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Discussion (87 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Of course CXMT, Micron, and family will still be profitable, but maybe not 'surge 470% from IPO' profitable.
If we are talking about all knowledge, then I agree that the compression ratio is very impressive already.
Hopefully, future models can be trained to be even more aware of external knowledge, accessible through web search / RAG / whatever it will be then, and might not need to internalize much knowledge at all.
There must be a limit, I agree, but there have been no signs of approaching it yet. The most recent cohort of small models have shown the biggest leap in capability so far.
Maybe? Human science history is absolutely littered with examples of things that were “constrained” by a fundamental law … until they weren’t, because we’d misunderstood or misapplied the law.
See Karpathy's "Cognitive Core" idea. (I don't have a good link)
Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.
2K, 4K, and 8K+ TVs have been around forever, and although 4K has become the norm, it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p
In a way it is actually the same thing that makes us accept AI as working in the first place. It only needs to be good enough for human perception. The same is probably true for compute.
And yet when we hit 4k, that's were people just stopped buying higher res. 8K is still useful, but only when the screen is so large that it doesn't fit in the room :-/
Sure, it might be very near using the current approach, but... it might also be might be very far off because we are using the wrong approach.
I mean, look at the max amount of intelligence you can get out of a human brain powered by two bananas...
Some groups are baking models into silicone, Deepmind has an example, it gets 18,000 tokens/sec on Llama 3.1, not sure about parameter size
It's like people saying mobile chips are going to be better than PC chips... until they realize PC can be made of mobile chips too if that comes true.
Also, you will be able to play with much more competent models locally. They will still feel like children compared to the adults living in the SoTA region.
Their posterior. Or worse, their interest in going to the moon (HODL style, not Artemis style).
Indeed it seems quite possible we are one architecture breakthrough away from existing chip stock driving us all the way to ASI.
Nobody has done AFAIK the information theory to prove it’s not possible.
Hyperscalers are screwed, data center mania couldn’t even be completed during this massive spending spree, all while the people seemingly sitting on the sidelines are working on getting these things baked into the OS and chipsets in a way consumers wouldn’t notice
On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.
In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.
Difference between Europe and the others is that it doesn't brag nearly as much.
EUV itself was invented by the US Dept of Energy and demonstrated first by Japan. It's why the US government can impose technology sharing and export control restrictions on ASML selling the machines to China, for instance.
I don’t think the goal there was to sit around praising past accomplishments. You always have to keep building.
Aren't they the only ones able to supply the chip-making machines?
i mean, it shouldn't be scary, because their failure is their own, and i doubt there would be collateral damage outside of those high risk investors.
It's scary for _them_, but it's an interesting case study for an outsider.
Is this accurate? It looks like they are no longer rising, at least for DDR5 memory:
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Most of the price increase did occur in Q4 2025 and most prices are fairly stable since then. Maybe this is different for LPDDR, GDDR, or HBM, but I would like to see evidence for that.
So others did spend energy on becoming better and now you see a different picture when you look at the world.
But what about SpaceX, Blue Origin... there are also counter examples that show it is possible for investors to wait out the big profits.
This is core reason why the German industry became so irrelevant in the last 2 decades: The rail infrastructure became pseudo privatized and now is in shambles (IIRC only about 60% of trains arrive on time). The PV industry was axed by the conservatives about 15 years ago and now is completely dominated by China. Even now, as the other EU countries demand strategic investments - and again the German conservatives say this ought to happen without any new debt. "We can only spend what we have", to quote Merz. Imagine China saying this about chip production, or even Sam Altman about compute hardware...
The problem is, shareholders have bled Western companies dry in the chase for returns on investments. There is no money left in the companies to retool them to be competitive with China.
Meanwhile, the CCP just pours dollars into their companies.
Unfortunately, there is no punishment in Western societies if you run a company into the ground as long as you pay your debts on the way out.
UK has been trying to get approvals for a new runway at Heathrow airport for over 20 years !!! now.
how much more do they need to ship to satisfy you?