527: Zuck Trying to Osborne Apple, Orion AR, Should Nvidia Buy Perplexity?, Trader Turns $88k Into $415m and Loses It All, Curing Diabetes, Microsoft, Samsung, Semiconductors, and Leonard Cohen
"the untamable spirit of liberty"
When one is enthralled with the beauty on the surface of the ocean, the immensity of its depths can never be discerned.
—Wu Hsin
✈️🧳🇺🇸🦅🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🍻 Guess who’s back! 👋
My week in the US with the OSV team was amazing. I had been looking forward to it for months and it not only exceeded my expectations but may have been the highlight of my year—possibly even one of the best weeks of my life!
I won’t go on and on about it because I realize it’ll remain kind of abstract if you weren’t there — but I’ll just say that it was incredibly invigorating to spend a week hanging out until 3 AM every day with top-quality people who care deeply and are, in the words of a friend who was there, “alive” and “pursue their interests deeply”.
We had a lot of fun and generated many ideas and projects!
It was cool to see people who specialize in very different things — from transcranial stimulation, microbiology, studying ancient texts, designing and manufacturing complex prosthetics, studying data storage into DNA, using 3D printing to make better magnets for power plants and transportation, artists, musicians, philosophy, writers, linguists, filmmakers, etc — yet despite what could seem like a mess of incompatible fields, what actually happened was that people used their expertise and different perspectives to help each other and suggest novel solutions to their problems.
The common thread of high agency and passion for creation brought everyone together. I suspect many long-lasting friendships began last week, and existing ones were deepened.
What more can you ask for?
🗣️🎙️🏛️🏺📜 🏹⚔️🦅⚖️ Speaking of ancient texts, I met Alex Petkas for the first time in person last week, and it was great.
He told us the latest about the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, and how a multidisciplinary team is using particle accelerators, AI, and good ol’ human ingenuity to try to decipher them and thus vastly expand our knowledge of antiquity — we have only a small fraction 🤏 of the texts that existed at the time. There could be masterpieces waiting to be discovered!:
If you want an idea of what we talked about late into the night, check out the podcast we did together:
Also, go straight to the source and subscribe to Cost of Glory. ⬅ 🔔
🛀💭 🌎 ❤️😃💔😟 Is it possible to envision a world where almost everyone loves their work?
For most of human history, the vast majority of people simply did whatever they had to do to survive.
Thanks to the wealth generated by scientific and industrial revolutions, our civilization has become more complex and the number of possibilities has exploded. More people have the freedom to choose occupations aligned with their interests.
Until the Industrial Revolution, about 80% of humanity worked in food production in some capacity, and choices were limited for the rest — craftsmen, shopkeepers, stable workers, scribes, soldiers, government officials, etc.
Despite massive progress, I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that today only a minority of people do something they *truly* love. When asked about it, they often talk about what a privilege it is to be able to make a living from doing something they genuinely enjoy doing and care about. If they had been born 500 or 5000 or 50,000 years ago, it likely wouldn’t have been possible.
But what if loving your work was the norm rather than the exception?
Will we continue moving in that direction? What would the world look like if most people could do something they loved doing? What would be the most popular professions? What would truly satisfy my neighbors and the strangers I see at the store? 🤔
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
🤓 🕶️ 👓 Meta’s Orion: Is Zuck Trying to Osborne Apple? + Parallel Paths to AR 🍎📲 🥽
While I was traveling, much was said about Meta’s Orion AR glasses. Opinions vary, but it’s clearly the most buzz for a new Meta product in a long time. I thought I’d think it through with you, and figure out what it may mean for the augmented reality (AR) market, particularly for Meta and Apple.
First, the demo was very cool, and I think Meta and Zuck did a great job of making it alive by making it *less* polished than Apple’s pre-recorded videos.
Doing it live always adds something intangible to demos, they feel more risky. I also think Zuck’s ongoing image makeover is going well. Inviting a bunch of tech commentators and YouTube creators was a great idea too. When you know you’ve got something special, you may as well leverage everyone else’s audience and goodwill to get the message out.
Where I disagree with some people, though, is on what it means for Apple.
Orion’s cool, but the consensus seems to be that it won’t be available in stores for regular schmucks like me for something like 5 years, maybe more. 🛒
Apple’s Vision Pro isn’t as cool as Orion, but it’s shipping today.
People are comparing apples and oranges (🍎vs🍊).
Apple likely has similar prototypes in its R&D lab, but we won’t see anything until it’s ready to ship. Steve Jobs always wanted to show things people could buy, both to avoid hurting the sales of current products (the Osborne effect), to motivate his team to focus on shipping (“real artists ship” — you don’t get that sweet dopamine just for showing a prototype to the world), and because it’s hard to make a big media splash, so make sure to leverage these events to make the cash register sing 💵🎶
Why do I think it’s likely that Apple has similar prototypes in a vault at the back of a R&D lab somewhere?
The Vision Pro gives us some clues.
That headset isn’t VR-centric, even though it can do that — most if its very expensive and advanced technologies aim to make it an AR device, essentially simulating Orion-style AR glasses inside of a VR headset. It’s the state of the art for what can be made commercially right now.
If Apple believed that VR was the main thing, they could’ve made a much cheaper Vision Pro that had great VR and passable AR like the Meta Quest (good enough to not bump into things and see people around you as you talk to them). They could’ve competed more directly with Quest and focused on being a higher-end version, with lower latency, higher-resolution screens, more compute power, etc.
But they clearly think that AR will be bigger than VR and are optimizing for it, including with their software which has had AR APIs long before the Vision Pro.
If the future is AR glasses, Apple is well-positioned on the ecosystem front — some compute and connectivity could be offloaded to the iPhone, movement detection to the Apple Watch, sound to the AirPods, etc. This low-level integration between the various pieces of the puzzle will be hard to replicate for Meta.
So why did Zuck show a prototype years before launch?
I have a few guesses:
Trying to Osborne Apple. While the Vision Pro seems like a commercial flop so far, this puts further pressure on it. Some casual observers will think “oh, these glasses seem really cool, I’ll just wait for those instead”, possibly not realizing how far away they are. At the same time, this is different enough from the Quest headsets (VR-centric) that they aren’t Osborning themselves.
Show something cool to investors. After spending gazillion bux on metaverse stuff without much to show for it, many investors were starting to write off that investment. This will probably get them excited again with the possibility that Meta could own a big platform similarly to Apple and Google for mobile.
Talent recruiting. In the same way that showing cutting-edge and exciting AI models or bragging about how many GPUs you have can help recruit AI talent, showing cool hardware may attract AR/VR/hardware talent to Meta.
Branding. This can be seen as part of the ‘Facebook and Zuck 2016’ transformation to ‘Meta and Zuck 2024’. This certainly helps, in the same way that Microsoft Research used to do all kinds of cool demos (most of which never ended up shipping). I suspect that Meta will ship — having the founder very focused on those products helps keep up the urgency — but some of the principles behind showing cool toys from the R&D division are the same.
A lot of this is speculation, reading between the lines, and good ol’ tea leaves, but I think the odds are pretty decent that if we could have full access to both Meta and Apple’s design studios and R&D labs, we may find very similar projects headed in a common direction and at similar levels of maturity. Meta may be further ahead in some areas, and Apple in others, but I doubt either of them is years ahead of the other.
If anything, Apple has the advantage of decades of experience making physical products at scale and to high levels of quality. Meta is the challenger with something to prove — which may be why they decided to give us a tour of the kitchen halfway through the recipe. 👩🏻🍳
🤖🫲💰 Should Nvidia Buy Perplexity? 🤔
This may be an idea out of left field, but I was thinking about Perplexity and how much I like it as a product.
My personal preference is for them to stay independent and keep doing their own thing because the world gets a little boring when the same few Big Tech companies own everything and their increasingly bureaucratic cultures ruin good services/products (non-core projects usually don’t get too much love)…
BUT
*If* someone were to buy Perplexity, I think I’d rather it be Nvidia than anyone else.
Apple would make sense, especially if their Google Search TAC deal — which is basically a way for Google to bribe Apple into not competing with them, and for Apple to get a gazillion dollars without having to do anything other than change a few default settings in Safari — gets further eroded and blocked by regulators.
Nvidia has been trying to get into software and services to diversify. They have GeForce Now, Omniverse, a self-driving car stack, and all kinds of models and services…
Having another big consumer-facing service that highlights the power of AI — in a way that is model-agnostic and rides on top of everyone else’s investments — would be a good optionality play. If it becomes huge and gains market share against Google, it could move the needle, but even if it doesn’t, it can be a showcase for Nvidia’s own models and technology (seed Perplexity with the latest hardware, fine-tuning models, etc).
🗣️🗣️🗣️ Dwarkesh Patel talks to Dylan Patel and Jon from Asianometry about AI, Semiconductors, GPU Geopolitics, and Energy Scaling 🐜🔥🏗️🔌⚡️
This was so much fun. If you’re a bit of a nerd for the giant challenges facing the continued scaling of AI models as well as the geopolitical risks around China and Taiwan, this is for you.
Both Jon and Dylan are great. Dylan goes on some particularly epic rolls that I think I need to re-listen to.
I highly recommend this one:
🎧 Dylan Patel & Jon (Asianometry) – How the Semiconductor Industry Actually Works (this link has the video, audio, and transcript — anything you want!)
Also check out Asianometry, a great source of rabbit hole dives! 🕳️🐇
And SemiAnalysis to learn WAY more about semiconductors.
🚀💰💰💰 Trader turns $88k into $415m in less than two years… and then loses it all 📉💣💸😬
This is CRAZY:
According to the claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court, DeVocht was a small, part-time investor with a portfolio of mainly Tesla stocks and derivatives that was worth $88,000 at 2019 year-end. [...]
"By the end of February 2020, the indicated value of his securities portfolio was approximately $5.5 million CAD. By the end of June 2020, when he was 30 years old, the indicated value ... was approximately $26 million CAD, and rising rapidly." [...]
By April 2021, DeVocht's net worth had grown to $186 million, according to the claim.
By November of the same year, his securities portfolios were worth $415 million.
I don’t even trust myself to calculate the CAGR of turning $88k into $415m in such a short time!
With such a ridiculous homerun, humility would dictate that luck is bound to run out and that taking a lot of chips off the table and diversifying into other assets is the wise thing to do.
But pride goeth before destruction:
By October 2022, Tesla shares were in sharp decline, and DeVocht's investment holding company was forced to sell shares to repay loans from his RBC margin account.
"In time, the plaintiffs' security holdings were worth nothing," states the claim.
Yikes 😧
He’s now suing RBC for providing “inadequate advice” and “financial planning”.
🍁 Canada vs USA 🦅
The spread is larger than I expected.
There was a brief moment around 2010-2011 when Canada did better — if you look at a chart of oil prices and of the exchange rate between the USD and CAD you’ll see why — but since then the spread has widened.
🧪🔬 Liberty Labs 🧬 🔭
🍌 ☢️ Radiation Dose Chart ⚛️
Big numbers and esoteric units of measure quickly become meaningless to non-expert, which is why I love this chart.
The main thing to understand is how the different-colored blocks scale (ie. all the blue blocks combined fit into three small green blocks, all the green blocks combined add up to 7.5 orange blocks..).
Note how two blue blocks is eating one banana (because of the slightly radioactive potassium).
Here’s the source of this XKCD classic from 2011.
🍾 Science FTW: Stem cells reverse a woman’s type 1 diabetes! 🧫👩🔬
I love this:
A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body. [...]
James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”
They took some of the patient’s own cells, reprogrammed them to be pluripotent, and then:
The researchers then used the chemically induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to generate 3D clusters of islets. [...]
In June 2023, in an operation that lasted less than half an hour, they injected the equivalent of roughly 1.5 million islets into the woman’s abdominal muscles — a new site for islet transplants. Most islet transplants are injected into the liver, where the cells cannot be observed. But by placing them in the abdomen, the researchers could monitor the cells using magnetic resonance imaging, and potentially remove them if needed.
🇰🇷🐜 Samsung Apologizes for Falling Behind on AI, Not Interested in Spinning-Off Foundry ❤️🩹
Not something you see every day:
Samsung’s vice chairman and head of its semiconductor business, Jun Young-hyun, apologized in a public letter Tuesday, saying the company was failing to meet expectations.
“We have caused concerns about our technical competitiveness, with some talking about the crisis facing Samsung,” Jun said. He said Samsung would improve its technology and revamp its organizational culture where needed. [...]
Samsung’s share price has dropped by around 24% since the beginning of this year, while shares of two rival makers of high-bandwidth memory—South Korea’s SK Hynix and Micron Technology of the U.S.—have gained more than 20%. TSMC’s shares have jumped about 70% this year.
The divergence reflects who is dominating AI-related hardware. [...]
Samsung on Tuesday acknowledged delays in bringing the latest version of high-bandwidth memory, HBM3E, to major customers.
They have been missing the AI boat, to some extent, despite having a lot of the pieces of the puzzle to be one of the main players.
They don’t seem interested in spinning off their foundry business:
Asked if Samsung was considering carving out the chip manufacturing business called foundry or its System LSI logic chip designing business, Lee told Reuters: "We are hungry to grow the business. Not interested in spinning (them) off."
Samsung claims to have a plan to overtake TSMC by 2030, but I’ll be very surprised if they can pull it off — unless TSMC stumbles badly, or China invades Taiwan.
🇲🇽 Foxconn is Building Nvidia Superchip Facility in Mexico 🐜🛠️👨🏻🔧📦
Speaking of the chip supply chain:
Electronics manufacturing group Foxconn is to build the world’s largest factory making Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence servers in Mexico, in a stark illustration of how global technology supply chains are decoupling from China.
The plant in the central Mexican city of Guadalajara will assemble GB200 Blackwell AI servers [...]
There was “crazy” demand for the Blackwell platform
I’ll keep an eye on other parts of the supply chain moving to Mexico. They may not get leading-edge fabs anytime soon, but there are many other parts of the process which could move out of Asia.
🔐 Microsoft Goes All In on Security 🏴☠️🔍
Microsoft now has 34,000 full-time engineers working on securing its products, the company said on Monday, and has tasked other company leaders with reducing vulnerabilities. Microsoft also said it began an internal program in July to teach all of its employees security skills, and that all employees will be evaluated on prioritizing cybersecurity as part of their performance reviews going forward.
34,000!
That’s kind of bonkers. They have 228,000 employees, so that’s about 15% of the total (and a higher % of engineers).
It feels like maybe they counted anyone doing anything related to security, but still, Crowdstrike has less than 10k employees total (and not all of these are engineers)…
🎨 🎭 Liberty Studio 👩🎨 🎥
🎶 The Partisan by Leonard Cohen 🎶
This song always makes me a bit emotional. It is so well written and performed.
The video above is an edit made by a fan, using footage from multiple live performances.
I encourage you to listen and pay close attention to the lyrics. Some verses are in French, but the English verses are mostly a direct translation, so you’re not missing a part of the story even if you don’t understand French — focus more on the way they are sung and the emotion in his voice.
Some context:
"The Partisan" was originally a French song titled "La Complainte du partisan," composed in 1943 by Russian-born French singer-songwriter Anna Marly with lyrics by Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, a leader of the French Resistance.
In 1944, American lyricist Hy Zaret translated the song into English, taking some liberties with the original lyrics to create a more poetic adaptation3. This English version became known as "The Partisan."I think it can be seen as about something specific — WWII and the resistance to Nazi occupiers — but also as something more universal.
The human need for freedom, the untamable spirit of liberty (I want to write it with a capital letter to highlight that it is a noble idea, but that may be confusing) and how far we can go to protect those we love.
Can feel the excitement from your retreat. Can’t wait to see what emerges.
Excellent post. OSV sounds absolutely lit up. Jim has been a great inspiration to so many people. And I’m so glad that a bunch of you younger folks are moving forward so creatively and dynamically.
PS. Thanks for turning me onto perplexity.AI. It’s so much better than any others I’ve tried.