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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

#171

Post by dragonwriter »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #59
willcipriano wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right after the election, we learned that the employment numbers turned out to be cooked ( https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/12/22/philadelphia-fed-sugge... ) that was in large part the justification for the rate hikes, I think they end in the next few months and start to decline this year.

My belief is that the moment rates start going down, there's going to be another massive asset bubble which will create tremendous inflationary pressure. Historically, inflation has never come down so fast or so easily anywhere. So much of inflation is about belief and psychology. If a "good times are here again" belief takes hold, it's entirely possible that inflation will run amok, again.

> Historically, inflation has never come down so fast or so easily anywhere.

Historically, the sharp bounceback from the brief but deep COVID recession is anomalous in a lot of ways, and the lagging brief inflation spike caused by the overshoot of stimulus in that anomalous recession is part of that. The causes aren't mysterious and just looking at the timeline of the inflation against past inflations in isolation while ignoring other relevant knowledge is...silly.

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

#172

Post by Tanjreeve »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #38
fosk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrarian signal, for the sake of having a conversation: - I think we will experience a massive deflationary bust. The inflation narrative is over, it’s all about a potential recession now. - By Summer 2023 we will experience YoY deflation and the Fed will cut then, or even sooner in anticipation to that. - We may see hikes pausing as soon as February, and cuts starting in the summer as a result of rapid disinflatio…

>Putin is now agreeing to potentially think about negotiations This is as red herring as it can be. No remotely serious analysis of this war can take anything Kremlin says at face value.

I've not seen anything convincing that Ukraine are going to stop till they have crimea back even if Putin did want to "negotiate" keeping areas they invaded.

Ukraine already tried appeasing Russia in 2014 after the last invasion and now they have the current situation so I doubt any decision with actual skin in the game (aka Ukraine) are going to be trying that again anytime soon.

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

#173

Post by cplusplusfellow »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #170
screye wrote: post #86

I believe the doom-n-gloom around all of tech is rather overblown. There are sectors of tech that will absolutely struggle. Gig-economy companies won't ever meet their valuation. Negative PE ratio startups are realizing that hyper-scaling is not as infinite as they believed, and that means their earnings might never catch up to their price. Social media companies are finally facing stiff non-American competition (Tik…

From the way people talk on this forum about economic conditions in this country you'd imagine the unemployment rate is 10%, nobody is hiring, and the market is down 50%.

The media consumed by the typical member of this audience would lead you to believe that. For some reason, everyone is trying to organize a recession.

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

#174

Post by KirillPanov »

dimator wrote: post #112
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…

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

> Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt?

The NYTimes and the rest of the media misread between the lines on this story.

Google aren't worried about competition. They are worried about losing the war with SEO.

ChatGPT showed them a glimpse of the SEO endgame. It upsets the balance between search ranking/boosting and SEO. Whatever adaptations they put into their boosting algo, GPT-style AI can eventually learn. Once learned, it can be subverted.

Fundamentally search boosting is at a disadvantage, because SEO has (blackbox) access to the boosting algo by feeding content to the crawlers and running searches. However the booster doesn't have access to the SEO algo; in fact it doesn't even know (beyond a guess) how many discrete SEO algos it is fighting, or which sites are optimized by which algos. So there is great asymmetry there.

That is why the fire alarm was pulled.

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

#176

Post by alar44 »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #142
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…

What is ChatGPT’s actual competitive advantage over search? It can’t tell you the second largest country in South America correctly, it’s an extremely cool demo but I can’t think of anything it could replace Google for. The underlying technology is extremely powerful, but it’s been powering Google for years

First try:

The second largest country in South America is Argentina. It has a land area of about 2.8 million square kilometers (1.1 million square miles). Argentina is located in the southern part of South America and is bordered by Chile to the west, Bolivia and Paraguay to the north, Brazil to the northeast, Uruguay and the South Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Drake Passage to the south. The country has a diverse landscape, ranging from the Andes mountain range in the west to the Pampas grasslands in the center, and the subtropical rainforests in the northeast. The capital of Argentina is Buenos Aires, which is known for its rich cultural heritage, vibrant nightlife, and tango music and dance.

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

#177

Post by SantalBlush »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #170
screye wrote: post #86

I believe the doom-n-gloom around all of tech is rather overblown. There are sectors of tech that will absolutely struggle. Gig-economy companies won't ever meet their valuation. Negative PE ratio startups are realizing that hyper-scaling is not as infinite as they believed, and that means their earnings might never catch up to their price. Social media companies are finally facing stiff non-American competition (Tik…

From the way people talk on this forum about economic conditions in this country you'd imagine the unemployment rate is 10%, nobody is hiring, and the market is down 50%.

The recession talk is delusional. Every economic metric but inflation is in good shape. These people don't know what they're talking about.

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

#178

Post by fragmede »

anacrolix wrote: post #148
fragmede wrote: post #11

Has it? Capitalism is based on supply and demand, and where those two lines intersect is where the magic happens. Except that we've never adapted it to the reality of, well, computers and the Internet. The price of duplicating a pile of bits, whether it be a Linux ISO, Windows 11, or the latest Disney movie is effectively zero*. Or textbooks to spread human knowledge around. A graph of supply and demand, where supply…

I'd like to see you try to send a 10 GB file to every human on the planet through Cloudflare.

I mean, that's their claim, not mine. It terms of bandwidth, it might take a week or two, plus I don't have distribution rights to any 10 GiB files that the world wants, to actually try, so I've no way to verify their claims. I'd love to try, so hmu if you have such a 10 GiB file! Email's in my profile.

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

#180

Post by FormerBandmate »

alar44 wrote: post #176
FormerBandmate wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ChatGPT’s actual competitive advantage over search? It can’t tell you the second largest country in South America correctly, it’s an extremely cool demo but I can’t think of anything it could replace Google for. The underlying technology is extremely powerful, but it’s been powering Google for years

First try: The second largest country in South America is Argentina. It has a land area of about 2.8 million square kilometers (1.1 million square miles). Argentina is located in the southern part of South America and is bordered by Chile to the west, Bolivia and Paraguay to the north, Brazil to the northeast, Uruguay and the South Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Drake Passage to the south. The country has a dive…

By population it’s Colombia, by land it’s Peru
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