> It's quite nice that the ipad mini does not have whatsapp or SMS plugged into it, so I can use it exclusively for reading books or playing music.
Both a phone and a tablet can come with WhatsApp, it's a user choice whether they are there and the frequency of checking them. Global muting the apps is also an option.
I understand your point, but it is a point mitigated by user intervention. Now, if we want to say reading on a bigger screen than a phone is a better user experience, I'm on board with that.
How many people would use audio interfaces in public places or offices? No one would share with everybody what he wants to do. GUI are there for simplify interactions too, it's just we forgot how to implement them well
When Anthropic spends on xAI, it benefits Google. When google spends on xAI, it benefits Google. When xAI spends on Google, believe it or not, that benefits Google.
This is how a Ponzi -style circular financing scheme typically works.
> When Anthropic spends on xAI, it benefits Google
Unless Google is directing these transactions, this is not a novel issue. (We see a similar effect with mutual funds owning most companies [1]. It's a weak effect.)
> This is how a Ponzi -style circular financing scheme typically works
No. It's potential conflicts of interest. It's not circular financing. Circular financing follows the cash. When NVIDIA invests in OpenAI so OpenAI can buy NVIDIA chips, that is circular financing.
I think it depends on how you view the payout google will get when these companies IPO and give Google exist liquidity and a nicer looking balance sheet, if needed, either or.
> it depends on how you view the payout google will get when these companies IPO and give Google exist liquidity and a nicer looking balance sheet
Google has a fantastic balance sheet with or without these investments. None of the recent deals have uniquely enabled an IPO. So they'd be playing to increase their stakes' value by a few points ahead of a dump, a dump that would almost certainly wipe out much more than they'd stand to gain by trying to make someone else a dollar so they get nickels and dimes out of it.
What's their novelty or moat to maintain the value chain? And why do we only see google, who already owns it, raising their hand to rent at these prices?
I’m not sure they need novelty or moat. AI compute resources are so scarce that inference providers will buy whatever is available. SpaceX sells inference hardware in bulk, with a proven track record of running inference and training workloads at scale.
What? They make money from their own inference and models too, which they can train effectively for free by funding their operations with rental income from their last gen datacenter.
SpaceX and Tesla used aggressive vertical integration, manufacturing simplification, and reuse to radically lower the cost of building rockets and EVs. It's not unreasonable to speculate they might be able to do the same for hyperscale compute.
* Company valuations around LLMs are not realistic
Both can be true, much like they were during the Dotcom bubble. The internet turned out to be a pretty real thing. A couple examples below might feel familiar in the next couple months/years.
> Blucora (then InfoSpace): Founded by Naveen Jain, at its peak its market cap was $31 billion and was the largest Internet business in the American Northwest. In March 2000, its stock price reached $1,305 per share, but by 2002 the price had declined to $2.
> Broadcast.com: A streaming media website that was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in stock, making Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner multi-billionaires. The site is now defunct.
> eToys.com: An online toy retailer whose stock price hit a high of $84.35 per share in October 1999. In February 2001, it filed for bankruptcy with $247 million in debt. It was acquired by KB Toys, which later also filed for bankruptcy.
> GeoCities: Founded by David Bohnett, it was acquired by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in January 1999[20] and was shut down in 2009.
> MicroStrategy: After rising from $7 to as high as $333 in a year, its shares lost $140, or 62%, on March 20, 2000, following the announcement of a financial restatement for the previous two years by founder Michael J. Saylor.
I am of the same mindset as you, but you also have to look at PE multiples of Cisco in 1999 and Nvidia today. One being the "ammunition" supplier in the battle for the Internet, and the other supplier in the battle for AI.
Cisco was over 400 at one point and Nvidia is around 30. Not quite the same.
Other players today:
- Digital Realty 48x
- Equinix 75x
- CoreWeave (still losing money)
There is likely a bubble of some type here, but I don't think this is the same as the Dotcom bubble.
The circular financing aspects in the current era are really obscuring some of the financials. There are also very legitimate companies offering very real products. The big issue today is that things feel a lot more obscured and interconnected, which makes it hard to discern shit from gold. Does not help when the gold and shit are swimming in the same circles and shaking hands with all the same people.
Here's my theory about the dotcom bubble. The market correctly identified the internet as hugely valuable and correctly identified search engines as being able to capture a large share of this value. Consequently early search engines, chiefly Yahoo!, obtained (merited) high valuations. What Yahoo! did with their stock (they IPOd in 1996) was go on a big startup buying spree. This is what actually started the bubble: invest in some random dotcom crap company in the hopes that Yahoo! swoops in, buys and you get a big payday.
What caused the crash was Yahoo! being unable to do anything with their acquisitions and Google coming out with a better search engine, undermining Yahoo!'s core product. Google basically pulled the rug from under the dot com bubble.
The situation we're in now with LLMs is different, if I'm right we're actually pre-bubble, the bubble hasn't even started yet.
I was expecting this comment. You know the answer. A scam will keep scamming.
There are also legitimate companies from the dotcom bubble era like amazon, microsoft, and intel. They all were vastly overpriced during the dotcom era. Probably also now lol.
I sleep on certainty. I feel bad for the people based their futures entirely on a trajectory from a time we'll look back on as "utterly unsustainable".
No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
Ok I did, and I still have no clue where you’re pulling your numbers from. This shows the bottom quartile has the lowest median growth rate in nominal wages. So low in fact it’s negative. In nominal wages. Not even accounting for inflation.
Both a phone and a tablet can come with WhatsApp, it's a user choice whether they are there and the frequency of checking them. Global muting the apps is also an option.
I understand your point, but it is a point mitigated by user intervention. Now, if we want to say reading on a bigger screen than a phone is a better user experience, I'm on board with that.
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