If Intel’s failure taught tech anything, it should be that you don’t get big change from big companies.
A proper industrial policy will focus on startups. You set a goal, and you expect a lot of failures. You pull the subsidies as the recipients grow.
Instead, America focuses on big, slow moving companies, which is crazy given that our dynamism comes from startups. Take this “Project Stargate” nonsense from Oracle and Softbank. The news is all over this “$500 billion” investment but they don’t have the money. (I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot to illustrate this, and this is what I got.)
What we have, instead, are two cloud laggards who think they can jump the queue to the AI Cloud with headlines and political pull.
Oracle spent a decade fighting open source. While it finally “won” (corporate open source promises are now bogus under the law), Google and the other Cloud Czars each became several times bigger, because the cooperation open source fosters just makes sense. Since then, CEO Larry Ellison has been investing in Cloud as fast as he can, but he hasn’t gained much market share.
While Ellison was being greedy for no good reason, Son spent the 2010s grifting the Saudis, with a $100 billion “Vision Fund” that gave us things like WeWork and the gig economy. Like Ellison, he builds from the top down, not the ground up, and his results show it. His big winner over the last decade was ARM Holdings, whose innovation was giving Intel’s x86 technology away to its rivals.
An Honest Media
You would think the business press would be offering the truth on this, for the sake of its investor-readers if nothing else. (This is what Simovate thinks AGI is.)
Nope. Critics are being blocked. Even Musk is ignored.
The only good news, so far, is that your tax dollars aren’t going to work here. What we have are big promises and a smiling politician. It will be interesting to see just how many Nvidia racks these guys are able to wrangle, when compared to those the real Cloud Czars acquire. My guess is the answer will be, not that many.
The Big Clue here is OpenAI’s Sam Altman, still spinning nonsense about “artificial general intelligence.” The idea of AGI is that people will be replaced by an artificial hive mind that does all our work for us. The Creative Class, mostly Democrats, will be powerless in the face of the Trumpian SuperClever.
That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of this works. Computers are tools. They’ve been increasing our productivity for generations now. They do the drudge work, allowing the Creative Class to imagine, and build, bigger and better things to serve all people. The computers define drudge work upwards all the time, and the people who “lose their jobs” find better things to do. The result is prosperity.
An honest media would have some skepticism about this bullshit.
