5 ms·

I wish Silicon Valley wasn’t just about software, particularly adtech. Some of the most brilliant minds are working on optimizing click ratios. There is some ha

• nikanj 6y ago
  Apple: Made by Foxconn, not in the US. nVidia: Made by TSMC, not in the US. Intel and Tesla are made in the US afaik, but even the hardware startups we do have still tend to manufacture abroad.
  • jfim 6y ago
    How much of the electronics in Teslas are made in the USA though?
  • adventured 6y ago
    Apple: assembled by Foxconn. If your premise were accurate, the primary value would be in Foxconn and they'd destroy Apple by competing with them and take their $60 billion per year in profit. Most of the value is from Apple and the other component makers, not the company doing primitive assembly. Further, Foxconn makes nothing in the iPhone, so once again it's very obviously not "made by Foxconn." And that's why Foxconn gets such a tiny slice of the profit.
    • microtherion 6y ago
      There are different ways of doing outsourcing. Companies like IBM (and Dell, at one point) outsourced more and more of their value chain, until eventually all they contributed to their products was their logo. I believe Apple is trying to go down a different path, by staying involved in the minutiae of manufacturing, materials science, etc, basically everything but actually doing the manufacturing.
  • jmisavage 6y ago
    Intel is global they have fabs in Israel, Ireland, and China too. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000015142/programs.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
    • fermienrico 6y ago
      The fab in China is 20 year old tech. Primarily chipsets.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • blackrock 6y ago
    SpaceX rockets are still made in the US. Go work for them. Seriously, you do not want to be assembling iPhones. Build a robot to do that tedious work instead.
• aeternum 6y ago
  Thinking about SV as just adtech is pretty reductionist. Through another lens, SV basically solved big data and global software distribution and scalability. Big tech has contributed to both the tools that allow handling massive data streams and ML. That foundation is what is helping data-driven manufacturing companies pull ahead.
  • fermienrico 6y ago
    Agree, it is deliberately reductionist to provoke discussion about what we're not doing in SV. What do you think we should be doing in SV in addition these technologies?
  • ragebol 6y ago
    And what purpose is that big data stuff typically used for? Something related to serving ads.
    • aeternum 6y ago
      For Tesla, collecting self-driving training data as well as general fleet data. For Square, collecting transaction data to mitigate risk so that merchants worldwide can take payments. For Uber/Lyft predicting areas where there will be people needing rides to optimize transportation needs. Plenty of real-world applications other than ads.
      • deeeeplearning 6y ago
        >to optimize transportation needs. You mean to optimize Uber and Lyft revenue
      • mynameisash 6y ago
        I used to work with a guy that liked to talk about how much porn has helped technology - primarily that the desire for privacy (in viewing and purchasing) helped drive SSL adoption. I'm sure he was being facetious, but the idea that an industry like porn or ads might drive technology that then can benefit other 'worthy' industries seems obvious to me.
• s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Investment follows returns, or at least the speculative possibility of returns. Unfortunately, semiconductors, automation and manufacturing tech doesn't have the same upside capability. If you want 10-100X returns, you look elsewhere.
  • MichaelZuo 6y ago
    Well the return on investment is in fact greater than it appears for critical industries. It’s just that the upside is not entirely captured in dollars or RMB, or any other monetary currency for that matter. So when people, who have been habituated to looking at numbers denominated in dollars, think about it they effectively have blinders on.
    • s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Fair point. I explained why financial investors are not interested in those technologies. The advantage of financial returns is that they are measurable and currency broadly accepted. People have subjective opinions on what constitutes non-financial returns and you can't buy a house with happiness. If the proposal is that more people should invest time in non-monetary pursuits, then what alternative incentive motivate them. Presumably people working in ad-tech could leave retrain for another career if they wanted.
• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Very true. It would be great if these brights were working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation. Instead it’s about extracting as much as possible from existing tech. It reminds me a little of the situation with journalism and news. We have less and less reporters collecting information but more and more websites and blogs that dissect and debate the same information.
  • jdross 6y ago
    There are infinite ways to retort this, but let’s go with the easiest and point to the company literally dealing with plastics recyling and separation that raised $55 million today https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-million-for-ai-that-picks-and-sorts-recyclables/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-mi...
  • bmitc 6y ago
    > working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation Do you happen to have any helpful analysis, articles, companies, etc. along these lines? I have thought it would be a fun thing to work on, but I have struggled to know where to look and haven’t found anything particular in my searching.
    • spaetzleesser 6y ago
      When you look at recycling facilities there are people sorting the trash that goes by them on conveyor belts. To automate this you need to somehow detect what the item is and then you need to be able to handle it. Seems like a great challenge for computer vision or other sensors and then robotics. Or have robots that can find trash in oceans or on beaches and remove it. This would be super useful but unfortunately our system rewards producing trash way more than removing or even better avoiding it.
• haram_masala 6y ago
  Let’s not ignore biotech. It’s experiencing a tremendous boom in SV (and in the Berkeley-Emeryville area). It gets way less attention than Tesla and Facebook, for some reason... probably because its products and innovations are much harder to explain to the public. (Though that may be an overly cynical answer with regards to the media.)
  • godelski 6y ago
    I thought these technologies are still early and in the research phase. That would make sense for them to operate in stealth mode. Tesla sells vehicles to the public (and let's be real, Elon is a big PR department). Are these companies producing useful products currently? It seems that you're implying that they are and that we (me) aren't aware of them, so I'm curious if you could expand on this and enlighten us. I do know investors are dumping a ton of money into bio-tech, just not aware of products that are being sold.
    • haram_masala 6y ago
      Regarding products, I'd divide biotech into three very broad categories, medical, industrial, and food. Medical biotech is generally the most well-established, from Genentech (now Roche) on down to the companies being created today. Most of that work are novel and very promising therapies for a range of diseases, and diagnostics/prognostics to detect and track disease states. Both are generally at the level that's popularly known as "personalized medicine" (specific to your genome, epigenetics, and in some cases microbiome). Some of the diagnostics in development and hitting the market now would be considered sorcery just five years ago. Industrial biotech is harnessing biological and biochemical processes for industry and production. That's much smaller but growing fast; people outside the industry would be shocked to discover what chemicals and other products can and will be produced simply by fermenting various microbes. Zymergen is one company doing this, and among the biggest but by no means the only one. Recently there's been a surge in biotech-based food production. Most people don't realize that the Impossible Burger (and other products from Impossible) taste so "meaty" because it contains transgenic yeast that secretes cow heme. There are companies that are creating cow dairy products from transgenic yeast - you can actually buy their ice cream today - and companies like Memphis Meats are working on cell-cultured meat, made entirely from animal-free processes , minus the initial cell biopsy. Same with Finless Foods. All of the above are within a couple miles of each other, and these are only a few examples.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  It took 2 days for the Moderna vaccine to be created, and it still hasn't been approved in the EU. We could be doing amazing things in bio with mRNA, Crisper and deep learning but the entire thing is so wrapped up in regulation in order to protect the incumbents that it is not a space worth working in.
  • boringg 6y ago
    2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer. Building the vaccine, bio-reacting it to scale and testing across appropriate populations took a considerable amount of time. Health regulations are in place for a reason, to protect the public not to protect incumbents. Sometimes I am sure it does, other times it makes sure poor products don't go into the public market.
    • outworlder 6y ago
      > 2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer This step used to take years. And require state of the art facilities, with biohazard containment, viral samples, etc. Now? Given a virus sequence done in a lab on the other side of the planet, one can design a vaccine in a day. Sure, it took many years of research (and in coronaviruses in particular) to reach this stage, specially on how to stabilize the spike protein. But one cannot understate how amazing this new technology is. And then once done you can send the results to a machine to get it "built". At a low scale, sure, but it's still impressive. With the mRNA approach we no longer have to resort to things like using eggs to make the vaccines, we can use the cellular machinery for that. It's mind-boggling.
      • boringg 6y ago
        Oh I think you are misconstruing my statement. It is an incredible feat what’s been done on these vaccines. I assume you got youre intel from the bio eats world podcast. I’m pointing out that jumping the testing that slows the vaccine to market is a bad move.
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Hardware manufacturers have a ton of additional labor needed to produce things. The engineers can't all be paid 200k+ or they'll bleed the company dry. The highest margins are realized in markets with the lowest overhead. That's where everybody shifted to.
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    I share the lament of the GP comment. It seems like it would better if there was hardware engineering and engineers weren't paid 200k+. That the market has shifted seems like a failure of the economic system.
• javajosh 6y ago
  Money wants to make more money. And it doesn't care about national boundaries. It also isn't good at pricing catastrophes like the collapse-of-the-US-financial-system-because-of-the-collapse-of-the-electrical-grid catastrophe that we can't recover from because we can't make the transforms anymore and China won't sell them to us and our ports won't work without computers anyway, and so on.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    You're mistaken, China will most definitely sell that to us. It is in their interest. To problem is if the US will be able to afford it.
• m463 6y ago
  I also wonder about this kind of stuff. I think about things like this: What if all the wallstreet quants and sv adtech guys were all put on a nuclear fusion project? It would be like an unstoppable force against an immovable project.