspect of this whole scheme. Nobody makes their money back if the LLM company valuations get more realistic.

Rockets have value to humanity too, but some people that worked on rockets ended up working for people that did not want to use rockets to improve human life.

I use AI all the time and it is great.

That said, I'm aligned with you that I'm not clear who is profiting from it other than oligarchs. I'm also quite certain the valuations are fully in bubble territory, pricing in decades of profit I don't see playing out for the LLM vendors. That said, I think it'll be a bit before it deflates.

Way too many regular tech bros making money/invested in it for a reasonable discussion on the topic on HN, imo.

The core problem here seems to be that people think your supplier having an equity stake in your company is wrong or risky.

If these were all private entities, I think it'd be okay.

But they're public entities and they're using the pittance of investment as a force multiplier on their stock price, which they're then regularly using to raise capital.

A lot of dumb money in retail investors (as well as corporate) are a big reason this valuations bubble is occuring - which is really the elephant in the room. It's not that the tech isn't real. It's that the valuations behind it have already priced in maybe a decade of profit that hasn't come close to materializing for the LLM vendors; although, the shovel sellers and makers are doing phenomenal - and they have a vested interest to keep the party going with many sweetheart financing/equity deals.

Yeah, but it's multiple orders of magnitude apart.

Are we also going to start putting LLM engineers to the fire because they're accelerating the enshitification of our world? Probably not.

That was the golden age of the internet. What followed was the total enshitification. Now, I barely use the internet. As a kid I could get lost on it for hours, there was so much discovery. This was before every link tried to sell you something or steal your information from you.

Where are the jet engines?

but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.

I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.

Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.

Everyone just needs to play soccer and avoid the 50/50s if you're an adult that wants to be pain free the next day.

I love me some adult coed soccer. And it can be very high intensity intermittently if you feel like it.

Sex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.

It's crazy how much 1at could improve QOL for their citizens and also improve and diversify their economy. Alas, they're just going to subsidize ram prices for everyone when this current cycles goes from boom to bust.

All my stem exams were hand written, it's how it should be. The best part is coming out with everyone else already disheveled and then grabbing a drink (or many) after the last one is over. That's some solidarity drinking right there.

Let's not think that we are all smarter than management at these companies.

Outside of a few well run companies, it's hard not to feel like the average IC is smarter than their leadership.

CEOs are just as, if not moreso, susceptibility to fomo than everyone else!

One idea I like is directly funding apprenticeship. It pays for job training and classroom instruction on a per-individual basis. The jobs are in long-term career sectors like advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, aviation, healthcare, and technology.

This is basically what grad school does too. I'm into funding education further any day of the week. For higher education, I'd only add a string attached like "must practice trade in state that funded you if job is available for x years or must pay back funding pro rated".

They're trying to do it more like a cartel where all major providers raise prices in unison. The intention is (probably) less specific entrapment and more getting people addicted to a fast LLM. From there, they all play with pricing to give a semblance of choice, without actually overly undercutting each other. At least, in the west.

This is all done to help valuations. The main revenue source are the investor dollars at the prospect that this industry will very soon actually be sustainable and highly profitable. It won't be, but if very soon stays around the corner consistently, the investor dollars keep coming.

You miss every shot you don't take. Don't be ashamed or afraid to appeal. At worst, nothing changes.

Sadly, all the time spent deferring reality ends up hurting a lot of bystanders. The debt they've run up is going to be painful, maybe moreso than the damages incurred from the anti-science and anti-transparency policies.