I agree, in any time in US history there has always been those 5-10 companies leading the economic progress.
This is very common, and this happens in literally every country.
But their CAPEX would be much smaller, as if you look at current CAPEX from Big Tech, most of it are from NVidia GPUs.
If a Bubble is happening, when it pops, the depreciation applied to all that NVidia hardware will absolute melt the balance sheet and earnings of all Cloud companies, or companies building their own Data centers like Meta and X.ai
And NVidia don't even make the GPUs! They're all made on a brave little island off the coast of China, while 7 huge US companies shuffle them around and exchange vast amounts of money for them.
Originally I was more interested in ML/DL theory and mech interp, so you can see I was more into theory. Recently, I am also curious and leaning towards learning more about how to build products with foundational models, such as LLM; for instance, recently I got the "LLM's Engineer Handbook [1]".
> If you want to work with ML you likely need the PhD + get lucky.
I do am interested in doing PhD in theoretical computer science, but I'm not too sure about AI PhD as I heard many (not-so-good) things about it.
> If you are interested on it because of AI, it's better to focus on LLMs and more NLP related fields.
Do you have any recomenndations that you have gone through that you think are helpful?
The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).
If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.
We're already at the point where participating doesn't make sense for a lot of workers, that's why tax increases (which must happen if we don't aggressively cut spending and even with the minor cuts we've had there's been incredible wailing) are coming from tariffs instead.
It's very unlikely the federal governments future obligations will be met in real dollars. I've said before "at the end of the day all retirement plans are effectively market driven." I wouldn't want to be depending on social security right now.
The issue won't be your technical skills. The german engineering quality only applies to hardware and physical goods.
It's a different culture. That you'll need to spend a lot of energy to understand.
Also german is a hard language to learn. Typically US people got it easy and don't understand such complexities, but this can be a time consuming endeavor.
Typically Americans have a very naive understanding of how the world works because American imperialism made it easy for them. So you'll need to get over this obstacle when you move here.
I believe it's worth it, it will open your eyes for many things and will make you a more complete human being.
BUT beware, all Americans I know moved back to US to make more money. Often they move here because they believe they are more left-leaning and like the idea about social democracy...
But then go back to the US because everything is easier there, salaries are higher (as long as you are a white-collar worker).
Feel free to mail me, I've been living here for 10 years and can help you understand what you are getting into :-)
It's time to walk away. You are no longer enjoying it and could leave with a fat paycheck.
If they will run the company to the ground, you'll end up with nothing and waste your time. It's better to have something than nothing.
If you are afraid of leaving, and then later seeing your cofounder be successful, because perhaps you were wrong on your take that it is running the company to the ground... you could negotiate to keep a small stake at the company.
I wouldn't though. In the end, money is what matters in business. You can find another purpose or another idea worth pursuing.
Currently, Crowdstrike, Zscaler and other solutions compete in a similar space than Wiz.
Google likely believes if can offer Wiz sec products bundled with Google Cloud. It isn't a terrible idea.
But Wiz itself works on multiple clouds, so it seems that Google can also grow it on their own.
Cloud security companies are growing a lot, and might be a growth lever for Alphabet, as its other businesses' revenue growth are slowing down.
My assumption is that this will actually make it easier for Crowdstrike and Zscaler to keep their market share, as they are pure-play companies on Cloud security and Alphabet has too many businesses to manage.
For me, it looks overpriced. Wiz has been growing a lot, but under Alphabet it might not perform as well as it did.
The big winners are the founders and whoever owned Wiz options.
I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
China is so ahead of the west in EVs, their battery tech, supply chain and also expertise is so amazing.
In China, you can buy even a car with swappable batteries. They are also extremely cheap in comparison to the West.
For people that live in the best Chinese cities and work in a white collar job, it's very cheap as well. Cheaper than it is in America or Europe as the purchase parity there is much higher.
The West needs to drop the "free markets economics" and heavily invest and subsidize EVs, they are the future.
We can't afford to wait 10 years and lag behind so much, China will end up producing all cars in the world and that's millions of well-paid jobs.
Go to Brazil and you'll see how many BYDs are everywhere. China will unfortunately eat the entire third-world car market, which has long been a good line of profit to US/EU car manufacturers.
The car industry in Germany is being Nokia'd. The iPhone didn't win because the US had central planning.
I'm not convinced at all free market economics are holding us back. Rather other parts of the world are leapfrogging us despite not adopting it.
It was always obvious EVs would be the future. I remember being at a friend's party in Germany more than a decade ago, talking to some guests who worked in the auto industry. Told them about this new upcoming car company called Tesla and how it would transform the entire transportation sector and eat their lunch. The entire group laughed me out of the room and talked about the amazing research they were doing on "clean diesel" or something, I kid you not.
It's simply a combination of innovator's dilemma, complacency and no appetite for risk taking.
You are both wrong, it's the other way around - the free market economics are outside the EU. Here is the EUSSR. Just try producing something in "green" Europe, have a look at the amount of carbon tax you have to pay, then you will see.
> I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
This is wrong. In the past German car makers made a great profit from selling cars in China and had a really good time. Now the Chinese have learned to build their own cars, which lead to a significant loss of market share for German and other foreign car makers.
But German car makers are still quite profitable. For example BMW just announced a profit of 7.68B Euros, and are still the largest exporter of cars in the USA (yes, exporter). The race is still on, and despite strong competition from Chinese car manufacturers, German car makers are everything but "shredded into pieces".
Plus the above example of the culture of finger pointing, hence avoiding accountability for the lack of vision.
Getting into the game too late and wasting a ton of cash on cars that miss actual target-user’s needs and wallets.
Unfortunately, this is a pattern having emerged in Germany since quite a while - it’s either the pandemic, putin, the government, china or whatever is en vogue to put blame on.
German engineering prowess is dying a slow death caused by their own ignorance of their arrogance.
They are still selling cars for the badge but people are slowly realizing that things have changed.
And don't get me started on the quality of their automotive software. I just bought an Audi so the pain is still fresh but after two weeks I'm still not able to properly login to my car - actually, it's 4 (four! yes!) different logins, and one of them is stuck to Italian. To call Audi software "garbage" is an understatement, and if there's anyone working there in here, yes I stand by my statement.
I live in Germany, and have heard the same story for years - only with Tesla instead of "Chinese cars". And look, who is dying now? Meanwhile, my ID.7 is just an excellent car.
Totgesagte leben länger, and such. The problems for German car makers were never that they could not deliver BEV, but that people would not buy them in numbers which would justify complete transition. Manufacturers like BMW, who were driving a more cautious, dual BEV/Hybrid approach for the same model did much better, and it is not like an BMW i4 is not a very good BEV.
Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper. They also send all used batteries back to China, leaving no pollution to your country. But such thing won't last forever.
Other than what the other person said I don't think it's just wages.
I'd say decades of having western manufacturing exported there in large part because of those wages, stability, etc leads to a country that's now just simply good at manufacturing. With diversified supply options, plenty of experienced human capital, automation skills and companies.
A different place like India or some place in africa can have those low wages and plenty of people but lack the supply chains, automation experience and infrastructure, etc
You are absolutely correct that just low wages by themselves are not enough to attract manufacturing on a global scale.
There are a lot of prerequisites (power/transport infrastructure, capable workers, political stability, organizational know-how) plus also network effects and advantages from local demand, and Chinese government did a really good job at providing all this over the last half-century.
But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
I also really wanted to stress this because people love to gloss over this wage-gap, and pretend that US manufacturing would get an immediate resurgence if we only abolished environmental regulations, or gave industry juicy tax-breaks/incentives, or invested heavily into relevant education programs-- but IMO those arguments are mostly a sham, and the core problem is that US workers are neither willing to work for $5/h nor are consumer willing to pay the difference.
>But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
It may be the biggest but at this point i think the combined corpus of other factor outweighs it insofar that it would take a long time for things to slowly come back.
At least for factories that aren't sweatshop work or primarily manual conveyor belt work.
Even in those later ones (I did automation for one in the food industry that literally can't move far abroad) it's insane how much of the endless amount of components that keep it all running came from china.
I think your best bet other than just wage is both education adjustments and gov incentive that works primarily from the bottom up rather than from the top down like countries in general in the west tend to try.
After all if i get a tax credit or grant or what have you for locally produced....idk keyboards...the cheapest way for me is still to get every component from china and to assemble here using a PnP machine manufactured in...you guessed it.
> Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper.
Honestly, this is strongly misleading.
Chinese goods are not primarily cheap because they are subsidised by communists, or because of lax environmental regulations, or because of prisoner labor-- the primary reason (and its not even close) are low wage levels. Chinese manufacturing pays an average $25k/year ($15k without adjusting for purchasing parity!!) for a 49h week. No western industrialized country even wants to compete with that.
You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
> You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
Already happening. Was in China recently - the driver of the rideshare I took said he was driving now because his electronics company outsourced manufacturing to Indonesia.
This is very common, and this happens in literally every country.
But their CAPEX would be much smaller, as if you look at current CAPEX from Big Tech, most of it are from NVidia GPUs.
If a Bubble is happening, when it pops, the depreciation applied to all that NVidia hardware will absolute melt the balance sheet and earnings of all Cloud companies, or companies building their own Data centers like Meta and X.ai
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