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.

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.

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.

The $20B will be paid out to investors. Maybe GroqCloud will keep $1B to keep the lights on for a few years.

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.

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.

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...

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