I, too, am terrified of better, faster, and cheaper AI models and services
Note: Today's headline is sarcastic
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
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Today in WTF: Is this legal? This was illegal. Why are we doing this? Holy shit.
Did we think all the smart devs in China were just sitting around?
Yesterday’s market selloff cost Nvidia hundreds of billions of dollars worth of market cap. Other major technology companies took blows. It was a rout.
And one that might have been overdue; Nvidia’s rapid appreciation is historical in scale, and there’s been a wee bit of hype in the market regarding AI in the last few quarters. That the Nvidia selloff was record-setting is more a factor of its previously world-straddling market cap than anything else; it hardly set a record in terms of its percentage selloff.
Today, Nvidia has to muddle along as only the third most valuable company in the world.
A good question to ask this morning is this: Did investors in U.S. tech companies with massive AI exposure expect domestic tech companies to never face a major challenge to their models and other products? It almost seems that the market thought that present and future U.S. AI dominance was so obvious that it was taken for granted — until it wasn’t.
That leads us to our second question: Did Nvidia and OpenAI bulls think that all the smart developers in China were doing nothing? Again, it almost appears that the answer to that question is yes.
While the stock market is unsettled — and everyone from my in-laws to the WSJ editorial board has a take — I think it’s worth keeping in mind a few core facts: