"Not Even Wrong" Podcast
Investing in fundamentally new concepts and engineering practices with large impact.
China Trip. Part 4. Dynamics between large model providers and smaller vertical players. BABA, Tencent, Bytedance, BIDU are selling tokens. Smaller players are using tokens to provide services to verticals such as healthcare, finance or transport. Unisound is such a company. Smart home, transport and healthcare. Smaller, proprietary model. AI native. Started as a voice technology company in the 2010s, pivoted to BERT and now using own multi modal model. Interesting dynamics. Same in US. Stack: Energy, chips, models, verticals. Money is made in energy and chips. Investment in all parts of the stack. Can smaller players attract talent? Can they keep up with model development? China discount at least 10X. Why? Chinese entrepreneurs not ready for big leaps. More myopic.
World Labs launches Marble. Generating real world simulation in virtu for robots to train on counterfactuals. World models are one of three essential ingredients for real world AI. 1. Planning algorithms such as Q-learning. 2. Evaluation function (what is a good action? What gets high values and what not?) 3. World Model. World Labs attempts to solve the World Model problem. Real world simulation in virtu. Two key factors. One is native 3D-ness of data representation. As FeiFei Li says in there essay: “ LLMs tokenize in 1D. World Lab uses native 3D representation of data. “ 3D representation allows for more affordances. Not just what can be seen, but what action is possible? Interview. World Labs can train on 2D data and create native 3D representation of scene due to Strong mathematical connection between 2D and 3D. Enable counterfactuals for robot to learn in virtual space.
Google vs. Nvidia chip strategy example of wealth creation in tech. Google developed TPU and transformer to take advantage of matrix multiply. Nvidia garnered most of the gains. Why? Because scale is what matters. Google knew what, but Nvidia knows how to do what’s necessary to scale. Scale engineering and manufacturing with global reach of software ecosystem are the blueprint for wealth creation in tech. Tesla. Native Chinese market presence with scale manufacturing and global software reach. This combo is unique and unfair advantage of Tesla. Like Nvidia.
China Trip. Part 3. Tesla’s position in the global autonomous EV market. The God, the Better and the Ugly. 1. The God: China’s avenues are driverless and noiseless. Future. Tesla is player in this highly competitive market. Supply chain, fighting for consumers. 2. The Better: Tesla is the only company with native Chinese market presence and global software and AI reach. Chinese market presence with global brand and general software suite is unique to Tesla. 3. The Ugly: Chinese overcapacity in EV’s and hard core focus on second mover copy prowess will be a problem and must be weathered.
China Trip. Part 2. Technology and modern lifestyle of China. How do young, modern tech people live in China? One big takeaway; the Chinese entrepreneurial class is still caught in myopic behavior. Make money fast. Lack of vision for longterm disruption. Low tolerance for disruptive innovation. Copy and cut cost. Clutter culture. Little patience for slick, Western influenced minimalist tech culture. Opportunity for Tesla. Opportunity for Chinese tech entrepreneurs. No desire to reinvent things from scratch and/or go back to first principles and reinvent a space. Every time I visit China I learn a lot about myself and the society I live in. China = copy hard. US = invent hard. China = 1 to n. US = zero to one. ‘Would you hire a young person that wants to unsettle what you built?’ If you are CTO of Baidu, would you hire a person that tells you to get rid of all sensors but cameras?
China Trip. Part 1. Focus of China trip was to learn about Chinese tech culture. visit companies, talk to people, researchers. See how Chinese tech scene works, lives and plays. Key take aways. 1 Manufacturing. Large capacity for cars. 2. AI for cars and robots, mostly old school. Some players like Xiomi, Xpeng copying Tesla FSD. Looks and feels similar. 3. China tech is advanced but not threatening US. Talent in China doesn’t want to work in China. Cultural centers like the West Bund in Shanghai are harbingers of things to come. An emancipated native Chinese tech culture. It’s hard to live and compete in China. 4. Car market is segmented into China clutter and slick Western design. Most local competitors compete on the clutter dimension, few, like Xiaomi, try the Western slick. We saw restaurants that are succeeding in Neo Chinese cuisine and look. Same could happen in tech. Chinese apps are full of clutter. U/I not well developed. China is a place of better future for kids, as opposed to Western societies which are caught in suicidal culture aberration.