Let me recap it for you: We live in a world where self-driving cars, which we were told for the last 15 years would solve every possible problem, from accidents to traffic to perhaps even loneliness, are going to be used to deliver hamburgers. Yeah!
Niu economi
Funny times
NVIDIA is worth 8% of the US stock market.
88% of their revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, half of it purchased by only 4 companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
These 4 companies will have spent $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in 2024 and 2025. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion. Funny times.
The Valley by the decade
The 1990s were the decade of E-commerce! The idea was that you could — and thus should! — sell everything online, starting from books (Amazon) and Pez Dispensers (eBay), or focusing on diapers (Diapers.com) and dog food (Pets.com). Own the vertical!, they said. Strangely, those who chose to focus on diapers or dog food did not come up on top.
The 2000s were the decade of blogs, the open web — and Google, Larry and Sergey’s lofty goal being to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Overall, they were a time of optimism and progress. Don’t do evil may seem quaint now, pronounced by what was to become the Californian Stasi, but many of us believed it.
The 2010s were the decade in which things took a dark turn. The idea was now to organise all the world’s information about us, and then pester us with non-stop nonsense targeted advertising (Google and Facebook). They were also the decade in which Silicon Valley took on the real world, with Airbnb, Uber, Bird and Lime — and influenced elections!
The 2020s look like the decade in which tech companies will take the Valley’s favourite literary genre, the dystopian novel, and use those smart words of warning as if they were a how-to manual, the blueprint upon which to build a Fake New World, with the awkward push for the metaverse first, and now the so-called generative artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT sorpasserà Google…
Un paio di anni fa, non uno ma due amici mi scrissero, fra il preoccupato e l’eccitato — perché eccitati, poi? — che ChatGPT avrebbe presto sorpassato Google. Davvero?, fu la mia risposta fra il sorpreso, il dubbioso e l’imbarazzato. Imbarazzato perché inizio ad avere una certa età, e sono sempre più scettico riguardo le cazzate sulle new new things, le rivoluzioni, il nulla sarà più come prima etc. Stamattina ho visto questo.
Mi sa che avevo ragione.
