Comment by MangoCoffee

That merely pushes the valuation onto the hardware makers, not the companies that have the temporary preferential access to their hardware.

That makes them at best temporary middlemen.

It only justifies their long term valuations if they can leverage that temporary monopoly for technological superiority (they can't) or lasting market share (they can't).

Chinese models prove there's no technical advantage, and the software side is heavily commoditized so there's not much advantages to market share either.

I would add that it is not just capacity, but also negotiation ability. With scale comes the ability to negotiate better prices than everyone else. Even if you can find capacity for your smallish user base, your inference cost can not match these companies unless you have a technical advantage for your inference cases. Squeezing the hardware requires request batching and caching which are far easier at scale and sustained user activity.

Export controls have highly motivated China to figure out how to make state of the art chips entirely in country.

It’ll certainly take years but I would not bet against China’s ability to manufacture something.

Thanks for sharing.

Is lack of inference chips due to the trading blocks by trump administration? What if Trump agrees to sell chips to china, would they collapse then? That's not a very strong position to be at

is that releveant if people can host their own models? that activity still undermines the valuation / diminishes the US companies 'moat' ?

they have the capacity via market manipulation; so you know, they only have things they've bought on the governments future debt obligations.

so, you know, they're as vulnerable as utilities at this point, if only there were people who gave a shit more about society than greed.

Not exciting for anyone directly or indirectly invested in a frontier lab or its partners. And that is a lot of people, including you.

The car industry is also a trillion $$ market in the US. I don't see why that would go any differently from the Chinese cars ban.

I read it as catastrophic for the companies trying to IPO. It'll be great for the rest of us though.

> Why is anything going to be catastrophic?

Many believe, including myself, that the market is currently propped by a massive AI bubble. Nearly a US $1 trillion is being spent this year, and more is planned for next year. All of this is for a "build up". There is no pay out. The major AI companies are taking in massive losses in the hopes that they will eventually be able to cash out.

The math is not looking good to me. The effect will be like the dotcom bubble. But much much bigger. Because the numbers are so much bigger.

a lot harder to ban software than hardware the size of EVs

Just keep in mind that it can take a whole for things to play out. I’m someone who believe the US AI industry is completely unsustainable and built on sand, and will crash even if the current AI itself turns out to be very successful. But that doesn’t mean everything will burn to the ground next week. In a history book things will look very sudden but at normal speed that can easily take months to years to fully play out.

Also, take in consideration that the AI trade infected a lot of other trade in the economy, if you decide at some point to move your money to a place that is safe in case of a downturn be sure to carefully evaluate that’s actually the case

These crises are manufactured by the central banks.

Compare and contrast how the dot-com bust did _not_ lead to global financial crises. Nor did Black Monday, nor the recent string of bank failures in the US.

('Manufactured' above means that central banks are responsible. I make no judgement on intent here. Around 2008 it was incompetence by the Fed and ECB as far as I can tell. The Fed started paying interest on excess reserves and the ECB even increased rates. Twice. Amongst quite a few other missteps.)

Does stealing from a thief still amount to theft?

I'm not sure a data center run by ... Palantir of all organizations is what people have in mind when they worry about data sovereignty.

How is this different from buying a supermicro rack? Better support?

And with that also gain institutional knowledge, skill up your workers and attract talent that wants to work on this stuff.

All boils down to short-term/long-term thinking.

It will come... all big hardware players (Intel, AMD, Broadcom) and dozens of startups (Tenstorrent, etc.) are working on it...

You're talking about multi-session vs. single-session throughput. A single user can easily leverage multiple sessions via e.g. subagent swarms, especially on a lower-end setup where any single session is going to be quite slow. Saturating utilization during off-hours is harder but potentially quite feasible by assigning lower priority, unattended tasks/inference loops.

Because it would be the US taxpayers bailing them out.

It’s a common denominator if you want to do napkin-math for a whole national economy. Regulatory capture is like a tax on those people not on the beneficiary side, so if the government were to nationalize both supply (no export license for SOTA models) and demand (no foreign or self-hosted LLMs allowed), they’d end up making everyone else pay for it in some way or the other. The governmental utility function will then include only those using the services for direct economic benefit.

They have a stupid plan to buy ten to fifty percent of all the SOTA AI companies, and giving us all a fraction of the money.

Trump keeps calling his enemies “communists”… then turns around and ‘seizes the means of production’ himself.

Circular investment deals and investment deals at valuations which have no possible justification.

> Just hosting it in the EU and promising not to retain / sell the data let's you charge a healthy extra and compete in many areas other players can't.

It's been a few years. Has anyone done this successfully yet?

Keeping SLAs spinning isn’t this trivial

I did. It is based off of future models that can be created with the people there.