Conor Callanan

China’s EV Market Is Imploding Beijing’s grand ambitions threaten to take down the global car industry.

No major surprise here. >100 distinct car brands competing in basically the same market. Massive subsidies driven by provincial governments’ desires to be *the* automotive manufacturing region.

Will take serious and thoughtful intervention from the CCP to prevent a minor catastrophe here.

IMO if this doesn't raise >$500m we've passed peak bubble. The "growth" of the last couple of years is only justified by an end-goal of true AGI/ASI. If the industry doesn't jump on this they've given up on that goal and will be judged by the markets accordingly.

www.nasdaq.com/articles/met...

IMO the early indicators of a pop here will be…
- a substantial drop in the cost of GPU compute on markets like hyperbolic.ai
- wait times for gas-fired turbines going from years to months
- commercial HVAC companies forecasting a decrease in datacenter revenues

That’s extra concerning here because capital investment in GPUs depreciates particularly quickly & consistently. If revenues don’t soon explode upwards, investors (not just confined to big tech) may be left holding datacenters that they aren’t financially viable.

A great example is AWS letting Blue Owl finance/own 80% of their new $27bn datacenter in Louisiana. This kind of debt-fuelled investing is indicative of late-ish stage bubbles.

One thing that I think isn’t discussed enough in the context of AI capex spend is the HUGE involvement of private equity/credit. The Hyperscalers ™️ are leaning heavily on joint venture type partnerships to scale up investments without dirtying their balance sheets too much.

As far as I understand, this “image encoding” is also something like a much richer text embedding. Curious as to whether this could open up some new avenues for semantic analysis of more complex/abstract textual data.

Some really cool potential use cases here like compressing session contexts or improving the feasibility of using LLMs for retrieval across large quantities of unstructured textual data.

Very interesting paper from DeepSeek. In training a 3B OCR model, they discovered that its encoder could be used to “compress” textual information into an image format that the decoder could understand with 97% precision.

UK faces rising and unpredictable threat from Iran, report warns A wide-ranging report by an intelligence committee has set out the risks Iran poses to the UK.

I know they say history repeats itself but this is taking the piss. MI5 must have seen the 23 year anniversary coming up and had a sudden epiphany for how handle this whole Iran ordeal.

www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98wjzj4jlpo

Like it’s one thing to disagree with a specific statement he made about the Artsakhci genocide or whatever, it’s another to imply that it’s perfectly fine for border control to intimidate him due to his political beliefs because he isn’t leftist enough for you.

Christ, you probably have more in common with him politically than about 80% of Americans? I’ll never understand the compulsion to continually exclude people from your sphere of acceptable opinions until it’s just you. Focus on the views you share - no one will agree with you on everything.

Either way, a super cool concept that arguably opens up one possible path towards AI that surpasses human intelligence.

Without having looked into it in much detail I wonder if it might work great for short, leetcode-style questions without showing much promise for longer problems that require more complex reasoning (closer to real-world SWE tasks).

GitHub - LeapLabTHU/Absolute-Zero-Reasoner Contribute to LeapLabTHU/Absolute-Zero-Reasoner development by creating an account on GitHub.

This is insanely cool. They’re claiming SOTA performance on maths and code with NO LABELLED DATA.

From what I can tell they’re using a sort of GAN-esque paradigm with a “Proposer” (generates tasks) and “Solver” (produces solutions) instead of a generator/discriminator.

github.com/LeapLabTHU/A...

This is what ICE does: just like they stalked the family’s car and smashed the windows in to kidnap them.

They attack people on the streets grab them and take them to concentration camps.

Entire neighborhoods gather to protect little babies & their moms from being separated & kidnapped.

What do you suggest he does? Genuinely - what outcome here would make you happy? I actually can’t fathom the level of cynicism required to look at someone voluntarily giving away >$100bn to the most vulnerable people on the planet and still call him an asshole.

Gerry Adams is nothing if not committed to the bit - fair play

Buffett Rule - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett...

You are the most smart and enlightened 🙇‍♂️. We all applauded your refusal to acknowledge the existence of nuance. Truly an inspiration to us all.

Many would see this as a regression rather than progress, which is fair. But I think given the political environment over there at the moment and how bad things could get, something a bit steadier would be good for us all.

It might require a (Bill) Clinton level communicator with Obama charisma that can convincingly distance themselves from both major parties, but I think there’s enough contempt for both parties and apprehension towards radical ideas that it’s possible.

Optimistically, I feel like it’s possible this could be achieved through a repackaging of basic neoliberal ideas with 2018 dem levels of social justice.

Since not enough time has passed for the dems to rehabilitate their image it’s more possible than ever (granted that isn’t saying much) that something new could emerge and become a force in US politics.

The democrats opened the door to anti-establishment populism by being chronically bad at communication/messaging and allowing themselves to be cast as elitist, just for those riding the populist wave to make such glaringly bad decisions that it seems they might lose support quicker than expected.

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

‘I Messed Up At Work Again,’ Crestfallen Michael Waltz Texts Wife, National Geographic Editorial Staff

‘I Messed Up At Work Again,’ Crestfallen Michael Waltz Texts Wife, National Geographic Editorial Staff

Hilarious how to this day it’s still pretty much an entirely manual process - purely because the traditional incentive to automate (labour costs) is absent because turf cutting happens during the summer holidays!

This is way more common in Ireland than you might think. Not long ago land sold by the council would sometimes come with ownership of part of a nearby bog for a fuel source. Most people that grew up on a farm would have fond memories of going “back the bog” in the summer for cutting/stacking turf.

Other details of note:
- Trained on AMD GPUs 👀
- Produced by a European research center instead of a VC backed start-up; means much more openness and willingness to share findings

I secretly hope both of these start to become much more common