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US Intel

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Re: US Intel

#561

Post by hrq »

vel0city wrote: post #548
esafak wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's happening exactly?

Billions in grants have already been cancelled. Lots of research is losing its funding.

Agreed. Also the biotech industry is largely getting defunded. Venture funds are pointing dollars elsewhere so fewer new companies are being started, while more biotechs are being started in China.

Most new drugs come from biotechs nowadays (not all of them, not GLP-1’s). But many do. If that innovation is happening in China and not the US today then it will create an issue in several years. We will not control our supply chain for a critical set of goods.

Re: US Intel

#562

Post by MangoToupe »

Herring wrote: post #552
MangoToupe wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the attitude I'm referring to. The people who run this country (emphatically including people who frequent this forum) are far more my enemy than anyone in china could even pretend to be. I also don't think Americans realize how quickly we will slide from relevance once our grip on the world slacks. We could have built this world into something amazing but instead we just got fat.

To be fair though, China has its morons too. If you can't deal with Republicans where you share a common language/culture/history, how are you gonna deal with a Chinese Trump on the other side of the world? In the last election, Latinos voted 50-50 for Trump. That should have been a massive warning sign. I like liberals, but they're way too passive. They really need to play the Prisoner's Dilemma in high school until…

Yea, but american voters have never acted rationally. It's all aesthetics.

Re: US Intel

#563

Post by margalabargala »

woooooo wrote: post #560
margalabargala wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they have had great success. The comments you made about political systems indicate you don't really grasp my point. - Governments are formed of people. People make mistakes. - Power tends to corrupt, and the likelihood of corruption scales with the quantity of power and the quantity of people passing through the role (that is, one person may truly have best interests at heart, but will their successor? Or their…

Im saying that people live in a culture, and that sets the parameters of what's conceivable. You're commenting from the post-reagan consensus, which inevitably leads to Intel's current situation. But it doesn't have to be like that, America had a different consensus from 1930-1970. (BTW, deepseek was trained on nvidia.) Xi doesn't personally set every industrial policy in China, its a ton of people all over the count…

I think we're kind of talking past each other maybe.

What I'm saying reduces down to, "the scale of effect that humans are able to have on a system, will eventually lead to problems of that scale on a system".

If you can dictate that all industries within a country must do some thing, that will eventually cause problems with all industries within the country.

Culture doesn't really have anything to do with it. Whether the person making that dictation is Xi or Trump or some random bureaucrat doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Re: US Intel

#564

Post by tomhow »

diddid wrote: post #532
tomhow wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To have a conversation about the US government buying a stake in Intel, and the threats of China in that space, requires one to have a conversation about both politics and ideology. It’s disingenuous to claim anything else. And to point out the irony of the passing fad on straws but deep love of fast fashion highlights the hypocrisy of US society in general and why we are incapable of having nice things or getting an…

The purpose of HN is to discuss things in the spirit of intellectual curiosity. To respond to an article about chip manufacturing with such a generic ideological flamebait line as "You can’t build a foundry on DEI, but you can feel good about yourself as you virtue signal about straws as you buy fast fashion" is the opposite of intellectual curious discussion. If the topics of DEI, straws and fast fashion are mentioned in the article or are relevant to the content of the article, sure, write them into the comment in a way that is relevant to the content of the article. The way you've invoked these themes, without any clear relevance to the article's content, is just what we're trying to avoid on HN. This is not new or difficult; the guidelines have been in place for many years and make it clear what we're trying for here.

Re: US Intel

#565

Post by dangus »

> Government involvement in private business almost always ends badly.

I don't say this to argue with the author or try to refute anything they are saying, but this bit toward the end is a very interesting position that I think displays the level of anti-regulation, anti-taxation, anti-government propaganda we are bombarded with by corporations.

People just kind of assume that the government can't function or work with private enterprise in any way when it does that all the time.

China is the elephant in the room of a counterexample. Who built the largest high speed rail network in the world and who owns them? Or how about the US military industrial complex? Or how about SpaceX? What about the time when the US government ordered factories to build Jeeps in WW2?

I don't really agree with...well...anything that the current administration is doing, but owning part of Intel isn't really horrendous. The horrendous part is that it came out of nowhere with apparently no congressional appropriation of funds/approval of such an endeavor.

Re: US Intel

#566

Post by Coffeewine »

marcosdumay wrote: post #155
rich_sasha wrote: post #46

I am torn on this. On the one hand, I strongly agree with this article. This kind of state ownership never brings anyhing good. I don't see how this is different. On the other, it is hard to deny how impressive the new wave of Chinese manufacturing is. No longer are they just making knock offs of Western products with stolen IP. BYD for example seems genuinely innovative, a top product. There are many other examples.…

> Or, Nvidia is concerned because China can mandate that the whole country pivots to using Chinese GPUs The US can do that too, it's not the ownership structure that is stopping them. In fact, the US used to do a lot of that before the 70s.

Hasn’t the US already done that? Huawei’s AI processors are banned in the US, with an effort made to ban them in US allies worldwide.

Re: US Intel

#567

Post by vel0city »

hrq wrote: post #561
vel0city wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions in grants have already been cancelled. Lots of research is losing its funding.

Agreed. Also the biotech industry is largely getting defunded. Venture funds are pointing dollars elsewhere so fewer new companies are being started, while more biotechs are being started in China. Most new drugs come from biotechs nowadays (not all of them, not GLP-1’s). But many do. If that innovation is happening in China and not the US today then it will create an issue in several years. We will not control our s…

Biotech still has a lot of basic science kinds of questions in it too. There's a lot about biology we seem to not really know in large populations. A ton of things we need to know more about before we even talk about commercial applications still.

Re: US Intel

#568

Post by graycat »

graycat wrote: post #475
bix6 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn’t be that way though. Venture capital is only for SaaS? It should be for technology in general. But the IRR demands are too much so it concentrates to SaaS.

Early on, with a good technical background, I guessed that, of course, the key to success in technology was some good technology but soon discovered that VCs just want to make money, a lot of money, quickly, and otherwise will hear from the investors in their fund . Just heard of Palmer Luckey. Hmm! Money? No big staff, not much equipment, essentially just one person?? $1B+, quickly? Example: Taylor Swift. Did she ev…

Addition: Omitted the reports that Swift is worth $1B from her singing.

Re: US Intel

#569

Post by woooooo »

margalabargala wrote: post #563
woooooo wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im saying that people live in a culture, and that sets the parameters of what's conceivable. You're commenting from the post-reagan consensus, which inevitably leads to Intel's current situation. But it doesn't have to be like that, America had a different consensus from 1930-1970. (BTW, deepseek was trained on nvidia.) Xi doesn't personally set every industrial policy in China, its a ton of people all over the count…

I think we're kind of talking past each other maybe. What I'm saying reduces down to, "the scale of effect that humans are able to have on a system, will eventually lead to problems of that scale on a system". If you can dictate that all industries within a country must do some thing, that will eventually cause problems with all industries within the country. Culture doesn't really have anything to do with it. Whethe…

Yeah, but that is a continuum and not binary. Xi isnt personally in a room pulling levers that control everything.

There are thousands of bureaucratic orgs and corporations making their own calls, deepseek and qwen were both trained on nvidia hardware, while several chip startups and SMIC ramp up.

The nature of those calls is influenced by culture. If you have a culture of MBAs, you get Intel's actions over the last 15 years.

Re: US Intel

#570

Post by idrathernot »

simne wrote: post #519
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused why you mentioned Rolls-Royce and then in relation to BMW. The government intervention of RR was nothing to do with the cars. The original Rolls-Royce company, which included the car division, was nationalized by the British government in 1971 due to financial issues with its aerospace business. The car division was separated in 1973. The parent company, Rolls-Royce plc (nothing to do with cars), was sol…

> I'm confused ... > The original Rolls-Royce company ...due to financial issues with its aerospace business. Well, it is because you do not understand economy of business. Unfortunately, main goal of any business is to be viable, not mean profitable, just be good enough to pay expenses need to run things defined as goals. By definition, ALL old automotive companies started as hybrids - car division to make profits a…

I think the main counter example to this in the case of Intel is Global Foundries success after splitting from AMD. However GF had to find their own niche downmarket to the cutting edge nodes that AMD requires. So in the case of RR, it’d be like if the turbine segment gave up on SOTA aero engines and instead transitioned into electricity generation turbines (or some less sexy end market).

My personal bias is that in the long term, keeping the different divisions as one whole makes both sides less fragile in the long run.

The other problem I think you’re getting at that being on the cutting edge of a market that is extremely capital intensive is a tough sell to the banks & financiers. I feel like every industry outside of finance is increasingly squeezed out like humanity can survive on securities arbitrage alone.

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