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Comment by choonway

2 days ago

yep. the word they use is probably 克制 or self-restraint. no need to raise so much cash if you can't use it.

in his article he talks about the negative aspects of getting everything you want. (all the money, brightest minds, biggest share in AI) etc. he says that these are the things that will cause a company to fail.

I shouldn't win too hard, because then I'll lose?

  • Yes. Once you're in such a comfortable position that you'll keep making lots of cash regardless of whether you do well or not, there is little incentive to make good decisions, let alone take risks. This is known as the "curse of Oil" and is also what Intel's decline is attributed to.

  • Sudden availability of capital and the perceived need to be seen doing something with it can be a curse. WeWork comes to mind, eg. Stay lean and mean until you actually need the capital. A company like DeepSeek will have zero issues raising anytime.

  • “Raising cash” isn’t necessarily “winning” since you have to give up equity/control, usually.

  • Problem of the local maxim, extreme dependency is the same as evolutionary pressure to specialize for it, eventually the process owns you.

    • Interesting, could you elaborate please? What does dependency mean in this context? That you become over specialized for a niche?

Unless they have a shortage of mathematicians, physicists, ... it seems a fundraiser could help bypass a compute gap by focusing even more on inference and training efficiency.

is this similar to Meta starting to rent out own compute as they cant seem to do much with it and monetising it is much better ROI?...

The maturity of leadership in China seems to be on a whole different level from the U.S.

Lots of companies in the U.S. have fallen victim to that syndrome, but if you used the word "restraint" in that context in Silicon Valley most people would look at you like you're insane.