Again, this is a misleading argument. The low carbon footprint in France is the result form investments of the past, while Germany relied on coal and lignite for a long time and only started to transition to carbon-neutral renewables much latter. The result was substantial drop of CO2 emissions form the grid which will continue. You can see it over time here: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/co2_emissions/chart.ht...
Germany started out with a high amount of coal and lignite (as a domestic source of energy with many jobs depending on it). The carbon footprint dropped with the rollout of renewables according and will be very low once the transition to renewables is completed. It makes no sense to compare it to France, which switched to a nuclear a long time ago. This is relatively easy to understand in my opinion.
Shouldn't this so-called "transition" should be monotonic? The derivative of energy price should be always negative if you're right. It's not. It's very, very, very much not.
If the end state is very cheap energy, why is it the opposite of cheap now?
Look: the "energy transition" is not working. It's done the opposite of work. You have to concede to reality at some point.
I'd advise you take a look at some of Musk's companies:
- Tesla is the top seller of EVs in the US, beating century-old companies.
- SpaceX has left public institutions like NASA and ESA in the dust despite their vastly bigger budgets
- Although it joined late, xAI is now firmly in the top 4 of AI companies worldwide (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI)
What's the common element between these successes?
Yeah the anti-Elon sentiment on HN seems unique to this platform and maybe reddit. If you go onto any college campus, you'll see a variety of students wearing Tesla or SpaceX merch. Neuralink has a 7 or 8 stage, highly competitive interview process, and most of his companies are internationally recognized and careers with them are highly sought after.
I suspect a lot of people are just upset they got rejected
That Elon Musk let the competent people do their job and didn't meddle too much? Did you know that Cybertruck, Starship and Twitter are the projects where Musk has let his competence "shine" the most?
It's been long-since established that the only reason early Musk companies survived was employees learning how to manage up and manipulate Musk into doing the right things early on...
I'm not OP but that seems like a pretty reasonable assumption. LLM dominance is basically a US thing (Europe is handicapped by the EU and China is handicapped by hardware), and there are only a few companies that are actually competitive in LLM's (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Meta, Anthropic). I think top 5 is a safer bet but top four isn't an unreasonable thing to say confidently
xAI has the largest GPU cluster for AI training in the world, and they regularly produce top-ranking models. Companies like mistral produce clever models but they’re functionally just not on the level of things like Grok
Russians would like to have Ukraine in their sphere of influence, but after bungled invasion in 2022 and subsequent grinding war, Ukrainians will go out of their way to be outside of this Russian world. I think we are talking about decades before normalization of relationship between Ukraine and Russia.
> If I were to steelman the Sutton perspective, it would be...
I don't find it very courteous to say that you're steelmanning someone's argument. Sutton is certainly smart enough to have steelmanned his argument himself.
Steelmanning : do it in your head, don't say it!
Great article!
It seems like the whole industry has overfitted to the System designs interviews of FAANG, thus focused on extreme scaling need that few companies actually have.
Anyone here play the RPG Dink Smallwood as a kid? There was a side quest where you hit (holy) ducks with your sword so hard that they cook: https://youtu.be/zWxXWG-U0Uo
reply