China supports Russia in its war formally, but practically it sells Ukraine whatever it needs, because a weak vassal-like Russia is very much in their interests. The US is far, far more outspoken and active supporter of Russia in this war.

Finally, there will be no hot war with China. They'll likely blockade and invade Taiwan before the end of the decade, but the US will not do anything, partly because it'll be exhausted from it's never ending middle east wars, partly because it'll only take a small bribe to get Trump to back off. He's genuinely fond of dictators like Xi.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993902

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"Is the company market cap low? Do they have a decent product? Is it plausible they'll 10x? Yes -> Buy some amount I can afford loosing"

For example, Tesla IPO'd at $5B cap, it was perfectly plausible to believe they'd be worth $50B some day. Shopify IPO'd at $1.3B, Square at $3B, 10x was perfectly believable. Uber IPO'd at $75B, I did not believe they'd be worth $750B any time soon, or ever. Do I believe SpaceX will be worth 20T in like 10 years? Lol. Fmao even.

Today's IPOs at $1T+ means that private money figured this out and cut the retail public out, IPOs seems to be a really terrible deal these days.

Here's a practical example: your gmail account today is probably more important to you than your phone number was in the 90s and you can run afoul of some random ML subsystem and lose access. There is no recourse or accountability. Randomly loosing your phone number and not having recourse was not a thing back then.

But yes, I was on the internet in the 90s, the little playground we fled to has grown into a terrible panopticon run by unaccountable people for their own personal interest. NIMBY DC opposition is a terrible proxy to tackle this, but it may be the only tool available.

AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.

Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus

All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.

I wonder if he'll ever realize that his silly definition of "freedom" is precisely what enabled the techno-oligarchy he rails against.

Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.

A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.

Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.

Masha Gessen has written a fair bit about this.

The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.

The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.

Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit"

That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.

I'd say virtually all robots you've seen in the real world today rely on classical approaches - you build a rudimentary map, then use classical algorithms to find paths/do area coverage. The robots do no reason or understand what they're looking for, they're more like in-game units. At most there's some bounded, lightweight image classification going on.

LLMs can understand and reason about the world natively. nVidia has a Tesla FSD/Waymo competitor which simply their 7B reasoning LLM but instead of outputting tokens directly, its outputs are fed to a 2B diffusion model that outputs 1.6 second long trajectory for the car, and this is enough for an L2 system. But to make this work, they need the model to run at 10Hz, so they use super high-end hardware to do it (Jetson Thor) and the car is still "blind" for 100ms at a time (they have a parallel classical safety system).

With on-chip LLMs you could run this loop at like 100Hz on a chip that costs a few hundred bucks, rather than 10Hz on a board that costs several thousand.

8B models aren't useful in general, but for specific use cases they can provide an enourmous amount of intelligence - nVidia's Tesla/Waymo competitor is a 7B LLM with a 2B diffusion model, and running that at those speeds could be an order of magnitude cheaper than existing solutions.

The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.

Having said that, this scheme seems like it might just be a reaction to current hardware limitations. When I saw Talaas demonstrate a 8B model running on a custom chip at 17k Tok/sec, first thing I thought was "wow, you can just run an LLM in a control loop"