OpenAI is not worth $860B to anyone other than to the companies hoping to inflate their own valuations by selling it goods and services, at least until OpenAI inevitably goes to zero and its assets are acquired for substantially less than $30B. It simply does not cost $30B to build an OpenAI competitor and the opportunity cost of building one also isn't approaching $30B (unless one accounts for the stock hit from investor FOMO over such a delay, as, for example, Apple knows all too well).
If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.
Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...
Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk
No crash yet, just a bunch of lawless stock manipulation by people raising money to feed gear to their LLMs. It's scaring students into other fields due to the attempt by these AI grifters to convert CS salaries into token purchases as they rob their customers with AI slop. This lack of jobs/graduates went on for six years after the 2000 dot-com crash(es), yielding the current dystopia of middle-aged web developers that don't know what a page fault is. All things being equal, we come out the other end in 2032 with vibe coders?
But all things aren't equal. Our country is deeply in debt and it is no longer clear to me that the government will reign in that stock manipulation activity before it crashes the market because it still believes, almost in desperation, the false narrative that by spending $600b on capEx, the grifters are going to exponentially increase GDP with magic AI productivity gains, thereby keeping the national debt at bay. This kind of setup could lead to a Greater Depression when they're proven wrong. Greater in the sense that people no longer know how to be that poor, not that they were particularly good at it in 1929. Way worse than 2001, and let me tell you...
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
..was totally expecting this article to be written in Chinese, because it is an active attack vector being used to infiltrate western IT infrastructure by pre-loading spyware into the boot loaders, then clicked the article and the link opened to Cyrillic characters. Of course, APT29 is doing this too, but their agents aren't thought to be in the supply chain, so they have to infect the products after installation (using traditional hacking techniques). Look at how Intel ME and AMD PSP work and presume that something similar is in the latest Allwinner, Rockchip, Alibaba, and Nuclei, etc.. chips. To the Chinese, this seems fair because "the other Party" is doing it. Not arguing that it isn't, just that most customers have their head in the sand denying it is happening (even using them in IPKVMs!)
There was also a Western paper on embedding hidden circuits (and thus functionality/ISAs) into CPUs and activating them in the field (after deployment) by executing a sequence of opcodes resulting in something akin to blowing a fuse on the processor die, thereby making the circuits invisible (to even a microscope) until activated. Those secret opcodes could then disable the chip or jump into a block of secret microcode and alter the program counter to behave in a non-standard manner so we might not easily be able to see what's happening, even if we knew to look. One still would have to deliver that secret sequence of opcodes to trigger such a stealth mode...that could be done via microcode/firmware updates from the manufacturer's website or an OS update, or similar techniques. Interestingly, an unexpected iteration of Chinese SoCs began flooding the markets just as the rest of the World was sustaining a "chip shortage" in a timeframe perfectly aligned with what would have been required to implement such a system after that paper was published.
Air-gapping the customer's devices during installation (to prevent the activation opcode sequence) might not work either. Many Chinese SoCs are used as embedded peripherals simply to add WiFi, Bluetooth and Thread capabilities onto existing designs via a simple UART or doorbell interconnect. This makes it too easy for these Chinese SoCs to also be listening for a Morse-code-like activation signal on a low-frequency band, triggering the backdoor to open (enabling a more conventional remote code execution port or logic debugger exposed via WiFi or BLE for example, or causing malfunction or damage to what's on the GPIO or UART pins). Such low-frequencies could be disguised (think Blue Whale signals) so they might be sent slowly over great distances (or even from floating weather balloons or low earth orbit) without drawing too much suspicion. https://youtu.be/E-gbYjLd93g
Almost positive 'ol Bessent has by now warned Trump that there is an issue with the AI queens breaking 1930s securities reform laws. Last week's stock market and crypto moves have all but sealed the fate of the Bozo No Bozos. They will take down the people involved with the funky purchase orders quietly, except inside of the closed door meetings where they get handled. https://youtu.be/y_z9W_N5Drg
Only theoretically at this point, though they will tend to speak confidently enough about such untested capabilities so as to cause millions in investment losses to others. One would think a hardware manufacturer that's teetering on the abyss would go full out and implement a vLLM interface (maybe a folder of local models that can be downloaded as components in the Xcode-way and also a router too), but their NIH mentality has them tripping over their own Graydey's. There is nothing special about Apple Silicon except the head start they had and that they're squandering.
Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features.
Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.
Exactly, this is about attaching the AI hype bubble to all of his dealings before he offloads with an IPO (that still leaves him with 75% of the stock).
If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.
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