Honestly did you even read the article? "Yes, there are cases of Southeast Asian nations slapping their labels on Chinese goods and then sending them to America to allow Chinese manufacturers to get around tariffs. But look at the graph of U.S. import shares above, and you’ll see that if 7% of imports from Asia ex-China are due to re-exporting, that would only shave 1.7 percentage points off of Asia ex-China’s share — only a fraction of the 4 percentage point increase in U.S. imports from that region since 2019." It refutes this point like 2 minutes in.
The article does nothing to refute the case, because Noah Smith has engaged in a little bit of sleight of hand in that section you quoted.
The 7% number is from 2018 data (!) -- yet Noah is talking about "since 2019." And, looking at the graph again, the major shift occurs in 2019.
So Noah's "7%" (again, from 2018, largely before the "decoupling") is totally irrelevant, and he handwaves away the possibility that China has since done an increasing amount of exporting to SE Asia for re-export to the USA.
I've heard Altman (on the Lex Friedman podcast) and Sundar Pichai (on the Hard Fork podcast) say things to this degree. The thing that OpenAI really managed to crack was building a great product in ChatGPT and finding a good product market fit for LLMs.
Well sure, but there still aren’t any other LLMs at the level of GPT3/3.5 let alone GPT-4. GPT3.5 just using the API returns fantastic results even without the ChatGPT interface (which isn’t terribly hard to replicate, and others have using the API).
There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that could’ve done something profound like ChatGPT if they had full access to GPT3/3.5. And honestly, OpenAI stumbled a lot with ChatGPT losing history access, showing other users’ history… but that doesn’t matter much as the underlying technology is so profound. I think this really is a case of the under-the-hood capability (GPT3/3.5/4) mattering more than productization and execution.
(Now I think there are not a ton of companies that could do what Microsoft is trying to do by expanding GPT4 to power office productivity… that is a separate thing and probably only about 3 companies could do that, at best: Microsoft, Apple, and Google… and theoretically Meta but their lack of follow through with making Metaverse useful makes me doubt it.)
Hm, I wonder how much of the API’s performance is related to training/finetuning done by OpenAI planned towards the ChatGPT product. I think the RLHF is partly product design and partly engineering.
That's a 4.47% decline year-over-year. Stock -15% YOY vs -5% for the SP500.
Unless they pivot soon, they're in deep trouble, with a declining user base (particularly young people) and a consistent loss in ad revenues. One big problem Meta has is they went "all in" on a VR bet, that isn't working.
In 'deep trouble' with 2 billion daily active users on each platform: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, resulting in the stock doubling in less than 3 months of screaming about the chorus of the end of times for Meta.
I guess betting against HN is somewhat a profitable move when everyone was scared to buy the stock at $88.
What makes you say "isn't working"? VR and the Metaverse are long term bets, they're not meant to be working yet. Far too early to write off as failures.
In the last earnings call it was reported that Facebook had just broke 2 billion MAU. The user base is inclining. Meta's family of apps' MAU increased by 4% year over year.
I think it's just the current stage of capitalism. A lot of the products that meaningfully improve people's lives have been created so now it's more profitable for companies to just start rent seeking in every place they can.
WhatsApp is becoming a super app through the buildout of business messaging. You can now do your shopping in India using the JioMart store on WhatsApp.[1]
Yeah nobody uses that. Payments is super easy to integrate because of UPI but otherwise no one is going to shop on WhatsApp and if WhatsApp gets significantly bloated people will simply move on to TG etc.
