This is just wrong. VC is not PE. The Vet example is really a bad trope. For every bad deal there are many others you never hear about. PE firms are not making money by simply buying everything up. The business still has to maintain and grow.
VC is most definitely a form of Private Equity, though it's not the limited-partnership deal model that we often see in SaaS, or Vet Clinics, or Housing, etc. Yes, they need to grow but PE firms don't invest directly. They have funds with relatively short time horizons that want 2 things: 1. cashflow during the fund lifetime and 2. equity growth so they can sell the assets in the fund prior to the end. PE firms will sometime flip portfolio companies to their next fund but this is frowned upon because the investors are sophisticated and recognize the valuation conflict of interest. The PE business depends on repeat business for selling their funds; the best are always over subscribed and never go shopping for investors, while the rest are marginal forever.
Did not read all of it. Yes, it is a form of private equity. Of course. You missed the context. The post kept saying VC is buying a vet shop. In that context they meant private equity. VC is not the same as what they meant to say, PE.
It depends how we are looking at the business. Absolutely at the end of the day a company is profitable or not but when thinking about inference, which is largely a commodity these days, you would first think about the marginal cost of it. That is your corner stone of the business. We have pretty clear indication that largely API tokens are being sold above the marginal cost. For especially a brand new business that’s critical and something that many unicorns never even hit.
Your right that all other costs are critical to measuring the profitability of the business but for such a young industry that’s the unknown. Does training get cheaper do we hit a theoretical limit on training. Are there further optimizations to be had.
You don’t have large capex in an industrial and then in year one argue that the business is doomed when your selling the product above the marginal cost but you have not recouped costs yet that have been capitalized.
They are and they are convinced the cost is not truly baked in because you need to factor in all the training and R&D. It’s a mixture of folks that 1) are convinced AI is terrible, 2) hate Sam Altman and 3) don’t understand how business price products.
We don’t have clear evidence either way but it heavily leans to API pricing at least covering inference cost. Models these days have less and less differentiation and for API use there must be some thought to compete on cost but it’s not going to be winner take all. They leap frog each other with each new model.
Oftentimes comically lower. I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.
I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.
> I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
This comment seems a bit odd to me. I Google about it and learned (from various sources):
> 45 mph (72 km/h) in downtown Chicago, where all the major interstates merge
This excludes construction or work zones.
That seems pretty reasonable. I've seen a few places in the US where several major interstates merge and the post speed limit is quite low -- 45-55 mph.
Maybe it exists but I wish there was more heavy hitting articles/research on this. I feel like an absolute grumpy old man but it feels drastically different compared to my younger years driving and I am only 40. These days I rarely see police on the side of the road ticketing and when I do it’s usually on a highway. Never do I see people getting pulled over in city streets.
My thesis has been an uptick on BS calls. Said differently the bad neighborhoods have gotten worse and funding for police is mismanaged.
Absolutely. They shut down for COVID and never came back.
A big part of traffic stops was to find weed and trade up for an arrest. With legalization, they’ve shifted to camera work, which has gotten even bigger with Flock.
For me the evidence is I have completed side projects I never would have before. I also recently started building a game that I had put off for years. At work I am closing more features than historically and at the end of the day not as fatigued. It’s only my experience and everyone’s is going to be different.
I don’t think anyone is blaming but it’s hard to ignore the progress we are seeing and thinks that these workflows will not be the norm in instead of the exception.
I mean we can always wish but I think Thi’s has been the major gripe for a number of years. They could run macOS today in an iPad. Alternatively they could at the very least copy some of the basic workflows in iOS but it’s just different enough that even with a keyboard the iPad feels off compared to a Mac.
Surprising there are not more solutions here. We have seen these style of drones for a number of years. I guess it’s a hard problem in general but I also wonder if part of it is simply the historically entrenched defense industry.
Part of it has to be owed to how tactically potent drone swarms are, as a means of asymmetric conflict. Even the best layered defensed are limited by magazine depth, whereas attack drones can be sent in theoretically unlimited waves.
Ukraine has a pretty good track record of taking down drone waves. US had plenty of warning of this tactic and years of examples of successful defense. I’m surprised we’re not seeing footage of thousands of loitering drone killers waiting for a target. Maybe the us just can’t do low cost high volume anything in the military.
The solutions already exist and have been proven on the battlefield. Peacetime military forces are just slow to adapt, as there are no real incentives to adapt quickly.
Drones such as the Shahed are little more than cheap mediocre cruise missiles. Because they are cheap, the enemy can launch them in large numbers. You counter them by detecting them early and then using plenty of cheap mediocre anti-aircraft weapons. Mostly guns and interceptor drones (=cheap mediocre anti-aircraft missiles).
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