Britain didn't abandon it's space programme. It abandoned a launch rocket programme though. That was over 50 years ago and the rocket was less capable and more expensive than alternatives at the time.

What alternatives? By your logic only one country should have a launch rocket. Thankfully that’s not a world we live in because that makes no sense. But I’m happy for you if you can be content with a space programme without a rocket, that’s a nice low bar to live with, you can basically never miss.

The article is right that open models already compete well with the frontier labs, and that the main thing holding big corps back from switching is fear of China.

I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.

Nvidia has to balance relations with their biggest customers. So that’s a careful decision to be made by them.

In other news, the gold rush has entered a new phase as miners pivot to selling shovels.

For now. SpaceX will be acquiring Tesla as soon as Elon gets around to it.

It's circular when money flows from A to B and then back from B to A again.

This is a series of transactions in which money flows from Google to SpaceX. There is no flow of money from SpaceX to Google. So it's not a circle.

More to the point, allegations of circular financing are about following cash. When NVIDIA invests in a company so they can buy NVIDIA chips, that raises a unique set of questions distinct from other types of conflict of interest. Affiliated parties doing business, as is the case between Google and SpaceX, has its own host of conflict-of-interest concerns. But they're distinct from those that arise in circular transactions.

I saw one useful feature added, which was support for lower resistance tips. You can also get it to report on the input voltage which is marginally useful if running on battery.

Most of it seems to be people having fun. Animations, enabling Bluetooth, web interfaces over aforementioned Bluetooth, etc. That's all pretty cool and hacker news is hardly the place to question why you'd want to do it, but I'll admit I find the number of people interested in hacking on a soldering iron a bit of a surprise!

Most large companies have the CEO answerable to a board elected by shareholders. CEO still has a lot of power but there are some checks and balances.

Zuck and Musk are somewhat exceptional in being dictator-CEOs.

Good news - Anthropic will pay you £600k to build the AI which replaces you.

Drag it out for a couple of years and you'll be set.

If you pay for any tier of copilot then you will get unlimited access to the auto complete.

If you don't use agents it's possible you'll not notice much of a change to copilot

I cancelled my autopilot subscription because Microsoft communicated to me that I would have to pay metered use in addition to the flat rate which I already pay. You're telling me this was misinfo? Microsoft actually is not starting to meter usage of autocomplete by GitHub Copilot? Why did they send this message then?

Capital is cheap for Google because they are making a lot of money and they have very little debt.

They are considered a very low risk and can borrow for a long time at low rates. They recently issued a 100 year bond.

They seem to have decided to issue equity rather than borrow more. This is probably so that they can maintain the ability to borrow very cheaply in future if necessary.

Sorry I am not buying into that. In your logic they should issue more debt. Their operating margin is lowest compared to Microsoft and meta. If oil goes to 200 tomorrow their profit margin will be squeezed most along with meta. (Ads) Backlog in cloud does not mean shit imo. They can slow roll it. Matter of fact half of that backlog seems backed by anthropic anyway. So imagine anthropic not making money because of a down turn and going down. Who will pay the backlog? This is exactly why they are diluting their stock instead of issuing more debt, they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket and want to retain capital for such downturn. That's how I read it.

They've already issued $80B in 6 markets/currencies. How much more do you think they can raise at a decent rate? I think they might issue more next year.

Issuing new equity might be a financial engineering experiment. No other mag7 has tried it. Plus they got BH name on the plate.