Inflation stays hot, AI disclosure bill, Drone warfare, defense startups & more

JCal is absent after cracking a tooth on a bison rib at the Salt Lick in Austin. The 2024 All-In Summit returns to Los Angeles on September 8 to 10, with applications open at summit.allinpodcast.co. Promised upgrades include transport to all events, concierge room booking, a full-day Sunday event, two days of content, a dinner around town and two parties. There is one ticket type, the budget is larger, and speakers will be announced in a couple of weeks.

Chamath, back from an AI conference in Paris where he held a fireside chat with Groq founder Jonathan Ross (transcribed as Grakn), says Ross separated Nvidia's strength in training from its push into inference, where the two goals compete. Ross claimed that if he deploys his roadmap he will hold about half of available inference compute by the end of next year, at lower power and higher tokens per second. These are the executive's claims as relayed, with no independent figures.

Chamath calls Nvidia's position an innovator's dilemma: it has bought up supply of high-bandwidth memory and specialized optical cables, which a differently designed inference chip avoids. He adds that, like Intel with clock speed, Nvidia defined a metric the market follows.

structural innovator's dilemma

After talking with entrepreneurs in Paris and London who describe petty crime, garbage, vandalism and drugs, Chamath concludes that major cities share a problem. He cites warnings about knife crime and being stabbed over a phone, though he never felt scared in Paris himself.

all major cities are crumbling