adventured

The US technology advantage is in software, hardware, biotech/pharma, AI, some advanced robotics (China is leading in general robotics), quantum, aerospace, military, medtech.

Competitively the US does well in energy tech and agriculture tech. The US is #2 in wind power, #2 in solar power, #1 in nuclear power, along with being the world's biggest oil & natural gas producer. The US industrial rail system is also an epic scale marvel, while its consumer rail system is pathetic.

It's definitely not elite in most infrastructure (including electrical plugs).

The SpaceX stock is floating solely (and temporarily) on fairy dust, it will not have any impact on the stock what-so-ever.

As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.

Those trillion dollar corps also employ millions of people in very high paying jobs. And the extraordinary stock returns have made their engineers (and countless public investors) wealthy across the past half century.

People wishing for the death of the mega corps, are directly wishing for the obliteration of millions of great jobs.

See: Germany + Russia in the Merkel era and questions over why the EU remained so very open to Russian energy for so long.

It's not alien anywhere. There isn't a country where the rich don't heavily influence politics, there are no exceptions, and there never will be. They're almost always useful, and when they're not they're thrown out windows (Russia) or stripped of their assets (China). In the US when they go too far (or won't step in line), the government tends to eventually flex its power and remind them who is in charge. It's why people ranging from Bezos to Tim Cook are quasi-terrified of someone like Trump and his tantrum potential (despite how supposedly powerful those titans of industry are).

They're looking at a likely $300+ billion in operating income over the next four quarters. $500m simply no longer matters. They'd be crazy not to spread that spigot of cash around. Their goal has to be to accelerate and spread the use of their GPUs for AI as far and wide as possible, build that up as much as possible before the music slows or stops. There isn't anything else to do with that much cash other than attempt to buy up the industry (they won't be allowed) or dump it back to shareholders (they don't want to).

Show me the HDI of the US vs each country in Europe, including all the poor ones.

Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:

Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine

To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.

The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.

The most common misunderstanding that people have about the extreme rich like Bezos or Musk, is that they're trying to get more money as their motivation. It's a remarkable failure of understanding, a kind of overly simplistic boiling down. Akin to: Iraq was about the oil (it was about power and control over the Middle East more broadly, oil is a trinket like the USD, secondary; the Middle East is a great powers battleground, between the US and Russia (and more recently China)).

They're trying to get their way, money is one means. They're trying to implement something they have in mind, outcomes, money is very useful for that in most cases. They're not trying to get more money as the thing unto itself, it's a tool of power/control/influence.

People that have never been near extreme wealth usually fall back to the very primitive reasoning of: it's just money grubbing, it's base greed. Because that's bumper sticker simple thinking that is easy to cuddle up to.

Back in reality, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al. these people are humans, they want things, they want outcomes, they have notions for how they think the world should be. Money helps them pursue that, it's nothing but a tool for them, a means to an end. It's comically foolish to think the money is the end.

There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.

The SR-71 is because they need to test for speed.

That serves a huge number of things both offense and defense: engagement, radar, missiles, trying to boost the speed capabilities of new planes & weapons. And it applies both to manned and unmanned planes.

Russia is less of a concern now, however China is coming on very fast in terms of leveling up their military capabilities. I'd be very surprised if the US military isn't looking to push its capabilities around increasing speed generally, just as it does any other aspect. There hasn't been a significant leveling up in US Air Force speed capabilities in many decades (since the F22 supercruise three decades ago?).

It's a mediocre article although broadly in the right direction.

NVDA's last quarter: $96b sales, $63b op income. It's closer to $0.65 of profit per dollar of revenue these days. Operating income is the better option for measuring how their actual business is doing.

Visa is generally the margin king outside of tech, at least for mega corps. So by comparison, their last quarter was $11.6b in sales and $7.1b in operating income. 61% op income margin.

But wait, Micron is having a lot of fun at the moment. $41.4b in sales for the latest quarter, $33.3b op income. 80%.

Sandisk as well: $9b in sales for the latest quarter, $7b op income. ~78%. $7b was their total sales figure for the full prior year, now they're generating that in profit quarterly.

The parent is clearly implying the more reponsible pathway is: neither.

The pizza Bitcoin story is not about a mere $1 billion.

The guy that sold his Bitcoin for pizza, did multiple transactions (detailed in that forum thread), not one. Somehow this part is lost to history when the story gets told.

He liquidated tens of thousands of Bitcoins.

The tally is a lot closer to ~$4 billion at $82k per coin.

The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.

Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.

Anthropic is heading toward $100 billion in annual sales, at the fastest pace of any company in world history. There isn't a close second.

The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.

Luna is about suppressing inexpensive Chinese model competition.

It's super simple.

Gigantic hyper margin ad network = artificial subsidization of cost for various tiers = put the boot on the neck of Chinese competitors. There's no scenario where they can compete with what advertising margins make possible in terms of artificially lowering prices charged.

They're closing in a billion users. That's Google search territory.

OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.

They're not going to need a government bailout, they're going to be a spigot of cash production.

Every single thread on HN keeps saying the same ridiculous thing, going on a year now. It's like they've never heard of advertising, which SV specializes in. It's like they're oblivious to the fact that every mega platform with so many users becomes an ad goldmine, and GPT's context positioning is even richer than search.

Same experience. Astra is on par with or better than Fable 5.1 with a lot more usage on the plans. It has been an extraordinary experience using it so far. 5.6 Sol was very good and Astra is a large upgrade in quality.

Well that's pretty easily avoided then.

Don't travel through the US.

99%. Humans break into three categories: originators, amplifiers, mimics. The 99% are mimics, they won't use LLMs for anything other than direct applications to existing life tasks.

See: what they did with personal computers and smartphones. They have access to Fable and Astra right now, and they're not interested what-so-ever despite what these systems can now do. Instead they'll promptly go vaporize $50k on a giant pile of metal garbage (autos) that will rapidly depreciate. They have no practical use for Fable as is.

For the same reason people didn't rush off to their local public library to teach themselves JavaScript to acquire a better life for the cost of renting library books. They can't easily go against their restraints, their biological potential. To do so is extraordinarily taxing.

Originators generate most of the extreme wealth, and extreme outcomes. Mimics can be exceptionally successful however, most doctors are mimics for example, they won't ever originate anything.

Amplifiers are the teachers, they - ideally - shuttle what works to the mimics for reproduction across society. The mimics are largely just trying to keep up with the Joneses. They go out of their way to not risk anything most of the time. They're ideally following pre-set paths to biological success. It's why mass, rapid de-industrialization for one example is such a wipeout, the mimics don't adapt very quickly, they followed the path they were told would work and then they feel betrayed, they become like abandoned programs and don't know what to do next.

As a system you don't want too much of your population in the originator category: it's very expensive and highly prone to spectacular failure. You want the extreme majority of your biological entities following successful paths that have already been proven to work.

Humans aren't special, we're animals. Apply the patterns accordingly.

Over time LLMs will route around the fraud, bureaucracy, and gilded walls that have been built up around academia and the sciences.

Nobody will hate AI more than the con-artists in academia pumping out fake papers by the zillions that are all about to be wiped out.

What is my purpose?

You pad the text.

Oh, my god.

It's overly automated and repetitive in its styling. Humans make odd stray adjustments to styling manually. LLMs build pages very efficiently. Unless you're very anal-retentive when building a site, there's going to be some distinct flair that isn't just a repeating segment.

It's like it was made by the world's most anal-retentive Wordpress theme builder. They went over it a thousand times until it was perfectly optimized, no distinguishing marks, no stray tiny misalignments, no single-use stylings.

The path to vast OpenAI profitability is trivial: advertising. Monetizing several hundred million users = $100+ billion ad network. 900 million active weekly users. Silicon Valley can do ad networks extraordinarily easily. Anybody doubting the ability of OpenAI to build an ad network around GPT will likely be embarassed in the near future.

The path to substantial profitability for Anthropic is questionable. The Chinese LLMs threaten them by far the most of the three major US LLMs. The money for Anthropic is certainly not in $20-$200 subscriptions. And they don't have anywhere near the consumer potential that GPT does, in terms of unleashing an ad spigot. So how far will the API money scale while being undercut by China.

OpenAI has to fight with Google for the ad business, they're specifically building Gemini to focus on consumer + search. Anthropic's business looks cute next to Google's search ad business (which is entirely at risk in this inflection). Meta looks like the biggest potential loser right now, ad dollars will be sucked out of the rotting Facebook network (not Instagram) and redirected to the rapidly expanding, hyper rich context LLM interaction. Advertising on Facebook will feel like running dumb banner ads on Excite in a few years, compared to what GPT will know about its users.

People that think Chinese LLMs are a general threat, don't understand consumer destination services, which is what GPT's future is. China currently has nothing to threaten with in that realm. There is half a trillion dollars of advertising up for grabs.

There isn't going to be a great depression.

The US is going to debase itself endlessly through spend-print-spend-print. At some point they may load up enough debt that the economy suffers a gradual heat death, in the style of Japan, wherein too much of your national capital is going to debt maintenance, sitting in a low yield blackhole sucking the dynamism out of your system (instead of going to productive use, business expansion, R&D, et al).

There's absolutely nothing particularly interesting or special about the direction the US is going. It's very, very, very easy to see what's coming and has been for ~20 years (since Bush nearly doubled the size of the Federal Government and blew up our finances with simultaneous tax cuts + massive spending expansion, we've never turned back from the bleed).

Gold has gone up ~10x since the early Bush years precisely because of the USD debasement, that's the reduction in value in the dollar being represented in the ultimate store of value. All of it has been remarkably predictable. I've been chirping about it forever here and there's nothing special about my insight either, this stuff is plain as day national econ 101.

I had a typical $20 Gemini plan that I just downgraded to their $5 plan (to keep access to some of the models). It had been so long since I let Gemini work on (or review) any code / design / html (anything) that I couldn't justify bothering to keep wasting money on it. It fell behind badly over the past year. Astra might as well be an alien super intelligence at code compared to Gemini. I enjoy talking to Gemini, it is very good at conversation, I get solid answers to everyday questions. I intend to keep the $5 plan indefinitely for basic use. I don't expect they'll ever resurface as a competitor in coding with Astra & Fable et al.

There's nothing new about any of this liability attachment. You're saying these things like they're novel.

If GM does something (or fails to do something) to their vehicle that causes me to crash, they're liable for the crash.

If someone cuts my brake lines (alters my vehicle) and I crash my car and kill someone, the person that cut the lines is responsible. I have to prove the context of course, and or an investigator has to do so.

And the responsible entity may refuse to pay up, may refuse to take responsibility. None of that is new either.

Tech has become overwhelmingly negative in tone over the past 10-15 years. Nearly every single aspect is drowning in negativity.

If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.

And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.

It'll ultimately take a lot of time to produce a polished product that people actually want to use. We're seeing that clearly. The vibe-code-an-app-this-weekend capability is producing almost exclusively a giant pile of worthless garbage, rather than an explosion of apps that humans want to use. It's mostly someone in a garage welding two pieces of metal together for the first time, and then roaming the neighborhood in celebration: look, look at what I have done, look, two becomes one, I have done this, look, amazing, I could probably build an airplane or a generator.

The bar will be raised + it'll turn out to require a lot more time & effort than is currently thought to produce something of good quality (even with Fable 6 et al). The smaller utility programs are easy for AI to turn out.