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It blows my mind that a chat client is worth over 26 times what Boston Dynamics is.
I wonder how this relates to Hyundai's partnership with Apple that was just announced and caused a massive rally of their stock price.
(Edit: this story was Dec 11th, so clearly not.)
I realize Korea is an ally, but this seems like tech we wouldn't want to lose the domestic capability to produce. Or tech we wouldn't want to cede the lead on. Why would Darpa pour so much money in for this outcome?
It blows my mind that a chat client is worth over 26 times what Boston Dynamics is.
It's always easy to overvalue products/services that are based on number of users than on actual improvements in a narrow but highly technical field with a super-high barrier of entry. The number of active users is one of the most enticing metric a VC firm can lay its eyes on. Edit: For context, the parent comment is talking about Salesforces' acquisition of Slack [0] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/salesforce-…
It blows my mind that a chat client is worth over 26 times what Boston Dynamics is.
To put a more positive spin on it: for roughly 1/26th the cost of another chat client we could have twice the scary robots.
There are a lot of similar things that we spend a relatively large amount of time talking about but don't actually cost that much in the grand scheme of things (fundamental science, alternative energy, and presidential elections, to name a few).
Just to give some numbers:
- SpaceX in 2019: 46 billion
- ITER: 22-65 billion
- LHC: around 20 billion
- ISS: 150 billion
(with the caveat that numbers for publicly funded projects are very difficult to pin down given the diversity of funding)
Basically all the projects that are slowly pushing us toward the future we read read about in science fiction are on the order of the cost of a chat client (the ISS being the outlier as one of the most expensive public projects in history). To me that's cause for optimism.
I wonder how this relates to Hyundai's partnership with Apple that was just announced and caused a massive rally of their stock price.
It blows my mind that a chat client is worth over 26 times what Boston Dynamics is.
a) Slack has 5x as many employees, global market share, consumer ubiquity, etc. It’s simply a bigger entity (in the same way that Home Depot is a more ‘boring’ business than slack but 15x larger in valuation)
b) Boston Dynamics is in many ways a research lab rather than a for-profit company. In research and the arts, things might be nominally inexpensive but their real value is priceless.
It blows my mind that a chat client is worth over 26 times what Boston Dynamics is.
> In early November, Bloomberg first reported that Hyundai was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Tokyo-based SoftBank Group. The Japanese conglomerate is selling off non-core business assets after it was hit hard by a series of soured bets, including WeWork and Uber. In September 2020, Softbank sold Arm to NVIDIA for $40 billion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981
[2] https://www.therobotreport.com/hyundai-acquires-boston-dynam...