3 ms·

Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?

wkat4242 2y ago
No I don't actually. I just looked it up, and I see I was backpacking the world at that time so it didn't really register. But I see it went very very wrong when the dotcom bubble burst. In Holland we had a similar thing happen (albeit at a much smaller scale) to the company World Online. They did an IPO and their stock tumbled into nothing. The CEO sold all her shares just before the IPO and was later challenged in court (though was acquitted I believe) It's a good point indeed. I forgot about all those (mainly due to my different focus in those days).
- frognumber 2y ago
  It didn't go very wrong for the purchasing party -- AOL: * AOL was very, very overvalued. * They bought a company with real worth. * When the .com bubble popped, they were left with Time Warner. It'd be a dead company without it. On the other hand, it did very badly by Time Warner and its investors. There are two possibilities here: 1. AI is gold, and NVidia is leading AI. 2. AI is a bubble, and NVidia is overvalued by a factor of 10-100x. In the case of #2, buying Intel converts funny money into real value, gives Intel engineering capability it so obviously now lacks to continue to push x86 forward, and gives NVidia engineers many, many decades of x86 R&D. In that sense, it can be thought of as a hedge on AI not succeeding (or someone overtaking NVidia in AI). In the case of #1, it either gives NVidia huge marketing and distribution channels, an end-to-end platform play, and a bunch of supporting IP, while chaining it to an obsolete corporation with 5x the employees. It also allows NVidia to do some antitrusty things by connecting with the dominant CPU platform (e.g. making iGPU chips, and various sorts of hybrids where Intel + Nvidia work best together).
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Does anyone here still believe in #1 though? I mean, AI is a nice development. But the hype started by ChatGPT doesn't really carry over to all aspects of the industry as much as it's said to. It's really good at some things, and really sucks at some others even though it pretends to do them. It's "Gold" for the things it's good at. It's a bubble waiting to burst for the others. PS: I wouldn't consider intel obsolete. Imagine they stopped making their CPUs and chipsets tomorrow. Society would be really really screwed. Sure there's AMD but they can't handle all that. They're managing things more traditionally, sure. But they're also in a much more settled market.
    - frognumber 2y ago
      I have no idea about the future progression of AI, and anyone who claims they do is either lying to you or to themselves. I'll also mention: - ChatGPT was a lot smarter for the types of things I'd like to use it for before the "safety" work. The efforts to make it never say anything offensive also made it a lot dumber. I saw a paper to that effect too. Perhaps some of that was a result of optimizations to shrink the model and make it more efficient (but then I'd expect GPT-4 to be smarter). - GPT3, which was an autocomplete, could do some things well the modern chatbot-ified models can't. - I have a lot of practice making the models smarter by having them check their own work, vote, etc. I have no idea how high the ceiling is. I might be a few inches away, or it might be the sky. That's a good time to hedge. Probably "legacy" was a better word than "obsolete." My language was sloppy.

No I don't actually. I just looked it up, and I see I was backpacking the world at that time so it didn't really register. But I see it went very very wrong when the dotcom bubble burst. In Holland we had a similar thing happen (albeit at a much smaller scale) to the company World Online. They did an IPO and their stock tumbled into nothing. The CEO sold all her shares just before the IPO and was later challenged in court (though was acquitted I believe) It's a good point indeed. I forgot about all those (mainly due to my different focus in those days).

frognumber 2y ago
It didn't go very wrong for the purchasing party -- AOL: * AOL was very, very overvalued. * They bought a company with real worth. * When the .com bubble popped, they were left with Time Warner. It'd be a dead company without it. On the other hand, it did very badly by Time Warner and its investors. There are two possibilities here: 1. AI is gold, and NVidia is leading AI. 2. AI is a bubble, and NVidia is overvalued by a factor of 10-100x. In the case of #2, buying Intel converts funny money into real value, gives Intel engineering capability it so obviously now lacks to continue to push x86 forward, and gives NVidia engineers many, many decades of x86 R&D. In that sense, it can be thought of as a hedge on AI not succeeding (or someone overtaking NVidia in AI). In the case of #1, it either gives NVidia huge marketing and distribution channels, an end-to-end platform play, and a bunch of supporting IP, while chaining it to an obsolete corporation with 5x the employees. It also allows NVidia to do some antitrusty things by connecting with the dominant CPU platform (e.g. making iGPU chips, and various sorts of hybrids where Intel + Nvidia work best together).
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Does anyone here still believe in #1 though? I mean, AI is a nice development. But the hype started by ChatGPT doesn't really carry over to all aspects of the industry as much as it's said to. It's really good at some things, and really sucks at some others even though it pretends to do them. It's "Gold" for the things it's good at. It's a bubble waiting to burst for the others. PS: I wouldn't consider intel obsolete. Imagine they stopped making their CPUs and chipsets tomorrow. Society would be really really screwed. Sure there's AMD but they can't handle all that. They're managing things more traditionally, sure. But they're also in a much more settled market.
  - frognumber 2y ago
    I have no idea about the future progression of AI, and anyone who claims they do is either lying to you or to themselves. I'll also mention: - ChatGPT was a lot smarter for the types of things I'd like to use it for before the "safety" work. The efforts to make it never say anything offensive also made it a lot dumber. I saw a paper to that effect too. Perhaps some of that was a result of optimizations to shrink the model and make it more efficient (but then I'd expect GPT-4 to be smarter). - GPT3, which was an autocomplete, could do some things well the modern chatbot-ified models can't. - I have a lot of practice making the models smarter by having them check their own work, vote, etc. I have no idea how high the ceiling is. I might be a few inches away, or it might be the sky. That's a good time to hedge. Probably "legacy" was a better word than "obsolete." My language was sloppy.