The US government is itself a major shareholder in Intel, and has every incentive to push Intel stock over its competitors. It's almost a certainty that Nvidia was forced into this deal by the government as well. We are way beyond regulation here.
Never imagined politics so obviously manipulating the talking heads with nary a care about perception.
A shocking surprise needs to be a surprise for it to work. Call it strategic naivety if you want.
Donald anounces tariffs and the markets react. He postpones tariffs and the markets react again. Only Donald and his friends know what he will announce next.
This feels like a misreading of what I wrote. The discovery that he is using tariffs to make a personal profit should be surprising.
> Donald anounces tariffs and the markets react. He postpones tariffs and the markets react again. Only Donald and his friends know what he will announce next.
That wouldn’t surprise me at all, I just don’t think a hypothesis about how he could abuse his power will be very compelling to anybody who doesn’t already think he’s prone to corruption. If anything, I think it starts inoculating people to the idea.
Right now if the US wants to go to war with China, or anyone China really really likes, they can expect with high probability to very quickly encounter major problems getting the best chips. AIUI the world has other fab capacity that isn't in Taiwan, and some of it is even in the US, but they're all on much older processes. Some things it's not a problem that maybe you end up with an older 500MHz processor, but some things it's just a non-starter, like high-end AI.
Sibling commenters discussing profits are on the wrong track. Intel's 2024 revenue, not profits, was $53.1 billion. The Federal Government in 2024 spent $6,800 billion. No entity doing $1.8 trillion in 2024 in deficit spending gives a rat's ass about "profits". The US Federal government just spends what it wants to spend, it doesn't have any need to generate any sort of "profits" first. Thinking the Federal government cares about profits is being nowhere near cynical enough.
The US government always ought to have the interest of US companies in mind, their job is to work in the interest of the voters and a lot of us work for US companies.
The US is desperate to not have that war, because they spent so long in denial about how sophisticated China has become that it would be a total humiliation. What you see as the US wanting war is them simply playing catch up.
Destroy the other country?
Take it over?
Be in a 1984 style „fake“ war forever?
The countries wouldn't fire nukes against each other's mainlands but maybe against each other's fleets. Pretty likely
I don’t think geographically restricting a war is even possible, really. The US’s typical game plan involves hitting the enemy’s decision-making capabilities faster than they can react. That goes out the window if we can’t hit each other’s mainlands. A war where we don’t get to use our strongest trick and China keeps their massive industrial base is an absurd losing one that the US would be totally nuts to sign up for.
Anyway, we and China can be perfectly good peaceful competitors.
Don't mistake talking about a thing as advocating for that thing. It leaves you completely unable to process international politics, and frankly, a lot of other news and discussion as well. If you can only think about things you approve of, your model of the world is worse than useless.
The AI hype train was built on the premise that AI will progress linearly and eventually end up replacing a lot of well paid white collar work, but it failed to deliver on that promise by now, and progress has flatlined or sometimes even gone backwards (see GPT-5 vs 4o).
FAANG companies can only absorb these losses for so long before shareholders pull out.
Also never forget that in technology moreso than any other industry showing a loss while actually secretly making a profit is a high art form. There is a lot of land grabbing happening right now, but even so it would be a bit silly to take the profit/loss public figures at face value.
Numbers prove we aren't. Sales figures show very few customers are willing to pay $200 per month for the top AI chatbots, and even at $200/month, OpenAI is still taking a loss on that plan so they're still loosing money even with top dollar customers.
I think you're unaware just how unprofitable the big AI products are. This can only go on for so long. We're not in the ZIRP era anymore where SV VC funded unicorns can be unprofitable indefinitely and endlessly burn cash on the idea that when they'll eventually beat all competitors in the race to the bottom and become monopolies they can finally turn a profit by squeezing users with higher real-world price. That ship has sailed.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat...
Ermmm dude they are competing with Google. They have to keep reinvesting otherwise Google captures the users OAI currently has.
Free cash flows matter. Not accounting earnings. On a FCFF basis they largely in the red. Which means they have to keep raising money, at some point somebody will turn around and ask the difficult questions. This cannot go on forever.
And before someone mentions Amazon... Amazon raised enough money to sustain their reinvestment before they eventually got to the place where their EBIT(1-t) was greater than reinvestment.
This is not at all whats going on with OAI.
If you're gonna buy at face value whatever Scam Altman claims, then I have some Theranos shares you might be interested in.
Anyway, I'd just point out that users don't even need to depend on the bots for increase productivity, they just need to BELIEVE it increases their productivity. Exhibit A being the recent study which found that experienced programmers were actually less productive when they used an LLM, even though they self-reported productivity gains.
This may not be the first time the tech industry has tricked us into thinking it makes us more productive, when in reality it's just figuring out ways to consume more of our attention. In Deep Work, Cal Newport made the argument that interruptive "network tools" in general decrease focus and therefore productivity, while making you think that you're doing something valuable by staying constantly connected. There was a study on this one too. They looked at consultants who felt that replying as quickly as possible to their clients, even outside of work hours, was important to their job performance. But then when they took the interruptive technologies away, spent more time focusing on their real jobs, and replied to the clients less often, they started producing better work and client feedback scores actually went up.
Now personally I haven't stopped using an LLM when I code but I'm certainly thinking twice about how I use it these days. I actually have cut out most interruptive technology when I work, i.e. email notifications disabled, not keeping Slack open, phone on silent in a drawer, etc. and it has improved my focus and probably my work quality.
To save others a search, here is a blog post and the paper:
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
Thanks for mentioning it.
Correct, but said technology needs to be self sustaining commercially. The cost the white collar worker pays needs to be enough to cover the cost of running the AI + profit
It seems like we are a long way off that yet but maybe we expect an AI to solve that problem ala Kurzweil
This is comically premature.
When you follow the progress in the last 12 months, it really isn't. Big AI companies spent "hella' stacks" of cash, but delivered next to no progress.
Progress has flatlined. The "rocket to the moon" phase has already passed us by now.
They don’t make AI chips really, they make the best high-throughput, high-latency chips. When the AI bubble pops, there’ll be a next thing (unless we’re really screwed). They’ve got as good chance of owning that next thing as anybody else does. Even better odds if there are a bunch of unemployed CUDA programmers to work on it.
There will undoubtedly still be a market for Nvidia chips but it won’t be enough to keep things going as they are.
A new market opening up with the same demand as AI just at the point that AI pops would be a miracle. Something like being an unsecured bond holder in 2010.
And what is that post-AI bubble "next big thing" exactly?
If there were, you'd already see people putting their money towards it.