I remember seeing interviews with Nortel's CEO where he bragged that most internet backbone traffic was handled by Nortel hardware. Things didn't quite work out how he thought they were going to work out.
I think Nvidia is better positioned than Cisco or Nortel were during the dotcom crash, but does anyone actually think Nvidia's current performance is sustainable? It doesn't seem realistic to believe that.
People who fought in WW1, thought WW2 would be similar. Especially on the winning side.
There is no specific reason to assume that AI will be similar to the dotcom boom/bust. AI may just as easily be like the introduction of the steam engine at the start of the industrial revolution, just sped up.
Indeed, but a lot of railroad startups went out of business because their capital investments far exceeded the revenue growth and they went bankrupt. I'd bet the same for AM radio companies in the 1920s. When new technologies create attractive business opportunities, there frequently is an initial overinvestment. The billions pouring into AI far exceeds what went into .COM, and much of it will return pennies. The investors who win are the ones who can pick the B&Os, RCAs and GOOGs out of the flock before everyone else.[0]
[0] "Planning and construction of railroads in the United States progressed rapidly and haphazardly, without direction or supervision from the states that granted charters to construct them. Before 1840 most surveys were made for short passenger lines which proved to be financially unprofitable. Because steam-powered railroads had stiff competition from canal companies, many partially completed lines were abandoned."
> Indeed, but a lot of railroad startups went out of business because their capital investments far exceeded the revenue growth and they went bankrupt
That was similar to what happened during the dotcom bubble.
The difference this time, is that most of the funding comes from companies with huge profit margins. As long as the leadership in Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon (not to mention Elon) believes that AI is coming soon, there will be funding.
Obviously, most startups will fail. But even if 19 fail and 1 succeed, if you invest in all, you're likely to make money.
If the bubble pops, would that bring the price for at least part of that hardware down and thus enable a second round of players (who were locked out from the race now) to experiment a little bit more and perhaps find something that works better?
My outsider observation is that we have a decent number of players roughly tied at trying to produce a better model. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Stability AI, Google, Meta, xAI, A12, Amazon, IBM, Nvidia, Alibaba, Databricks, some universities, a few internal proprietary models (Bloomberg, etc) .. and a bunch of smaller/lesser players I am forgetting.
To me, the actual challenge seems to be figuring out monetizing.
Not sure the 15th, 20th, 30th LLM model from lesser capitalized players is going to be as impactful.
It might be as simple as the regional options that middle-American households can afford have decreased. For example, in 1990, the median home price in California was 10x the median household income in West Virginia. Today, the gap has increased to 16x. Meaning that even fewer West Virginian households can include California as an option to move to as 25 years ago.
These people you propose are renters, not buyers. I don't entirely discount the impact of CoL differences (moving to California is pretty annoying from that perspective, and I've done it twice), but it's not the barrier you're suggesting.
Would be cool if the article would explain Musk's reasoning for the support. 'Us rich guys gotta stick together.' isn't much of an analysis. Trump is anti union? As I understand it, Trump is not anti-union. He worked effectively with unions in New York for decades. But he seems to be anti union leadership.
I think on this one he's wearing it on his sleeve and I take his motivation at face value. If you want to know why, he tells you why on his twitter all the time.
Musk's desperate for attention, would be my suspicion. Every time he's out of the news, he does something weird. This gets him in the news, ego it is desirable. I'm not sure you _really_ have to go looking for more complex motives than that.
The NLRB has ruled that Tesla broke the law by barring factory workers in California from wearing union T-shirts and when CEO Elon Musk tweeted that employees would lose their stock options in the company if they unionized.
I'm not sure that is realistic anymore. The run of free money is over and I expected that markets are going to be very picky compared to a few years ago
I must have missed the memo. Where could I get the free money? "a few years ago" we had a global pandemic. Are you claiming that markets will be very picky compared to that time?
What is the reality of New Zealand's extradition status with the United States? My understanding was there was no treaty, but we just learned that Mr. Dotcom was to be extradited.
I attended executive training for a couple of years. The members were all CEOs and would come to the group in monthly meetings with a very wide range of problems from: 'my VP Finance does not complete his work on time and offers an endless stream of excuses. I need to exit him. What's the best approach?' To 'My unionized interior finishers are abusing their time clock, how should I approach the union to correct this?'
The coach used an effective 5-step approach to the resolution process:
1. Present: The presenter makes a clear, one-sentence statement of the problem.
2. Clarify: The sounding team asks clarifying questions: 'How long has the VP been behaving this way?', 'How well do you know the local union leadership?' Only clarification at this step. No suggestions yet.
3. Suggestions/Recommendations: 'Conduct a confidential search, negotiate an exit package and move on. Be sure to keep the BoD up to date on this.'
4. Reaction: Presenter indicates the suggestion they believe is most likely best for them.
5. Accountability: Next meeting, the presenter reports whether they took action, and whether the results benefited from the discussion.
Phases 2 & 3 were conducted in round-table style, with each team member interracting one at at time.
The results were typically effective. The presenter didn't always take the advice, but always reported that the process had provided insight.
NVDA::AI
CSCO::.COM