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They likely haven't put even close to enough money behind it. This isn't a unique situation - you'll see in corporate america a lot of CEOs who say "we are inve
by danielmarkbruce 2y ago
They likely haven't put even close to enough money behind it. This isn't a unique situation - you'll see in corporate america a lot of CEOs who say "we are investing in X" and they really believe they are. But the required size is billions (like, hundreds of really insanely talented engineers being paid 500k-1m, lead by a few being paid $3-10m), and they are instead investing low 10's of millions.
They can't bring themselves to put so much money into it that it would be an obvious fail if it didn't work.
- spacebanana7 2y agoGiven how the big tech companies are buying hundreds of thousands of GPUs at huge prices, most of which is pure margin, I wonder whether it'd make sense for Microsoft to donate a couple billion to make the market competitive. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-bought-twice-as-many-nvidia-hopper-gpus-as-other-big-tech-companies-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-bought-...
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoThe big players are all investing in building chips themselves. And probably not putting enough money behind it... it takes enormous courage as a CEO to walk into a boardroom and say "I'm going to spend $50 billion, I think it will probably work, I'm... 60% certain".
- spacebanana7 2y agoYou're probably correct, but I feel like I have to raise the issue of Zuckerberg spending a comparable amount on VR which was much more speculative.
- hnlmorg 2y agoZuckerberg owns Facebook though. It’s a lot easier to make bold decisions when you’re the majority shareholder. Edit: though emphasis should be put on “easIER” because it’s still far from easy.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoThis. Without knowing the guy, he seems to be a) very comfortable taking a lot of risk and b) it's actually not that risky for him to blow $20 billion. There aren't many cases like this. Larry/Sergey were more than comfortable risking $10 billion here and there.
- wavemode 2y agoZuck is founder and owner. So is Huang (Nvidia CEO). They call all the shots. Whereas AMD's CEO was appointed, and can be fired. Huge difference in their risk appetite. I'm reminded of pg's article "founder mode": https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html I think some companies simply aren't capable of taking big risks and innovating in big ways, for this reason.
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- DanielHB 2y agoIt amazes me how much these companies make actually gets spent on R&D, you see the funnel charts on reddit and I am like what the hell. Microsoft only spends ~6bn USD on R&D with a total 48bn of revenue and 15bn in profits? What the hell is going on, they should be able to keep an army of PhDs doing pointless research even if only one paper in 10 years comes to a profitable product. But instead they are cutting down workforce like there is no tomorrow... (I know, I know, market dynamics, value extraction, stock market returns)
- laweijfmvo 2y agowell, look at Meta... they're spending Billions with a capital B on stuff and they get slaughtered every earnings call because it hasn't paid off yet. if Zuckerberg wasn't the majority share holder it probably wouldn't be sustainable.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoR and D in the financial statements I've seen basically covers the entire product, engineering etc org. Lots and lots of people, but not what regular people consider RnD.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoaka "Big D, little r"
- DanielHB 2y agoI know, R&D is like that in every company. It is mostly "development" not research. What I am pointing out is that they could be doing a shit ton of research, what happened to big companies sponsoring fringe research? That used to be a thing, at Microsoft even.