sorry, not corruption! retainer fees and timely stock purchases. different thing!
Trump on the other hand is completely open about this. He even brags about making money from deals, something that was previously considered a huge conflict of interest. He appoints people based on loyalty alone, not knowledge or experience. He bullies countries into compliance with mafia tactics ("appease me or else..." tariffs or even war like venezuela and greenland). It's a huge moral shift where that is no longer unthinkable. The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
Also, the constitution used to be holy. Now Trump is flaunting the 1st amendment on a daily basis (limiting LGBTIQ+ speech, establishing America as a "christian country" which is explicitly forbidden). I think all these developments are very concerning. I don't live in America but considering it is still a big world power it does worry me.
The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always
Again, the problem with this train of logic is you inevitable condemn everyone and everything as evil, at which point the word completely loses its meaning. Evil is only useful as a term if there are actually things that are not evil.
America has certainly done immoral, unethical and frankly evil things. It's also done moral, beautiful and even heroic things. It's a big complicated entity made up of literally millions of people and trying to summarize it as "good or evil" is pointless.
The reason this nuance matters is that we want, need to encourage doing good and the first step to doing that is to actually be able to distinguish between good and evil.
give me a list of these “beautiful and heroic things” - very interested to read them
> We estimate that over the past two decades, USAID-funded programmes have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children.
How about that? Or are you going to come up with some excuse that somewhere, somehow, an american also benefitted from saving all these lives and therefor it doesn't count?
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The core reason for creating USAID in 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, was to consolidate and revamp U.S. foreign aid into a single, more strategic agency to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, promote democracy and free-market principles, and fulfill America's moral and economic role as a global leader. It aimed to separate economic aid from military assistance and make it more effective in fostering development, spreading U.S. values, and creating stable partners, distinct from the bureaucracy of the State Department.
That doesn't make usaid saving 90 million lives less great.
Also, remember how america is not a single person? It is in fact millions of people? You want to tell me with a straight face that every single employee of usaid is working entirely out of some kind of dispassionate desire to increase american foreign influence?
I don't get why it is so difficult to understand that countries (and people) and do both good and bad things over their existences and if we actually want a better future we should encourage the good things being done which means we need to actually be able to recongize good vs bad.
America actually does quite a bit for hungry children, both within and without her borders. Is it enough? Perhaps not, but that doesn't somehow make what they do bad.
However, the greatest enablement was the overblown cynicism large swaths of the american elites had towards the national proclaimed values. When you think everything is cynical even when it is not then the next step is to have governments that are completely cynical.
I'm not quite sure how to explain this very obvious point: biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense and trump and his government is extremely corrupt and pretending that they're the same is both factually wrong and has the effect of protecting trump and his corruption.
The point isn't that anyone is above reproach, the point is that all you're doing is normalizing the increased awfulness of the republican corruption. And normalizing it means that it is more likely to continue happening and less likely to be punished.
If you're supposedly unhappy about clinton "corruption" why aren't you really mad about trump?
This whole "oh everything is the same nothing can improve" attitude is literally a favored tactic of the most corrupt governments. They want you to think that way because it means they'll never be held accountable. Any time people start talking about improving things they're met with an endless deluge of "oh it's all the same nothing can change" which is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
> [1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
I don't disagree that they're all corrupt bastards but come on man you cannot seriously pretend the degree of corruption is the same.
the echochamber is going nuts… look at this thread and see how many of you are saying “degree of corruption” and then think whether or not you are getting this fed like clowns from whatever fucking (“social”) media your brain is being poisoned and then start to question your life’s choices
Are you arguing that every act of corruption is of precisely equal magnitude and consequence?
The only way for the "degree of corruption" to always be the same for every person ever is for every act of corruption to be of perfectly equal magnitude and consequence.
If an act of corruption can be of greater magnitude and consequence than another, than it's perfectly reasonable to say that someone who engages in corruption of greater magnitude and consequence does so "to a greater degree" than someone else.
So which is it?
I think deep down you really prefer to pretend that it's all perfectly equivalent, otherwise your simplified world-view doesn't make any sense
On the other hand, an advocate for greatly increased corruption might claim that corruption can't be measured at all. Or, hypothetically, they might strictly use un-anchored non-metrics like "the other guy does it too", "any is too much", "omg look over there!", etc.
The US government is literally for sale. Businesses know that this window is limited and are executing antitrust manuvers left and right while they can.
So those businesses either know, or expect, that either:
a) these guidelines will be changed in a way that makes them hard or impossible to revert (i.e. through legislation or a Supreme Court judgement); or
b) there is little risk of a future change of administration.
Very few administrations do everything they theoretically could under the law and their own guidelines (even the ones that also do lots that violates both.)
I wonder if there should be a c) There is a lack of meaningful planning beyond the current status quo.
Also, if they manage to reach "too big to fail" status by that point, whatever punishment will be nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
The government has been under significant influence of corporations for a long time: this is true. But now bribes are being accepted unabashedly. Presumably, hopefully, this won't last beyond the current administration. To equate the two is dishonest.
I can list other Admins as well if necessary? Trump insanity is public though, maybe we like our corruption more private, is that it?
Or, if you prefer, you can count the number of times a president has pardoned someone he openly says he doesn't know anything about. At least the previous presidents tried to make up a plausible sounding reason.
then you are talking about counting dollar amounts as if we have access to bank accounts and shit to check these “dollar amounts” to see who stole more (we don’t but I am sure you can find some stories about some made up numbers and go “here, Trump this, Clinton that, Trump > Clinton - boom)
And my fav, the “degree and magnitute” is the shit, that is also something we can scientifically measure LOL. I am left-leaning centrists, most of my friends are right-leaning and for the AOC is more corrupt than Trump so you know, whatever world you live in will define “degree and magnitude”
E.g. "billion is so big!", uh, I've heard of a billion before, and then comparing the value of a company to a single person's salary, as if that was very relevant.
That is who I'm writing for.
We can't work backward rationally from "this deal makes sense" and get to "here's why". Corporate acquisitions often don't work that way, even when there's no bubble. The price is often just not justified at all. By anything.
In many cases they're just capitalizing testosterone.
That show was very on the nose about a great many things.
If those things were integrated into the giant there would be political risk of it eating all of the money of the giant.
If you do very risky R&D in a big corpo then the risk creeps into other things: other projects might look at the R&D and say, “we will just use that when it’s done”. It’s a lazy kind of move for tech leaders to make, because it makes you look like a team player, and if the R&D goes belly up then you have someone else to blame. This ultimately leads to risky R&D in a big corpo not being compartmentalized as much as it should be. If it fails, it fails super hard with lots of fallout.
But risky R&D at a startup is compartmentalized. Nobody will say they use the output of the startup until there are signs of life, and even then healthy caution is applied.
Also many of Google’s flagship products come from acquisitions. Eg Android, Docs, YouTube, their entire ad network, Firebase, DeepMind, lots more.
This isn’t easy! Equally famously, Microsoft routinely botches acquisitions, eg Skype, Nokia etc. Seems to me the only MS acquisitions that don’t fail are the ones they mostly leave alone (eg LinkedIn, GitHub).
Which is totally fine: anyone who is a biotech investor knows this and everyone makes tons of money in this arrangement. Investors (both public and private) take on the science risk and some of the regulatory risk, and the pharmaceutical companies provide a guaranteed (big $$$) exit and take over scaling manufacturing to bring a drug to market. Most people with retirement accounts and pensions and index funds rarely touch this stuff except as a diversification strategy that pools the risky stuff to get the upside on the whole industry.
I met someone that left to go to a startup and was bought by Cadence. He did this 5 times and about 2-3 years later Cadence would buy the startup he was at. He just couldn't get away.
Not sure where the author is getting their information from but there is seemingly little correlation between the investment rounds quoted in this post and other online sources. No mention for example of the Series E that valued Groq at $6.9bn.
The 6.9bn valuation is accurate though https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/groq-raises-750-mil... https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
Edit: some searching about suggests that Groq initially projected $2 billion in revenue for 2025, later cutting that forecast to $500 million. That appears to have be what this article is trying to say.
https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/groq-slashes-202...
— A motivational speaker, probably
Revenue targets are meaningless, especially in hyped fields.
No, we don't need to visualize that.
Doers are perpetually disliked by losers simply because they can do stuff while them can't.
It's natural that the losers' actions are aligned towards making doers disappear, but it's usually a very low level and pathetic threat to doers.
I enjoyed reading your article and hope you have more stuff coming :). Keep it going!
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
A stack of bills is roughly 0.5 inches. Assuming a 12-ft joist-to-joist spacing, that's 12 feet per floor \times 12 inches per foot \times 2 stacks per inch = 288 stacks per floor = $2.88M per floor since a stack of 100s is $10k
So that would be a 1,000M / 2.88M ~ 347 story building.
Or is my unit conversion wildly off from dealing with sick kids over the holidays?
A 4x for an AI cloud+infra play that targets speed and cost? Where do I send the check?
If NVIDIA believes it can take this and scale it, $20b is a no brainer.
Here's my take on what actually happened: https://ossa-ma.github.io/blog/groq
It certainly isn’t a “panic” as nvidia is so flush with cash. This is a minuscule amount of money for them.
My understanding is Groq failed to deploy their second-gen chips on time, which caused their stock to deflate.
Groq's primary advantage over Cerebras and SambaNova, as I see it, is they don't fabricate on TSMC. That's attractive to Nvidia, who doesn't want to give up any of their datacenter GPU allocation.
Edit: my information might be old, I don't know if they successfully taped out their second gen chip or not. Can anyone corroborate?
One of them will surely be right eventually!
But because buying it helps perpetuate the hype and money cycle of the 'AI' trend for awhile longer. It may not look like it directly, but a purchase like this keeps Nvidia's stock up in the future, which is all investors care about.
Not following the core argument here. Author seems to be comparing valuation in funding rounds to revenue projections. Revenue projection was revised downward, valuation was not.
Good point about not running the proprietary models, but that doesn't preclude strategic fit with Nvidia.
If they told the investors privately then they're probably fine, but I doubt they did.
I feel like I'm missing something here…
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8c395eb5-8d22-431f-b6ba-0...
B) All info the OP(= author) knows is known to the professionals dealing with the due diligence. They decided to do so while looking at data which is not available the public. So assuming they know some things why we don’t know is not a far fetched idea.
Current administration just handed it to them for a bribe
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg9q635q6po
They'll tear them down and x-ray/electron-microscope it and they've gotten exceeding great at cloning chips
src: https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
wkat4242•1mo ago
pstuart•1mo ago
reverserdev•1mo ago
How do the market regulators allow that?
newsclues•1mo ago
DrewADesign•1mo ago
Same way I reckon. Both are bad.
> Funny how everyone shits on Nvidia's monopoly when we've got Google walking around after winning a monumental antitrust case regarding their Android/Chrome/Google information monopoly.
... are you implying people around here don't give google flak for monopolistic business practices? That doesn't square with my experience, here.
oh_my_goodness•1mo ago
wkat4242•1mo ago
Aromasin•1mo ago
Oversight hearing is worth a listen to get a better idea on how the current administation is harming regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NZxkvYaVuk
pas•1mo ago
bilbo0s•1mo ago
This is what happens when companies figure out they don’t have to buy out other companies. They just need to pay off shareholders for the right to hire key employees. Which is convenient, since the key four or five guys are usually pretty big shareholders.
It’s no longer necessary to monopolize a market. You can monopolize intellectual capital by just paying ungodly sums of money. The rest will take care of itself.
wkat4242•1mo ago
credit_guy•1mo ago
I don't share your view. Groq continues to exist. Nvidia did not take any or their hardware, so the same Groq you access on OpenRouter will exist tomorrow or one year from now. If anything, they'll significantly increase their presence, since they just got $20 billion in cash.
As for Nvidia stifling innovation: one can argue that they do the opposite. They hired key personnel from Groq (including their founder and CEO, Jonnathan Ross). These people agreed to the move, presumably for the money, but most likely also because they think they can deliver even more if they have access to Nvidia's resources. So, in terms of overall innovation, it will most likely go up.
But you can say that they stifle independent innovation. Maybe, but the case for that is not that open and shut as it might seem. They entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq. Which means Groq can provide their "secret sauce" to other interested entities, maybe Apple, maybe Intel or AMD, maybe OpenAI, maybe Oracle. The number of companies who could be interested in their tech is quite high.
Or simply, Groq, with the many billions in unencumbered cash they just received will decide to go for version 2.0 of their tech, or they can significantly expand the GroqCloud. Their valuation just went from $6.5B to significantly higher than $20B. They can pursue an IPO, or they can issue debt. There are countless possibilities for Groq now.
wkat4242•1mo ago
The linked article expects differently:
> Nvidia’s buying them with their insanely inflated war chest. They don’t want a chunk taken out of their market share. They can’t afford to take that chance. So it’s like they’re just saying: “Shut up, take the $20 billion, walk away from this project.”
How much this is true I can't really verify myself but it certainly sounds concerning.
> But you can say that they stifle independent innovation.
But this is exactly what a market watchdog is supposed to prevent. A market with one player (or two) is no market. And Groq was going in a decidedly different direction than Nvidia.
The linked article echoes my worries in other ways as well e.g. worker displacement, explosion of energy usage. I often equate it with the dotcom era, I worked on this thinking we made the world better. But the endgame, with the Google, Meta, pervasive tracking etc is much more dystopian. Especially considering the societal effects. Enshittification, corporate rule, polarisation due to social medias promoting "engagement" and thus conflicting content that get people riled up.
I don't want the same to happen with AI here and it feels like they are already aligning the stars to make exactly that happen.
wmf•1mo ago
The $20B will be paid out to investors. Maybe GroqCloud will keep $1B to keep the lights on for a few years.
credit_guy•1mo ago
You are stating this as a fact. Do you have any links?
Otherwise, the simplest interpretation is that the $20B is paid by Nvidia to Groq, the company, not the investors. I don't even think it is legally possible for Nvidia to do a deal with Groq's investors directly, rather than with Groq.
wmf•1mo ago
credit_guy•1mo ago
Because your argument sounds something like this: Nvidia did something (a fact), and I am sure that after that Groq will do something else (not a fact), therefore Nvidia is such a bad player. Do you consider this to be a correct argument?
wmf•1mo ago
Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408104
credit_guy•1mo ago
All the employees who jumped ship (90%) had to be bought out, otherwise they would have a conflict of interests. The schedule is quite irrelevant. The remaining 10% also got cash. But the article is quite mum on the institutional investors. They can choose to cash out, or to keep the business running. Now that they have a lot of cash, they can choose to expand GroqCloud, or they can choose to pretend to keep the business running, just for show, to not trigger regulatory scrutiny. To claim it’s the second means you are quite confident the regulators in this administration will do their job. And prosecute Nvidia. Are you really saying that?
vips7L•1mo ago
dnautics•1mo ago
sireat•1mo ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...
"Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco , Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner."
POP QUIZ - Which minority partner is the key here?