How are they going to afford an investment thats ~1/3rd the value of the company? Seems like one of those announcements that no one follows up on to keep them honest?
Much like that “initiative”, I imagine this won’t materialize either, they’re largely hoping government funds get steered toward them and by which point they’ll pocket everything they can while delivering a minimum of what was promised, if anything at all, and they won’t be properly held accountable for it.
He wants credit for everything while doing nothing.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/t...
That was a project by Oracle to build some data centres, many of which had already broke ground and were under construction, and they pulled OpenAI and Softbank in to give it that AI veneer.
So it's stuff that is really happening, and was already happening. Similarly this TI plant was announced under the prior administration as a win of the chips act, and again it's being recycled to current.
This sort of shell game works for a while, but a couple of years the bill comes due.
Construction of the first data center Abilene, Texas site is ongoing. Emily Chang visited the site over a month ago and got video footage [1]. So it's not nothing. Will they actually invest 500 billion in the end? I dunno; I guess we'll see. The main challenges seem to be the availability of electrical power and skilled workers, not demand, investment or ambition.
Obviously $500B is a lot of money, but it's not actually an unbelievable amount of money.
Go to flyover States to see the impact of that money.
I don’t think Illinois has actually awarded any of that funding to providers to build anything yet. It looks like the original schedule was to start awarding grants this summer after planning process from 2021-2025.
I see some of the things funded by the IIJA every day of my life.
And that's not including the projects which are still being worked on getting approved including projects to replace sewage lines in my area, reworking stormwater drainage systems, and additional flood control projects, all of which are planned to be funded through the IIJA and all of which I think my city could really use. 60% of the IIJA funding hasn't been spent yet.
Then you are part of the problem, pull your fingers out of your ears.
And still.
General Electric was (just a few decades ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 50 anymore.
Saudi Aramco was (just a few years ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 10 anymore.
If you want to read about similarities in Xerox's own hubris/downfall, Dealers of Lightning is one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past few years (about their SFbay PARC Labs of the 70s/80s... and its failures to adapt).
The "Computer Associates" of today is... Salesforce.
Have they really improved Tableau, Heroku, Mulesoft, Sendgrid, Slack, now Informatica?
• Meta (all of it)
• Google (not necessarily the rest of Alphabet)
• Apple — UI updates are not innovation, and there's a lot of bugs
• X (the social media website, no comment on the new parent AI company)
• The car-shaped bits of Tesla — the humanoid robotics bits are at least "future", even if Tesla is not demonstrating anything new in this spaceUnfortunately, my mid-sized US city still doesn't have an Apple Store... so I haven't demoed the VisionPro, yet; but I want to be able to see if its endorseable for my Parkinsons friend (whose eyes still work well); I suspect if I demoed it I'd also purchase one too.
Absolutely seems innovative.
To me, it seems to have the same problems as the Google Glass, in that it's far too expensive and doesn't have a clear idea what its own USP is.
That said, while I've played with a few different VR headsets, I've not had a chance to play with the VP, so perhaps there's something in the quality that would become visible if not for the prohibitive price.
But you don't have to start expensive: cheaper headsets already existed for several years before it came out, and those are perfectly adequate games consoles; and of the reviews I've seen for home cinema and virtual monitor uses, nobody seems to prefer AVP over other headsets half the price.
This madman's extraterrestrial dream™[0] will do more harm than not.
[0] Nightmare - ¡yay let's destroy Earth to build a dependant-upon-Earth colony! /s
Also: if you want to drive a vehicle that actually saves the planet, buy a hybrid (plug-in, or not).
For Mars… well, I like the idea of settling other worlds and expanding and yada yada yada, but Musk has repeatedly demonstrated he's not got the personality to actually do that right and not lock people out of the base for disagreeing with him. Plus, if you Muntz* a life support system or a food supply or the walls on a Mars base, everyone can die before replacements arrive.
At least, so long as they're not of the [buzzword]+[existing product] variety of startup. A decade ago we had "Uber for $[dictionary merge all nouns]", and today you can easily find a lot of people trying to shoehorn "blockchain" into things without any apparent understanding that other ledgers exist. Not those kinds of startup, those are all just copycat pander-to-the-investors schemes at best, and magical thinking at worst.
On a similar note about madness and vision: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and SpinLaunch. SpaceX clearly has Mars as a big futuristic vision, and unlike say Blue Origin they actually make rapid progress in that direction; Rocket Lab may be small fry compared to SpaceX, but are thinking along similar scale for launch vehicles and have the political advantage of not being Elon Musk, so if Brand Musk implodes as I now expect it to, they may end up doing many similar things in practice; SpinLaunch may not be going anywhere fast, but they're aiming for a very different launch system and are therefore will end up in the history books even if they run out of investors.
A few years ago I would have also said Relativity Space, but these days everyone is 3D printing rockets. I've even seen a small 3D printed rocket engine in person, on display at one of the smaller booths in GITEX Europe last month, so Relativity Space no longer stands out for 3D printing rockets.
I have no idea where any of the AI companies are going. It looks like the sector is in a stage where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, and therefore rapid improvements are relatively easy to stumble upon. But the same dynamics mean that's a red-ocean environment, whereas (IMO) the best innovation is a blue-ocean environment: https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-oc...
Hadn't heard the red- vs blue-ocean distinction before. Thanks. The bullet points are similar to Thiel's zero to one thesis. (Right?)
FWIW, I'm currently most excited by efforts addressing climate crisis. Like advanced geothermal, better heat pumps, improving the grid, etc.
If I understand, most would be considered blue-ocean.
Most definitely face the chicken & egg challenge. As in the merit and benefits are apparent. But someone has to underwrite lofting a new market(s) from scratch.
Cheers, Jason
To echo [1] the Xerox example, the C-suite became entirely made-up of former salesmen who'd become addicted to the pavlovian `click`ing sound their massive copiers made in bill-per-page leases... which blinded them from realizing the digitizing world wasn't going to favor their no-risk-taking approach.
`click` - `click` - `click` – late 60's ASMR erotica for Xerox VPs.
[1] amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA
Companies can do financial tricks but end users can’t.
The linked article doesn’t even try to complete the argument… there’s not a single reason offered why TI could plausibly have increased total revenues more… instead of just spinning their wheels from a higher cost base.
Or to put it another way, why wouldn’t that revenue growth have gone to their competitors?, which did in fact happen.
Any company large/influential enough to get in front of trump right now is gonna be in the news saying this stuff. The entire admin runs on "the last person to convince trump".
Trump pardoned a bunch of criminals, drug dealers, and other trash people because the right person talked to him at the right time.
This is exactly what people said would happen. It's open season for bribery
Not to mention the fact that we refused to hold the person who tried to overthrow our government accountable for doing so.
If the Germans had taken the same approach in 1945, the Nazis would’ve been back in power by 1950.
His popularity has decreased somewhat, but given a choice between him and the opposition, I suspect that they would continue to do the same thing.
He may indeed pass but I'm not so sure that would change much.
The hyperbole about 2024 being the last election in American history will seem silly in retrospect to most, but those who really believe it now will for the most part never admit they got swept up in hysteria and will instead pat themselves on the backs and credit themselves for America narrowly avoiding disaster. A generation or two later, young people will just roll their eyes when their parents talk about any of it, one way or the other, like millennials did when their parents rambled on about Reagan or Nixon.
Being from 70's generation, with family that had to their encounters with PIDE/DGS, and took part on the liberation forces, I see the supposed hyperbole with different eyes.
Hopefully I am wrong.
When in doubt, bet on the status quo. When the status quo falters, bet on a return to the status quo.
Now, if there are other reasons to do this like for defense or supply chain security, that's a different story. But it will cost you.
Knowing these facts changes your perspective on these semis-in-the-USA news headlines.
Intel makes something like 50% - 75% of theirs in the US.