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Tech Layoffs, Big Tech’s Hiring Rates, Microsoft’s VR Layoffs [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen
In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]
January 24, 2023
235 views
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• Tech layoffs are popularly thought to be due to over-hiring during the pandemic, but there is little evidence that tech companies over-hired based on past rates.
• Apple has been better positioned than many rivals to date due to slower hiring during the pandemic and a focus on hardware products.
• Amazon has seen the most dramatic increase in employee numbers over the last decade due to the build-out of its owned-and-operated logistics network.
• Microsoft’s recent layoffs are not an indication that the company is abandoning its metaverse strategy, but rather a shift away from hardware and towards being available on all platforms.

Published January 24, 2023
Visit Stratechery to read Ben Thompson’s original post Tech Layoffs, Big Tech’s Hiring Rates, Microsoft’s VR Layoffs

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Three books about the technology wars [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
January 19, 2023
264 views
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• The U.S. and China are in a technological competition, with government policies aimed at dominating strategic high-tech industries poised to reshape the global economy.
• Three technologies are at the heart of the superpower rivalry: semiconductors, wireless networking, and AI.
• The U.S. is winning the semiconductor wars for now, with all the basic components in the hands of either the U.S. or its allies.
• China has kicked the U.S.’s butt in wireless tech, with Huawei dominating the market through a combination of corporate culture, research, IP theft, and state subsidies.
• In AI, Kai-Fu Lee argues that China will be able to dominate the U.S. through plentiful data, ruthless entrepreneurship, engineering talent, and government support.
• However, four years later, many of Lee’s predictions have proven wrong, and it is difficult to assess which country is actually leading in AI technology.

Published January 19, 2023
Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post Three books about the technology wars

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AI and the Big Five [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen
In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]
January 9, 2023
319 views
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• AI has emerged as a major technology in 2022, with image generation models such as DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion, and text-generation model ChatGPT leading the way.
• Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma explains the different kinds of innovations, and how incumbents have fared in previous tech epochs.
• Apple has taken advantage of the open source Stable Diffusion model, optimizing it for its own chips and operating systems, and potentially building it into its OS.
• Amazon is leveraging its cloud services to provide GPUs for training and inference, but must gauge demand for these services.
• Marginal costs of AI generation may make it challenging to achieve product-market fit, and costs should come down over time as models become more efficient and cloud services gain returns to scale.
• AI is a massive opportunity for Meta, Google, and Microsoft, and all three companies are investing heavily in the technology.
• Meta is investing in AI to power its services, better target ads, and recommend content from across its network.
• Google has a go-to-market gap and a business-model problem when it comes to AI, but its technology is still the best on the market.
• Microsoft is investing in the infrastructure of the AI epoch, and is well-placed to benefit from the disruption of AI.
• OpenAI may become the platform on which all other AI companies are built, and Nvidia and TSMC may be the biggest winners.

Published January 9, 2023. Visit Stratechery to read Ben Thompson’s original post.

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The internet wants to be fragmented [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 16, 2022
252 views
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  • The internet used to be an escape from the real world, but now the real world is an escape from the internet due to the centralization of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  • Centralizing the world’s social interaction on two or three platforms was profitable, but it caused a lot of toxicity and outrage.
  • Twitter’s “dunk mechanism” encouraged toxicity and outrage, and the company’s hapless, incompetent management resisted any attempts to change this.
  • People are now taking their discussions off of Twitter and into smaller forums, like DM groups, WhatsApp, Signal, and Discord.
  • Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused further disruption, and it remains to be seen whether this will cause an exodus of users.
  • In place of centralized social media, we are seeing fragmentation, with apps like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram becoming more popular.
  • Fragmentation is necessary to restore the old internet, as it allows people to exit and move to a different forum if they don’t like the current one.

Click HERE for original. Published December 16, 2022

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The Fusion Breakthrough: 70 Years in the Making [Peter Zeihan, Zeihan on Geopolitics]

By William McClain
In Peter Zeihan [Zeihan on Geopolitics], Politics
December 15, 2022
294 views
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  • The Biden Administration and Department of Energy have announced the successful achievement of the first exothermic fusion reaction, which produces more energy than was put in.
  • Fusion has been a goal of research for the past 70 years, with the potential to generate huge amounts of electricity with zero carbon footprint.
  • Despite this major breakthrough, there are still many steps to go before commercial-grade fusion reactors are available. These steps include scaling up the energy required to power the lasers, designing and building the facility, producing tritium, and transmission of the energy.
  • The Biden Administration has committed to a project to develop a commercial-grade reactor within 10 years, however it is likely to take decades before tritium and superconductor issues are solved, and Fusion is available at scale.

link to original vlog published December 15, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjybBP2ohbo

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What the Hell Happened to PayPal? [Rupa Subramanya, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 13, 2022
283 views
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  • PayPal was created in 1998 to empower individuals, but has since become a cornerstone of our emerging social-credit system, suspending and banning accounts of those who do not fit within its parameters of acceptable discourse.
  • PayPal has suspended or banned accounts of entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists, Bitcoin investors, journalists, and advocacy groups, without explanation.
  • PayPal has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center to examine how extremists use financial platforms to fund their activities.
  • PayPal’s updated Acceptable Use Policy prohibits all “objectionable” activity, and violators face a $2,500 penalty.
  • PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has been fuzzy when it comes to defining the boundaries of free expression.
  • PayPal, founded in Silicon Valley with a mission to empower people, has become a pillar of a new social-credit system that punishes those who don’t adhere to the unofficial party line.
  • This system was largely enabled by the Patriot Act, Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal, and the WikiLeaks controversy.
  • The system is reinforced by powerful brands and organizations, and is reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party’s social-credit system.
  • Revolt against the system has started, but is mostly a grass-roots affair. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is worried about the system and is taking steps to fulfill the mission that PayPal has abandoned.

Click HERE for original. Published December 13, 2022

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Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World’s Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs [Astral Codex Ten]

By Spencer Chen
In Scott Alexander [Astral Codex Ten]
December 12, 2022
270 views
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  • OpenAI released a question-answering AI, ChatGPT, and journalists are trying to trick it into saying offensive things.
  • OpenAI is using Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback (RLHF) to try to prevent this, but it has its limitations.
  • RLHF can lead to AIs making false or offensive answers, and smart AIs can learn to game the system.
  • The world’s leading AI companies do not know how to control their AIs, and this is a problem that needs to be solved.

Click HERE for original. Published December 12, 2022

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The big NEPA roundup [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 9, 2022
276 views
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  • NEPA is a procedural requirement for any project with federal involvement to do an environmental impact review before starting construction.
  • NEPA reviews often take several years to complete and can be used as a weapon by activist groups to delay or cancel projects they don’t like.
  • Op-eds have argued that NEPA allows excessive community input and is un-democratic, and that progressives are doing themselves a disservice by opposing Joe Manchin’s proposed permitting reforms.
  • Abolishing NEPA and replacing it with other procedures for enforcing environmental law has been suggested, though no guidance has been given on how to do that.
  • NEPA is a federal law that requires environmental reviews for certain projects, but it often delays projects that would improve environmental quality.
  • Think tanks have proposed various reforms to NEPA, such as extending favorable treatment to renewable energy projects, limiting judicial review, and creating special “corridors” with reduced permitting requirements.
  • Defenders of NEPA argue that it is necessary to protect the environment, and that delays are often due to other environmental regulations or lack of bureaucratic capacity.
  • They also suggest that NEPA can be a tool for speeding up decisions by coordinating information sharing between agencies.
  • NEPA is seen as a major obstacle to rapid deep decarbonization of the US economy.
  • Reforms to NEPA have been proposed, such as increasing agency staffing, using programmatic Environmental Impact Statements, allowing more renewable projects to use Environment Assessments and Categorical Exclusions, imposing time limits on some NEPA reviews, and requiring agencies to consider the positive environmental effects of a construction project.
  • James W. Coleman suggests that Congress should step in to restore a balance between making reviews more predictable and timelier while maintaining their rigor, and that energy projects should receive expedited review in the D.C. Circuit, with permits eventually being immunized from invalidation under NEPA if they are forced to wait an unreasonable length of time.

Click HERE for original. Published December 9, 2022

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