“Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I know of no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

It’s also a testament to Altman’s dealmaking prowess: a progressive San Francisco tech leader walked into an administration that opposed everything he publicly stood for, and within days, he secured a crown.

Bullshit. Absolute steaming mountains of bullshit.

These techbros don’t stand for anything. They’re a bunch of objectivist libertarian assholes who enjoy the aesthetics of being perceived as progressive because it’s trendy in the kind of social spaces they want to inhabit.

This isn’t about “dealmaking skills”, it’s about Trump being a giant baby who will do anything for anyone who kisses his ass, and Altman not giving a flying fuck about Trump being a fascist because sucking up to him makes him money.

Correct. Taiwan considers it a matter of national security to never allow their best processes to be exported. That monopoly is why Taiwan still exists.

2nd amendment

For Taiwan, it’s a matter of survival, plain and simple. They’re not going to give up their monopoly because without it they cease to exist. It does not matter how irrational the person they’re dealing with is, because for them this is life and death, literally. TSMC is the single biggest national security asset they have.

No, that just plays into their hands. If you complain that it sucks, you’re just “using it wrong”.

Its better to not use it at all so they end up with dogshit engagement metrics and the exec who approved the spend has to explain to the board why they wasted so much money on something their employees clearly don’t want or need to use.

Remember, they won’t show the complaints, just the numbers, so those numbers have to suck if you really want the message to get through.

Correct. It’s about metrics. They’re making AI opt-out because they desparately need to pump user engagement numbers, even if those numbers don’t mean anything.

It’s all for the shareholders. Big tech has been, for a while now, chasing a new avenue for meteoric growth, because that’s what investors have come to expect. So they went all in on AI, to the tune of billions upon billions, and came crashing, hard, into the reality that consumers don’t need it and enterprise can’t use it;

Transformer models have two fatal flaws; the hallucination problem - to which there is still no solution - makes them unsuitable for enterprise applications, and their cost per operation make them unaffordable for retail customer applications (ie, a chatbot that gives you synonyms while you write is the sort of thing people will happily use, but won’t pay $40 a month for).

So now the C-suites are standing over the edge of the burning trash fire they pushed all that money into, knowing that at any moment their shareholders are going to wake up and shove them into it too. They’ve got to come up with some kind of proof that this investment is paying off. They can’t find that proof in sales, because no one is buying, so instead they’re going to use “engagement”; shove AI into everything, to the point where people basically wind up using it by accident, then use those metrics to claim that everyone loves it. And then pray to God that one of those two fatal flaws will be solved in time to make their investments pay off in the long run.

Sure, “low end” wasn’t a perfectly scientifically accurate way to describe it. I apologize for my terrible lack of academic rigor.

The point is that they’re not going to let their highest end processes be replicated outside of Taiwan. Or, rather, the Taiwanese government is not going to let that happen, because fear of losing access to that technology is their one bargaining chip with the West. Without that, they cease to exist as a country. There just isn’t enough incentive for anyone to risk a war with China otherwise.

But it cannot produce the higher end chips. That was explicitly part of the agreement when they built the facility. They’re only willing to fab low end product outside of Taiwan.

I was being very specific when I said “their best processes.”

Taiwan are very clear about this; they (correctly) consider their monopoly on high end chip manufacturing to be an urgent matter of national defence and it is of the highest priority to them to keep it solely within Taiwan. They will never allow their best processes to be exported.

It’s not just people, it’s also that China invests heavily in the building blocks of effective industries. They’re serious about education and healthcare as public services, they invest heavily in transit. You can’t expect life to bloom in a desert, but the US keeps acting like stripping away everything necessary for industries to prosper will somehow make them prosper harder.

Requisite disclaimer; The CCP are an appalling autocracy with a litany of crimes against humanity to their name. Just because they do some things well doesn’t make them worthy of admiration. Yes, I’m looking at you, .ml