> it’s really bad
> friend who has invested in China for over 40 years visited a few months ago
> 3rd tier city, not the Shenzhen, Beijing visits that newbies do
> 60-70% of homeowners more than 15% underwater on purchase price
> wage growth stagnant since Covid
> many college graduates working food delivery at US$10-15 per day
> layoffs
> many workers unpaid for months as governments and companies lack cash to pay
> bright spots in tech and robotics yes
> but average man on the street is doing badly
> shopping malls empty and many stores closed
> people milling around aimlessly with little to do
> depression level economy
> general feeling of the world leaving them behind and of the central government not caring
this is the state of the 1 billion people you don’t see in the big cities
TLDR: MSFT doesn’t believe in AGI, wary of overinvestment, OpenAI partnership is over
A. AI and AGI are overhyped
- “Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%.”
B. Very negative on more capex spend from MSFT
- “[If you look at the Industrial Revolution] there was a lot of money lost”
- “…countries are going to deploy capital… I'm so excited to be a leaser… I build a lot, I lease a lot.“
C. Value in AI is in infra where there is overbuild, and B2C apps which OpenAI has won, negative on model layer
- “in consumer, in some categories, there may be some winner-take-all network effect. ChatGPT is a great example [of a] at-scale consumer property that has already got real escape velocity”
- “[in enterprise] buyers will not tolerate winner-take-all. … where the buyer is a corporation, an enterprise, an IT department, they will want multiple suppliers.. That is what will happen even on the model side.”
- “In the model layer, one is models need ultimately to run on some hyperscale compute.”
Opinion
———— 1. Satya is calling the bubble in buildout. The crazy people like govts are entering the game. He’s happy to lease from them when they overbuild. His own capex spend is capped
2. He’s disappointed in the OpenAI partnership - he sees them as having built a great consumer app for themselves with dominance in the category, but models for enterprise usage have gotten commoditized.
3. He’s sooo done with the AGI talk. If you can’t get to 10% global growth your AGI talk is meaningless to him
4. He’s backing MSFT from the capex precipice. It’s funny because he certainly did make Google dance, and now they’re committed to insane capex. But he’s outta here
One of the most meaningful @dwarkesh_sp interviews so far
AI is designing superior wireless chips outside the normal design space
👇 🧵
I hated wireless antenna design in college because it was the most non scientific tradition bound guildlike cult where the older engineers would drop by and sigh and tell you “that won’t work in practice”… glad it’s getting figured out
114 million views in 7 days
> Historic really
> How did it happen? 🧵below 👇
Wed Nov 27 8.38 pm - The newly titled Dr Louks, posts the following after a verbal defense of her PhD thesis in Cambridge, England