When the company is required by law to turn over their data to the government without due process and to embody good socialist values, suddenly the difference between country and company is smaller. For your second point:
US Muslims in concentration camps within the last 15 years: ~0
Chinese Muslims in concentration camps within the last 15 years: ~1,000,000
Completely ignoring the forced sterilizations of men and women and China removing any democratic opposition and imprisoning student protesters in Hong Kong. It may not be one way traffic, but there sure is a whole lot more going one way than the other.
Which country has illegal torture, rendition, imprisonment without trial, spying on a global scale and is currently openly threatening Canada, Panama and Greenland, and has provided all the means for the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza?
I'm not a fan of the Chinese system - but green houses and stones...
[1] As somebody has pointed out below - a lot of those Chinese emissions are ultimately produced for use in other countries.
Places like the UK have simply shipped their emissions overseas - then complain about these countries rising emissions.
It's easy to have the highest growth if you start from nowhere - when somebody quotes growth you should instantly be on guard for BS. For example the US could have gone from 1000 to 1020, and China from 200 to 220 - focusing on the larger percentage increase from China is rather missing the point.
You are also forgetting total carbon emissions over the lifetime of a country - developed countries are responsible for a lot of the carbon in the atmosphere - and while developing countries might be catching up in day to day emissions they are nowhere in catching up in total emissions.
Your first paragraph is so strange, given my link and the source showing China is already responsible for +30% of global ghg emissions.
This is directly to your point. You ironically have US and China flipped, and China is largest AND fastest growing.
And cumulative emissions? Another ironic critique, given China is by far the largest and fastest growing emitter. Assuming you agree with the 1.5C target increase, we have a limited budget. Allowing a catchup (cumulative/per capita?) isn't sustainable to achieve climate goals.
Perhaps a reason why the US is looking to build a massive wall on the southern border ( people feeling northward ) and is eyeing the acquisition of territories to the north.
Though that doesn't map to the 4 stages of stalling - it's a stage 5 - the oh crap stage.
I'd actually flip it around - in a crowded market the last 80% of work on those 20% features is what makes you stand out.
It's the detail, the little touches, that result in the comparative advantage in the market - not the shared 80% ( most chairs have 4 legs, seat and back - that 80% isn't what you compete on ).
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
Interested in your opinion on crowd-funding as a way of raising initial capital - ie cut out professional investors and go direct to potential customers?
I've seen it work once, but it was hard over the long term: LIFX (smart light globes) [1], which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012 by people working from the same co-working space and accelerator I was involved with then (so I kinda had a backstage view on it).
Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand.
Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3].
So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups.
Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported.
These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day.
And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term.
Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust.
I guess the worry for startup's there is if you too close then they might 'steal' - however big companies are typically quite keen on upholding IP laws - they use their venture arms to spread their bets - partial stakes ( and inside knowledge ) on a whole array of startups.
The worry is not so much that they’ll steal your IP (good legal protection can prevent that), but those kinds of corporate VC funds are generally looking to invest in things that fit in with their own corporate strategy and plan. The investment is a bit of a “try before you buy” before eventually acquiring the company and making the product part of their own offering.
That can be a good path if you’re making something that one of these companies would want to acquire and an acquisition by such a company is an appealing outcome for you.
But it’s not going to help you if you want to be an independent company and brand that can do things the way you want long term.
I'd largely agree that most of the components are there, however one thing I think that's very important but is perhaps missed with the focus on the PC is the phone.
Most people's primary, if not only, computing device is their phone - which at the same time is probably the most restricted device.
And if you wanted to build your own and connect to the mobile network - it's considerably harder than doing the same for a traditional personal computer.
Not sure ByteDance specifically does all that.
Now if you want to talk about the recent human rights records of the two countries concerned I think you'll find it's not all one way traffic.
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