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How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

economist.com

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Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#131

Post by bee_rider »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #130
bee_rider wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely is a limit to US support for Ukraine, but currently Ukraine’s only hope is that Russia’s willingness to fight will run out before either US support or Ukrainian willingness to fight does. So, hopefully we’ve had serious discussions behind closed doors with Ukraine about how far we’re willing to go. But signaling that publicly would weaken Ukraine’s position (by giving Russia a light at the end of the…

As my quote points out, the US has a long history of abandoning ‘friends’ after they’ve outlived their usefulness. I’d be surprised if Ukraine is any different.

Sure. That US support isn’t actually infinite is something Ukraine will have to account for. But it is something that we should handle with them behind closed doors.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#132

Post by bee_rider »

ROTMetro wrote: post #127
cjbgkagh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is spending a great deal of money, those are chips, and not having to spend money is a concession. Your framing of the situation makes little sense to me and appears to be angling towards the conclusion of unlimited support for Ukraine until their 'inevitable' victory. I'm less optimistic about Russia collapsing and also not optimistic about America's continued support for Ukraine, they wouldn't be the first c…

Of the USAs 700 Billion yearly defense budget, we spend around 150 billion to contain Russia, and we've spent that or more since the 1950s (so over 10 trillion dollars). We aren't spending new funds to support Ukraine. Most of the 'spend' so far has been moving numbers from under 'In XYZ DoD warehouse' to 'Transfered to Ukraine' in an accounting spreadsheet. When we are sending Ukraine more than 150 billion a year an…

I agree that fundamentally this is an expense that we can keep up for quite a while, but I’m not sure about the idea “these weapons are to contain Russia, therefor we don’t have to worry about using them to contain Russia” for a couple reasons.

First, hypothetically is the US were to fight Russia, we’d use a different mix of weapons. So it is putting unexpected pressure on our supply of Javelins, because they are doing the work that would normally be done by, whatever, JDAMs or something.

Also there must be some of what we programmers would think of as oversubscription or deduplication of weapons — I mean if we have like 2 war’s worth of weapons to handle all our competitors and we expend one war’s worth of weapons to handle one competitor, then we suddenly only have one war worth of weapons to handle all the rest. We haven’t expended one war’s worth of resources on Russia but it is worth keeping in mind that this isn’t like, literally zero cost or something like that.

Edit: also another thing that rubs me the wrong way with this description is, it seems to play into the narrative that Russia and the US never could have gotten along. The real hope is that the overwhelming US lead has a deterrent effect on countries that might want to start a war. The best weapons are ones that don’t get used.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#133

Post by screye »

birdymcbird wrote: post #120
dimator wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt? Don't they have similar research and tech around these AI systems?

80% of their revenue comes from ads, which is google search. Chatgpt and any other startup who invests in something like chatgpt can upend googles core business model. and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space. “Innovation” behind search was to slowly increase no. if paid ads in your results, driven by need to increase revenue and keep the rest of the 80% of biz afloat.

> and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space

LAMBDA and PaLM are literally the answer to Chat-GPT. Google is their closest competitor.

I do agree that they will lose their moat, and soon Google search will just be another tool among many.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#134

Post by fzzzy »

goldenchrome wrote: post #110
birdymcbird wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overly rosy take on big tech. I’ll use Google as example. Their execs are in full panic right now over OpenGPT. What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway. these guys will double their attrition targets if not have full blown…

You underestimate the staying power of monopolies.

Like AOL and MySpace?

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#135

Post by ed-209 »

This impending downturn is why I've tolerated a most unsexy project reassignment from my current employer over the last 9 months. Instead of data-driven green-fielding in AWS I've been brown-fielding in Azure where the current priority is dictated by the shifting demands of a single large customer. This all promises to be a nightmare if product doesn't realign and snap out of their identity crisis.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#136

Post by birdymcbird »

throwaway_75369 wrote: post #128
birdymcbird wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don’t have any incentive to try and stop it Inaccurate. Russia is getting backed into a corner, where they believe the wests goal has been to destabilize and break Russia all along. The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine. The increasing probability of nuclear war should be sufficient motivation for america to broker a peace deal. Instead we’re sending more weapon…

> The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine. I'm still confused when people assert there's any chance Putin will use a nuke in Ukraine. I'm far from an expert on Russian politics, so I imagine I'm missing something in terms of reputation or intimidation or face saving, but I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich par…

> I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)

This isn’t the motivation. Putin has been saying since 2007 that NATO expansion is an existential threat to Russia. Now whether we agree with that or not is besides point. They view it that way.

They warned in 2007 Ukraine entering NATO would lead to war, but we basically told Russia that there a has been and they don’t matter. This led to what happened in 2014. Then in 2021, we basically come out in full support of pulling Ukraine into NATO.

What’s happening now is extremely dangerous. Russia can’t win in Ukraine because of west helping Ukraine and their economy is ruined after sanctions. They see this as an end of Russia.

You’re backing them in the corner. This is when rational state actors act irrational. The chance of thermonuclear war is increasing because Russia cannot take on the west in a conventional war.

We had a significant role in how we got to this war, but we won’t ever take responsibility. We pulled out of Afghanistan and now the military industrial complex is making billions through Ukraine.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#137

Post by cjbgkagh »

ROTMetro wrote: post #127
cjbgkagh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is spending a great deal of money, those are chips, and not having to spend money is a concession. Your framing of the situation makes little sense to me and appears to be angling towards the conclusion of unlimited support for Ukraine until their 'inevitable' victory. I'm less optimistic about Russia collapsing and also not optimistic about America's continued support for Ukraine, they wouldn't be the first c…

Of the USAs 700 Billion yearly defense budget, we spend around 150 billion to contain Russia, and we've spent that or more since the 1950s (so over 10 trillion dollars). We aren't spending new funds to support Ukraine. Most of the 'spend' so far has been moving numbers from under 'In XYZ DoD warehouse' to 'Transfered to Ukraine' in an accounting spreadsheet. When we are sending Ukraine more than 150 billion a year an…

With diplomacy we could have turned those tanks around and sent them into China. Like what was done in WWII but for Germany. From the very onset of WWII Churchill smartly appeased Russia in an effort to get Russia to flip and it worked. China is the burgeoning hegemon and the real risk the US dominance. From memory the impetus for the conflict was China sharing US intel about plans to militarize Ukraine with Russia in order to goad Russia into the conflict. Now China and Russia are inseparable. This will make the future conflict over Taiwan infinitely more difficult.

Right now the EU is bearing the brunt of the economic costs and they're not wealthy so they'll run out of money sooner. But ignoring the money spent costs; what is being discovered in this war is the efficacy of mass low cost long range drones. It's unlikely to ever be cost effective to defend against this and conflicts settled this way will be immensely destructive. I remember when it was unthinkable to militarize drones to remotely kill people from a long way away, then we did it, and soon it'll be done to us.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#138

Post by mkl95 »

sokoloff wrote: post #31
mkl95 wrote: post #20

One of our non unicorn competitors just raised ~200M in a niche where 100M+ seed rounds are usually something you raise after you become a unicorn in a series D or something. There still are crazy investors out there but they are crazy about more specific things than say three years ago.

How much did they sell for that $200M? (They have to be at least close to unicorn unless they sold well over a typical amount in that round.)

They are close to unicorn. But last time I saw a similar company raise that kind of money their valuation was ~1.3bn.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#139

Post by lossolo »

screye wrote: post #133
birdymcbird wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of their revenue comes from ads, which is google search. Chatgpt and any other startup who invests in something like chatgpt can upend googles core business model. and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space. “Innovation” behind search was to slowly increase no. if paid ads in your results, driven by need to increase revenue and keep the rest of the 80% of biz afloat.

> and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space LAMBDA and PaLM are literally the answer to Chat-GPT. Google is their closest competitor. I do agree that they will lose their moat, and soon Google search will just be another tool among many.

And Google developed LaMDA model (superior to chatGPT) a lot of time before OpenAI, additionally without their research into transformers and publishing results, OpenAI would probably not even have ChatGPT now/yet.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#140

Post by [deleted] »

fallingknife wrote: post #119
ramesh31 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tesla for a period was valued at a higher market cap than Toyota, the largest auto manufacturer in the world. Tesla is still valued higher than Toyota, Honda, GM, and Ford combined . Something is broken.

That's not true. You are looking at market cap when you should be looking at enterprise value. Toyota is $350 billion and TSLA is $380 billion.

[deleted]
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