> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.
That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.
No it’s not an easy fix. Manufacturers don’t have a good pulse on long term demand. The he capex to spin up a new manufacturing plant is significant. Especially with the recency of Covid where some folks did get caught with their pants down and over invested during the huge demand boom.
I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on and lots of startups getting massive amounts of capital but I here is a strong signal that a good part of this demand is here to stay.
This will be one of those scenarios where some companies will look brilliant and others foolish.
Smart manufacturers will sell 'hard drive futures'. Ie. "Give us $100/drive now for 100k drives for delivery in march 2028".
These contracts are then transferrable. The manufacturer can start work on a factory knowing they'll get paid to produce the drives.
If the AI boom comes to an end, the manufacturer is still going to get paid for their factory, and if the AI company wants to recoup costs they could try to sell those contracts back to the manufacturer for pennies on the dollar, who might then decide (if it is more profitable) to halt work on the factory - and either way they make money.
Can you provide some solid examples of companies doing this in an industry with high capex? Yes futures exist but largely in commodity businesses. Because what you described sounds more like pre-purchase agreements which already exist. To have a futures market you would need investors and a product that is more of a commodity and not something highly engineered.
You are also forgetting that the payback period on a plant is not a single year, it will be over many years and most likely no buyer is wanting to arrange purchasing that far out.
I don’t see how what you described sounds is set in reality even for “smart manufacturers”.
That only works out if there are enough investors willing to pay for those futures. If the new factory can make a billion drives but they only have 2 of those futures contracts sold (that is 200k drives) they don't build the factory. Remember too if they sell those contacts they are on the hook to deliver - if it is just investors they will accept the street value of 100k drives in 2028 but some of the people might be buyers demanding physical goods.
Every year a few farmers realize they are contracted to deliver more grain than they have in their bins and so have to buy some grain from someone else (often at a loss) just to deliver it. This isn't a common problem but it happens (most often the farmer is using their insurance payout to buy the grain - snip a very large essay on the complexities of this)
> If the new factory can make a billion drives but they only have 2 of those futures contracts sold (that is 200k drives) they don't build the factory.
But the AI companies are flush with cash and trying to buy everything, right? Why wouldn't they buy up as many futures contracts as the fab company needs to justify more fabs?
> Every year a few farmers realize they are contracted to deliver more grain than they have in their bins and so have to buy some grain from someone else (often at a loss) just to deliver it.
This is most commonly because they sold a futures contract for X bushels expecting to grow 2X but 75% of the crop failed and they only have 0.5X.
Semiconductor fab yields aren't as susceptible to how much it will rain next year and the companies generally have a pretty good idea of what their yields are for a given process node.
Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.
If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.
Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.
Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.
They target those ads by ingesting as many signals as possible from as many input devices & sensors as they can possibly convince people to use. They make a lot of money from advertising b/c they have managed to convince the most number of people to give them as many behavioral signals as possible & they will continue to do so. They kill products only when the signal is not valuable enough to improve their advertising business but that's clearly not the case w/ AI.
Just because something is in do-or-die situation doesn't mean that they have some kind of magical advantage over fat cat. Being in that situation means there is very real possibility of doing "die" part and we have lots of examples of them doing so.
The guy was hawking the doubling of human lifespan at some elderly potential investors... I really wonder why he decided to raise that point in that particular situation? Kind of going straight to our deepest fears.
I assume he was using Gemini the same way as he was Claude when I make the following statement.
I don’t believe it’s exceptionally unique or new that companies will revoke access if you are using an unpublished API that the apps use. I don’t see anything wrong with it myself. If you want, pay for normal token use on the published APIs. There is no expectation that you can use APIs for an application, even if you are a paid user, that are not published explicitly for usage.
Indeed, that's why Anthropic, OpenAI and other LLM providers are known to adhere to published APIs to gather the world's data, obeying licensing and ROBOTS.txt.
I was under the impression that they do obey robots.txt now? There are clearly a lot of dumb agents that don’t, but didn’t think it was the major AI labs.
Obeying robots.txt (now) is still better than not obeying it, regardless of what they did before.
The alternative is to say that bugs shouldn’t be fixed because it’s a ladder pull or something. But that’s crazy. What’s the point of complaining if not to get people to fix things?
Will be interesting when/if more information is released. I am not sure why folks are so surprised or think it’s shocking. While definitely out of the norm, my mind was immediately thinking 10 days seems like an even number where you are trying to find or do something, not sure how long it’s going to take so you just stick it. Certainly odd that it’s only a few hours but for all I know there is some written government procedure for whoever is doing that sets it at 10 days.
> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.
That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.
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