I worked at a company with multiple cofounders; one of them became the CEO, the other one was initially CTO, but ultimately his title was just cofounder after a while and someone else was hired to be CTO. This person then went on to just prototype and build whatever he wanted to; the service he built ended up having no OC engineers supporting it, pages went to him but he didn’t bother responding and nobody would tell him he had to respond lol. Ultimately people just didn’t use that thing or delayed using it as they couldn’t really rely on it.
Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basically like decentralized pensions.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
Its a market signal; we’re going to see a massive boom in investment (mostly from China, but still) in capacity expansion. Eventually the prices will stabilize.
China just needs to produce 3080s/3090 cards (which they are capable of doing given enough investment) and they can supply the gaming market for 95% of its needs
The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.
Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.
People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore.
Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough in the eyes of hundreds of millions and that will create continuous hardware demand (at least because of hardware churn, but also because there are a lot of people in the world who currently don't have great access to this technology yet).
I don't know how much optimization will drive down hardware per token, but given that most people would rather wait like 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes for answers to their coding problems, I think it's safe to assume that hardware is going to be in demand for a long time, even if, for whatever wild reason, absolutely nothing happens on top of what has already happened.
The "bubble popping" mostly means that investment will drastically fall, investors will start demanding profit, and costs will soar. This will cause a lot of tools currently built on top of LLMs to become too expensive. Free tools will likely become rare.
There's a significant number of users that will not pay for AI. There's likely also a significant number of users that will not accept higher subscription costs no matter how much they use AI tools today.
When this happens, the market will go back to "normal". Yes, there will still be a higher demand for computer parts than before ChatGPT was released, but the demand will still go down drastically from current levels. So only a moderate increase in production capacity will be needed.
AI is already easily profitable without further optimization. If at any point investors decided that this is the best the models are going to get, because it's not worth further investment then we will run inference on the existing hardware, forever. What will not happen:
- The models going away. There is no future where people will start doing more coding without AI.
- Everyone running all AI on their existing notebook or phone. We have absolutely no indication that the best models are getting smaller and cheaper to run. In fact GPUs are getting bigger.
This might hurt OpenAI, depending on how good the best available open models are at that point, but this will in no way diminish the continued increased demand for hardware.
> When this happens
I think all of this is highly unlikely, and would put a "If". But we will see!
> Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore
Won’t they? For a great number of people, LLM’s are in the “nice to have” basket. Execs and hucksters foam at the mouth over them, other people find utility but the vast majority are not upending their life in service of them.
I suspect if ChatGPT evaporated tomorrow, the chronically dependent would struggle, most people would shrug and go on with their lives, and any actual use cases would probably spin up a local model and go back to whatever they’re doing.
I’m not denying hardware demand will evaporate, it definitely won’t, but interrupt the cycle and “ehh, good enough” will probably go a very long way for a very large percentage of the userbase.
I am not sure I understand. I agree: If AI were to disappear tomorrow, people would adjust (as they did when AI, or the iPhone or the internet appeared). That's what people do.
But now there is user demand. Who or what would take away AI? What is the scenario?
Lots of companies right now have slapped AI features on their products without extra cost. Some are offering it for free (e.g. search engines). If LLM costs significantly increase, I would expect free AI features to disappear or become extra paid features (already started to happen in some SASS), while any free LLMs become simpler and cheaper.
This is making the scenario more complicated, because now we also have to consider products without product market fit, which is an entirely different issue. I don't know how to think about that.
But that's exactly why this "bubble" is so hard to predict, isn't it? The dot com bubble was simple. All companies were jumping the gun to make websites. Most were not useful, but the Internet was useful so it survived. LLMs are useful, but how much of its current use is actually valuable? If 95% is useful while 5% is memes, we're fine. But if 95% is useless, the industry will collapse hard. Who can tell what is useful when LLM companies sell the service to everyone?
Stabilize at an incredibly high price. Once they realize they can make more money selling high and producing less. I hate to say it, but the savings does not get passed on to the customer.
The part that seems to need emphasis is that the author happened to walk inside this neighborhood cafe while just walking his dog. To many Americans, the idea of just walking into a cafe is probably alien (you need to drive everywhere).
The one downside of non-urban life (and crappy public transportation). It's overall quieter than if I lived downtown and I appreciate that. But in terms of walking, I have a Mexican joint and then everything else takes effort.
The Wal Mart plaza is only a mile away, but unfortunately its a fully uphill mile that has me going 200 feet in elevation. And in terms of cafe, it's simply a tiny corner Starbucks. The local joints are about 3 miles out east or west as a start.
If this is something you want to do you might consider a bike. A 6 mile round trip on for for coffee seems a bit much, but 3 miles each way on a bike shouldn't be bad unless you're in a city (in which case there should be things closer). You could also do this same thing with a thermos of coffee/tea and a local park.
Once the job situation is out of the way (which sadly might take a while in this market), I wouldn't mind that idea. It plays double duty in helping to loa weight I really need to lose as well. Any hesitation I have to bike around a few miles is entirely my own fault in terms of health, so I should buck that mentality.
My nearest park is 6-7 miles away, meanwhile. I don't know about going there for coffee, but it'd be a nice little bike route. My city does fortunately have quite a few dedicated bike paths as some solace against the usual car centric society.
This is why I'll never move back to Canada. A cafe will be a few red lights away on these ugly wide roads, in the middle of a parking lot surrounded by box stores.
It's not just the driving that sucks, but the ugly environment it created.
Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
And even more stupidly, traditional American carmarkers are discontinuing EV models and shutting down factories JUST when they finally had an edge over their japanese competitors.
ford in particular seems to only ever give up on everything. they couldn't compete on compacts, so they killed the focus and fiesta. they couldn't compete on EVs, so they killed those too. next thing you know toyota will start carving away at the F-150's market share and they'll kill that, too.
Probably not the correct way to see it, but compared to new car makers like Tesla, BYD, Xpeng and so on, Ford seems not doing anything. The formers invest heavily on softwares, robots (in house or funding external cos), ADAS, remote sensing etc. I don't see giant legacies doing the same.
Ford's only move seems to be to form "skunkworks" teams, like the one that produced the Mach-E (not a bad car), and they started another one recently. But if the output of that is a single model and not the entire future platform direction, it seems like the wrong approach to me and it's more highlighting a symptom of the majority of the company being rotten.
honestly it really does seem that way. the impression I'm getting is farley just wants to make as much money as he can off of whatever's left of ford and leave. I mean, what kind of leader goes "wow I drove my competitor's car and it's freaking great, I give up!"?
compare this with toyota's CEO. they easily could've just coasted on corollas, camrys and RAV4s forever. nope, here's a new beastly supercar on the way!
> Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
Oh, indeed. I was attempting to be generous, but it's arguable whether they deserve that generosity.
> I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
We're still paying for this today with the so-called "Chicken Tax" (and all of the other crash and emissions regulations) that has deprived us so many good Japanese trucks over the years.
Outside the purely electric vehicles (where I believe Tesla competes very well, where is BYD at with FSD?), is there a Chinese equivalent to:
- The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. It’s main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
- The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
I believe the USA still has an edge in some areas of the market.
> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.
Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.
EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.
> Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The whole EREV trend actually came from China (and if you look at reporting from Chinese car shows, outdoorsy/cross country stuff is all the rage right now). But the EREV sales seem to be falling off, maybe because the masses have overcome range anxiety (and the charging networks have been built out).
> EREV sales in China increased 218% year-over-year in 2021, 130% in 2022 and 70.9% in 2023. In other words, growth has been tapering off for the last few years.[1]
Couldn’t agree more. And the niche market will only hold on because of protectionism. If the US let in the wave of cheap EVs that are coming, people would buy them - suddenly noone is going to care about “range anxiety” when you can get a 20k ev that does 300miles.
American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets
the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.
E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.
However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc
There is no way that a land cruiser owner in Africa will ever consider anything made by Ford. That's like blasphemy. The LC has decades of proven reliability, that the bronco needs to compete with.
It's true, the Ranger is immensely popular. But Ranger owners and LC owners do not see eye to eye and you'll have a tough time convincing the LC owner to change allegiance.
For South Africa specifically, the Ranger is about as large as you can go in terms of personal vehicle, before it becomes a serious hassle. Our infrastructure does not really support bigger cars. How does the bronco compare with the Ranger size wise?
Lastly, the Ranger is built in South Africa, I think Ford knows and understands the Southern African market very well.
I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
> - The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
The world is moving to EVs, ICE will mostly be collectors cars in 20 years in developed countries. As to Chinese sports cars Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: "June 2025, an unmodified SU7 Ultra (with a maximum 1,139 kW (1,527 hp; 1,549 PS) power) lapped the Nürburgring in a hair under 7 minutes, 5 seconds. It is not only faster than the fastest Tesla Model S Plaid and Porsche Taycan versions, but also faster than a Rimac Nevera, one of the most high-end and expensive electric sportscars."
"It achieved a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h (308.33 mph) at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, making it the fastest car in the world and breaking the record previously held by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at 490.484 km/h (304.773 mph)"
>I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
From what I can see, Tesla did not passed every test scenario, but it passed most of them (so it won): 5/6 in the first table (highway test) and 8/9 for the Tesla Model X in the second table (urban test), the two Chinese cars placed second and third with one less passed test than Tesla (7/9), while the Tesla Model 3 passed only 5/9. Interestingly, both Chinese cars passed the test that Tesla failed. Considering Tesla has millions more miles of driving data and more years of development, it seems like it's only a matter of time (with more data and iteration) before the Chinese cars pass the rest of remaining tests, which is great because competition is healthy.
Setting aside the performances of similar systems, the more fundamental question is why is this even important to Chinese carmakers?
1. They are shutout of the U.S. market with tariffs from both parties, that doesn't seem likely to change.
2. Self driving systems are far more difficult to work well on the roads of Europe, Asia or Africa. The kind of wide roads and planned development only exists in U.S, Canada or Australia. On top of it the issues with weather handling are still on-going problems.
3. Labor is not near as expensive as in the U.S. in the rest of the world (dollar is expensive) so automation ROI is not as attractive given the costs.
Tesla was a third of the new car market in Norway last year, but most people buy without the FSD. I don't know anyone that drives around using FSD as anything other than a gimmick or glorified lane assist.
No it got gutted by Americans that were tragically fed a constant diet of misinformation as to the actual policies of the GOP. EVs still poll very well in the US and so does combating climate change.
Is that … a bad thing? I know that peer reviewing takes time (although iirc journals don’t pay reviewers). And there is overhead around publishing which needs to be covered somehow.
Academic publishing is _notoriously_ profitable. Authorship and the bulk of the editorial process is done by others for free, and these days you often aren't even creating a physical copy. Their overheads are really pretty minimal. What the money (subscriptions and / or APCs) gets is the kudos associated with the publication.
It is reasonable to say: well if they aren't providing anything of value then the market ought to bypass them. The reality is that the publishers have been very canny in protecting their position, and sharp practice is rife.
They charge a substantial premium for that service. The open access publication fees are typically hundreds or even thousands of dollars per article.
There are other platforms that can offer a similar service for much cheaper, but scientists incentivised to publish on established journals that have a higher impact metrics.
Fair enough on the personal decision part. I'm less interested in telling people what to do and more interested in whether the premise ('nicer things = happier') actually tracks with how human satisfaction works. The research suggests it often doesn't, which seems worth knowing regardless of what you choose to do with that information. [1]
I would recommend the recently published book The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel, or check out the interviews he's done in recent months on it:
It's not about being frugal or cheap or spendy, but on recognizing human psychology and what actually brings most people happiness. See also the 85-year Harvard study on the topic:
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