ericmay

Spot-on and you're asking the right questions. And the other problem in these comments is that folks seem to think if China pulls ahead we can't just distill their models, provided that distillation is a key part of "this". If it's such a great strategy we'll just use it too if we want to. Boom roasted.

For some reason folks seem to think that China can take action and then other countries can't also take action or respond to that action and it comes up again and again. China has hypersonic missiles! Pack it up boys time to go home. Nothing we can do. Dang shucks. China distilled American AI models, welp time to just close it all down and let's just write off those trillions of dollars and all the literal geniuses financing and building these things. Oh well China can just copy American models while we spend all the money! Ok we just stop developing models and we'll just copy their models. China will flood the market with their cheap products! Nope can't do anything like, oh, idk, not buy any of those products or just raise the prices on them in local markets. It's never-ending. I don't understand the lack of capacity to reason about other actors that takes commonly takes place. And that's just China, never mind other general issues.

That's fair, I don't really take a large issue with anything you wrote here. My general point was to shake loose some dogmatic apples hanging on to their naive and unsubstantiated beliefs that open-source must be some moral good and closed-source must be some moral bad. Both can be good or bad.

Thanks

Sure, but at the end of the day, Apple makes a lot more money not just on device sales but app sales too even though Android phones are allegedly more versatile and inexpensive.

You can talk about open-source and cheap Chinese models all you want, but at the end of the day if American companies are making all the money that's kind of all that matters. That will feed into development and maintaining an edge.

androids and iphones are approximately the same thing

Yet...

  Android holds 70.6% of global active devices to iOS at 28.7%, but iOS captures 64.2% of consumer app spend. [1]

Possible, certainly. But this case also applies to China and its "open-weights" strategy. They won't be able to form companies either or get ahead.

[1] https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2...

This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good. But you can see how that breaks down with even trivial examples. Not a great argument.

The second piece of this "a moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit" - says who? Why? This logic is also faulty. You're also cargo-cutting self-interest in here as a moral failure when many good things depend on humans acting in their own self interest. For example I completely and selfishly installed a new tree at my house. But the community benefits from carbon capture, shade, &c.

I understand the sentiment you have here and I think for everyday use and having some guiding principles it is probably fine, but don't confuse this for a principle that is actually examined. You can find contradictions rather easily, never mind solid arguments which expose cases where what you think is true is not really true and so forth.

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum.

Now what?

The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (which I think the iPhone to cheap Android phone really speaks to, i.e. they do the same thing but one is 50x better at 5x-10x the cost) and thus they can be gate kept and like the iPhone the vast majority of profits go to a select few with high end implementations. OR the models aren't actually that much better, companies lose a fortune and then nobody can create any better commercial models or build out scale needed for open source models because it's not profitable.

We could wind up with only open-source models or something along those lines, but if the compute and scale is needed to train the models, nobody will be able to do that profitably and so AI research is either gate kept and silo'd for something like military applications or it just doesn't really happen because there's no funding for this scale of build out.

That's just like, your opinion.... man....

It depends on how it is applied. You can release open source software that advances knowledge and freedom that results in economic destruction or the loss of life, for example.

No

Prove it

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path.

Right... and there are two problems with this:

1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the underlying assumptions about compute and scale needed are mostly on the mark. So you can release open-weight models and they will have great use cases and applications, but ultimately similar to how you don't use an open-source phone or a budget Android phone from Wal-Mart and you buy an iPhone instead, you will see that although they "do the same thing" one product is clearly superior and you just have to pay for it. For this to not be true...

2. then it incentivizes most (all?) companies, American, Chinese, or European to halt development of models because if you spend all the CAPEX and it can just be copied and turned open-source nobody will invest in that. Given that China is not halting development of proprietary models I believe the current strategy and the subsequent approach to release open-weight models is at best a stall tactic, and at worse a sign of desperation.

Open source and the support and development models around it have been great. But folks are a little too dogmatic about it. Open-source software isn't a moral good, and closed-source software isn't a moral wrong either.

I have to live in this economy, unfortunately.

Sure but that applies to all of us with anything we disagree with. I think taxes are too high. "Blah blah do XYZ" I can just say "I have to live in this economy, unfortunately.". Ok.

Your argument is basically "in my opinion SpaceX is overvalued, therefore a lot of pump-and-dumps are going on and retail investors are buying them and losing money, therefore the economy is rigged" or something along those lines. Feel free to reframe it how you'd like but that's the gist of it. At the end of the day it's just not very coherent and I've repeatedly pointed out systematic reasons that it's wrong, I've pointed out how your valuation of any specific company is incomplete, and finally as you've tried to piece these things together you still have not made a consistent point and you've meandered around basically just complaining without really bringing anything to the table here. If SpaceX or any other company that is going to IPO is a pump-and-dump, show your work. At the end of the day it's just your opinion, and one in which most of society disagrees with.

I don't think anyone has really had to value a planet yet.

Sure, but that doesn't mean it's not possible or that you can't actually value the resources and minerals.

(I'd assert Earth is at least as priceless as, say, the Mona Lisa.)

I'd mostly argue the same, but what something is worth is mostly just an opinion.

It's more broad but I don't think that changes anything with respect to the destructiveness and need to stamp out the ideology. Nazism is just a flavor of either authoritarianism or maybe just a flavor of a broader racial/cultural superiority ideology. Typically in the west we reject the whole tree and not just some of the branches. I apply the same argument to communism. And you can certainly find more charitable interpretations where maybe some freedoms are still present, but you can do the same thing racial or cultural superiority ideologies or similar.

By that logic Iran has lost the war too, because they can't possibly come out of this situation in a better place than before the war started, which really was back in October 2022.

Since then Iran's economy has been crushed, government was decapitated (and could be again at a time and place of our choosing), they face a naval blockade that prevents them from selling oil, their military was drastically reduced in size and capability by American bombing, they've made their fellow Arabs in the region very, very angry, and they've come to see that both China and Russia (don't forget, Iran sells drones to Russia to kill Ukrainians) were powerless to come to its aid. Their nuclear program is at best on pause.

Now we can sprinkle in that they've depleted a lot of their munitions, and both Hamas and Hezbollah were nearly destroyed and have become shells of their former selves, resorting to hiding behind children and attacking UN aid convoys.

Just in case you thought Iran was somehow coming out of this situation better than before, the above shows that is unequivocally false.

But hey, yea the US "lost the war".

Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).

Spot on. It's interesting to me that we've failed to stomp out communist sympathies but I guess we didn't stomp out Nazi sympathies either.

Both are authoritarian ideologies that are incompatible with free expression, free trade, and free peoples. Yet people openly talk about being communists despite the above and despite the fact that tens of millions of dead precisely because of communist ideologies and failed economic policies. To claim that fascism and specifically Naziism is an insidious boogeyman means you should also claim the same about communism. Curious how some/many folks don't or don't seem to understand that.

Well if this is what you believe you're basically going to just end up in a world where you are sacrificing Americans or Europeans to uphold Chinese corporations and then their elites hoard all the wealth, and tax revenue to fund services vanishes in the United States, though I think Trump and co would be happy about that development.

At the end of the day, corporations will be upheld so it's a question of whether you'd like some degree of control and ownership, or whether you'd like to, well who knows what you'd do because how are you going to buy products when you don't have a job, and makes you think Chinese companies won't eventually raise their prices or start cheating out? They already do via companies like Temu which are producing e-waste and plastic junk at artificially cheap prices and of course that ends up polluting the environment too.

If nothing else, consumerism and cheap material products at the expense of all else I'd argue isn't a good thing and we should move away from that as a society.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In communist and other leftist authoritarian ideologies and there are of course different degrees and expressions of this, but you typically have to engage in mass conformity, whereas democracies with free markets and free expression of ideas and allow for folks to style themselves outside of the norm.

It's one of those things that unfortunately popular culture has become confused about. Free markets, property rights, and free expression (as examples), which are not leftist, are the cultural mechanism which allows and encourages individuality. In societies where those things are not valued, free expression for example in communist societies, women are more oppressed and that's arguably by definition. Even at the economic level, capitalist economies and free market economies permit worker-owned collectives, whereas communism destroys and disallows private ownership of the means of production (and typically property rights in general). Free markets are more permissive and more, well, free. Leftist economic systems aren't because they are unnatural and require forced cooperation.

That seems like an odd definition for Earth's value.

It's not, you're just being argumentative for no reason.

It's very normal for someone to value a planet or other celestial body in terms of the value of the minerals or other resources on that body.

You can ask for clarification from them for what they really mean though, but just calling it an outright lie doesn't seem accurate.

No, I'm considering the fact that he has provably (in court!) lied about stuff like this, repeatedly, to the point of the SEC slapping a minder on the guy's tweets for a while.

Don't buy shares in his companies if you don't like their business plans or believe their assumptions. Use your own judgement, create your own models, make your own assumptions.

Well not really. So you're wrong here yet again. What's the total value of all minerals and resources on Earth. If SpaceX had a goal to colonize other planets or asteroids and the sum total value of the minerals and other resources that they had access to was greater than the value of what is here on earth, what exactly is a lie about that statement?

Of course, the aspiration and attempt may fail, but in this quote they did say if.

You're letting your dislike/distrust of Elon Musk cloud your judgement. If you don't like him or don't like what he says, don't buy shares in his companies, don't buy his products, and don't read what he writes.

The naïve retail investors you suggest should buy index funds will be exposed to SpaceX and the other AI companies through them, no?

You're exposed to any company that hits the public market, depending on which ETF you buy. Could be the S&P 500 or a Total Market Index or some mix of those two plus international ETFs. You name it. Of course that's the downside of the ETF, but it's also the upside because the assumption is you can't pick winners and losers in the market so you buy them all.

I think, for example, Microsoft is a terrible investment because almost all of their products suck ass. I have shares though through an ETF and that's the price I pay because while I think it's a terrible investment I could be wrong. Just like you can be wrong about SpaceX.

Your point of contention here really just doesn't make a lot of sense.

You're declaring IPOs like SpaceX to be pump-and-dumps but not providing your own research and valuation model, and then at the same time complaining that retail investors who aren't doing their own research are going against industry advice and buying those IPOs, while also complaining that big banks shop IPO deals (as they have done for a century) to their high net worth clients who are... responsible investors who are making sophisticated decisions? And of course you're ignoring the fact that in order to offload bags one has to find someone to offload those bags to, there are lockup periods, due diligence, and other mechanisms in place to prevent or mitigate the scenario you are describing because it is bad business and you can be sued for doing shady things.

And you know what, maybe you're just wrong about SpaceX[1] and because the retail investors have shares due to the ETF they make more money than they otherwise would. In other words, calling something a pump-and-dump is just like, your opinion.

[1] I have no shares in SpaceX and don't care much about the company one way or the other besides being generally positive on space technology and exploration. I think Elon Musk is a loser, and I also don't own any direct shares in Tesla.

Then just don't buy the pump-and-dump and stick to ETFs.

Already explained things like lockup periods. Investment firms marketing the IPO also do. not. want. IPO prices to crater after the IPO. It makes them look bad, it harms their business, investors will avoid shops that loop them in on what turn out to be obvious scams or whatever. But even if they don't, who cares? They (I) are sophisticated investors. If I make a bad investment I'm an adult with means and I can live with the consequences.

Why didn't I buy the SpaceX IPO? Because I think it's a crappy investment! They tried to pump-and-dump but they sure couldn't catch me. See how easy it is?

I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children.

Maybe. They’ll encounter if eventually and if they are coddled too much they can’t handle it. I also think folks forget, or perhaps they were coddled, that kids already know about a lot of this stuff and when parents aren’t around say all the bad works and make very, very crude jokes. That’s what kids do. That’s what we did.

You're just making stuff up.

Even in this contrived scenario, a stock plunging to 50% of its IPO price doesn't indicate much. It can still be a good investment. Stocks are punished for non-material things all the time.

Even when these mythical scammers that you've completely made up decide to sell, they need willing market buyers. If those market buyers are sophisticated investors then who cares if they lose money - you know the risks.

If they're retail investors then they shouldn't be buying individual stocks in the first place without conducting proper research which would tell them the stock is a good or bad investment based on their own criteria. As I've already mentioned, the default advice and what is common in the industry is to purchase index funds or target date retirement funds. If you go off and buy some stock at IPO you should have done your research, or you can live and die by the results of your investment. Sometimes you even make money.

I'm just not going to accept you or anyone else just making stuff up like this when I see it, calling things pump-and-dumps, and then walking away as though you have some fait accompli and it's all rigged and all the scammers are just scamming and screwing you. There are guardrails, regulations, rules, and standard advice. If you go buy some high-flying IPO and you lose money that is your fault. Learn to be responsible for yourself and stop projecting your own failure and cynicism on others. Cynicism is the refuge of the most foolish of people.

Most retail investors suffer from significant information asymmetry. We have regulations, in part, to mitigate this fact.

I don't disagree - however that's a separate point from the OP's it's all a scam and pump-and-dump sentiments and doesn't detract from any point I've made.

A point you yourself might remember when arguing on the internet.

I know it feels great to write things like this but I don't care - my point stands alone and it's only applicable to you and what you wrote regarding valuations.

Sure. A great example of that is the corruption of Spain's socialist government: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/spain/spain-pm-sanchez-brother...

Just friendship and love :)

I wrote in another post which I think fits nicely here: You are ignoring things like lockup periods, vesting schedules, and other general machinery that specifically exist to prevent day 1 or short-term dumps of shares. It's not in the interest of the company that is IPOing or the bank - how can the investment bank go to investors and market securities and then on Day 1 those securities (because it's a pump and dump remember?) drop by 10% - 20% - 30% or more. That's bad business and investors will leave investment firms that did that.

Retail investors are the marks, not the scammer here.

Retail investors who aren't sophisticated enough to do analysis and evaluate equities shouldn't buy them less they potentially lose (or make) money. You're inventing a scam and scammers where none exist here. Uninformed retail investors, and who knows how much money they even have, should be buying index funds which is what is advised by investment firms, CFPs, and more.

You can't make an informed decision on it unless you do your own research and analyze an individual stock. Then it's up to you to decide if it's worth investing in. This is true for any investment. Just because you think something is bullshit doesn't mean it is. Maybe you're just wrong. Buy the security or don't.

Sure, but this applies to any sufficiently advanced conspiracy theory and wouldn't be limited to markets. Secondly you the individual can just not buy the shares if you think they are overvalued. You're confusing your own interpretation of the valuation of some company with "the right valuation". Maybe you're just wrong and they're not over valued? Maybe you're right? It doesn't matter much, except you can buy shares in companies that your investment thesis and modeling suggests you might buy.

The flaw in your thinking is assuming it's actually worth the IPO price.

Then don't buy it at the IPO price? The bullshit artist will have to lower their price until there are takers in the market.

If I'm a bullshit artist, $100 is great, $50 is good, and I'm just trying to avoid the $0 scenario.

They're not bullshit artists, they're greedy. If you think you're pulling one over on someone $100 is great but $200 is better - might as well see if you can get $200. Since we're just making up random people and motivations.

Every day investors absolutely buy these shares; these price targets are publicly available and SpaceX shares are equally publicly available.

And you can just not buy the shares. It's very straightforward.