Wednesday, April 05, 2023

5: Semiconductors

I started my online makeup business with no money and made $97,681 in sales last year. The key to my success was turning disappointments into opportunities. . She used a credit card for startup costs, which included a Shopify storefront, a GoDaddy domain, inventory, and shipping supplies, which totaled about $800. She paid the debt off in three months. .......... Debt financing is a common method for funding a business, but experts recommend this approach only if you're prepared to pay your bills on time to avoid interest on your balance. ........ Today, it's easier than ever to start your own business or side hustle because all the tools you need are online. Plus, many are free or affordable. This digital revolution is one reason 10.5 million Americans created businesses between 2020 and 2022. ......... In 2021, Leyva expanded her operations and opened her first vending machine, stocking with it her lashes and makeup for locals to buy in person. Last year, she generated $84,074 in online sales and $13,607 in vending-machine sales ......... She has four other vending machines today and, in February, signed a lease for a storefront in Caldwell, Idaho, which she plans to open on April 15. .......... I was a stay-at-home mom, in this repeat pattern at home, and I needed to get out. So I became a local makeup artist on the side in Idaho. I eventually wanted to create my own product because I kept having to go to Ulta and Sephora to get makeup for my customers. ......... Leyva Beauty started with just lashes because that's the only thing I could afford, but little by little, I started adding cosmetics. ......... There were a few times I didn't like the quality of certain lashes, and that was money thrown in the garbage. But once I found a good manufacturer, it was smooth sailing from there. ......... I started with a lip gloss and grew from there. ......... So I went door-to-door to businesses at that shopping center and pitched them. They all said no. And that truly put me at my lowest. ........ That's when I started venturing out to Boise, Idaho. I ended up relocating to an indoor food court called Chow. That vending machine has done even better than it did in Caldwell. .



The Most Amazing — and Dangerous — Technology in the World The historian Chris Miller explains how semiconductors touch every corner of modern life — and the geopolitics of manufacturing them. ........

the two themes are really dominating the show — China and A.I.

........ There’s a geopolitics of who controls A.I., a race between the U.S. and China to get the strongest and earliest A.I. capabilities. But they also connect in another, more tangible way. They are both stories driven by semiconductors and who controls them. ........ Whoever controls semiconductors controls the future. ......... semiconductors really can be controlled ........ I started researching it around 2015, 2016, didn’t start writing until 2020, and finished writing early 2022 just as the chip shortage was reaching its peak. .......... we rarely think about chips, yet they’ve created the modern world ......... a new car will have a thousand chips inside of it, your refrigerator, your microwave, your dishwasher. All of our devices are full of chips that do computing and do sensing, increasingly do communication. And so the modern economy just can’t function without lots and lots of chips. .......... just the primary chip in an iPhone will have around 15 billion transistors on it. And so each one of these tiny switches is smaller than the size of a virus. They’re measured in a number of nanometers, which is a billionth of a meter. ........... the chip industry has produced improvements that have gone far beyond any other aspect of the economy. There’s nowhere else in the economy that we’ve had exponential growth rates persist for not only years but half a century. ......... the first chips were used primarily for defense systems ......... people realized that there were a lot more uses for computing than anyone really imagined at the time that Gordon Moore first coined the concept of Moore’s Law. ........ At the time, he predicted devices like what he called personal portable communications equipment, sort of like a smartphone, if you will. He envisioned home computers that would be networked together, sort of like the internet. ............ He could predict portable communications devices, but I think even he was shocked by the iPhone when it first emerged a half-century later. ......... as they’ve gotten smaller and smaller, the wavelength of visible light has gotten far too broad to actually carve transistors in the way that we want. So visible light has a wavelength of several hundred nanometers, depending on the color, whereas the transistors on your smartphone are far smaller than that in dimension. And so around three decades ago in the early 1990s, scientists began developing a new type of lithography, more precise, using smaller-wavelength light in the ultraviolet spectrum. ............. today, there’s just one company that is capable of producing the machines that are capable of providing this light at the scale and with the precision necessary. And these machines are the most complex machines humans have ever made. They require one of the most powerful lasers that has ever been deployed in a commercial device. They have an explosion happening inside of them at 40 or 50 times hotter than the surface of the sun. ................... the laser itself requires exactly 457,329 component parts .......... that level of precision and reliability has been extraordinarily difficult to produce, and it’s why there’s just one company in the world that is capable of producing them. ........ The U.S. military was actually one of the early drivers of innovation in semiconductors. The first chips that were created were created for guidance computers in both space systems and in missile systems. And the Pentagon funded a lot of the early research in semiconductors and still is a major funder of a lot of cutting-edge research today. The military was interested in semiconductors because it wanted to miniaturize computing power to distribute it across battlefields. .......... U.S. intelligence-gathering, which today is more dependent than ever on semiconductors. .......... a company called Nvidia based in California produces the majority of the chips used for A.I. training in the world. And Nvidia manufactures all of its leading chips at one company, TSMC in Taiwan. So underneath all of the A.I. training happening around the world, whether in the U.S. or in Europe or in China, are chips produced by just a couple of companies. And that produces a level of political influence that the U.S. in particular has tried to wield in recent years. ............. this one Taiwanese firm, TSMC, which produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, 90 percent. .......

TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung in South Korea and Intel in the United States.

.............. these three firms will be the only three firms close to the cutting edge for at least the next half decade, probably longer. So there’s just extraordinary concentration in the industry when you get close to the leading edge because of the expense and the sophisticated technology involved............ The other 10 percent are produced by Samsung of South Korea. And Intel right now is a generation or two behind what either of those firms are capable of producing. ................ the firm had to sink or swim by selling manufacturing services to largely U.S. firms from day one. ........ it’s not just the U.S. that’s reliant on chips from Taiwan. It’s everyone. It’s Europe. It’s Japan. It’s China. The entire world’s manufacturing sector requires TSMC’s chips. ................ you lose Taiwan, and you lose the semiconductor industry — that Taiwan is a point of vulnerability for the entire world. ............... the Silicon Shield, the idea being that it would be too expensive for anyone to disrupt the chip supply coming out of Taiwan, and therefore, no one would be willing to do so.......... China now spends more money importing chips than it spends importing oil ............. although China is a manufacturing powerhouse, it’s actually a small player when it comes to the production of semiconductors, especially when we’re talking about cutting-edge semiconductors. ............... the U.S. has a unique capability to conduct cyber espionage because a lot of the world’s key data centers and cables transfer through the U.S. We see it in financial networks, where the U.S. also has a unique position. .......... he U.S. government, over the past 10 years or so, has been able to surgically cut China out of certain parts of the chip industry while keeping China dependent on many other types of chips. And so whether it’s cutting-edge tools, cutting-edge software or certain types of chips, like the chips used to train A.I. systems, the U.S. is able to say China can’t have access and is able to force the world’s chip firms to basically comply. ............. Micron brought a suit against Fujian Jinhua for stealing intellectual property in China, but in Chinese courts, they actually ruled in favor of the Chinese company against Micron, alleging that Micron had stolen the Chinese companies’ intellectual property, which was, of course, a bogus ruling. But for Micron, China was a critical market, because China is the world’s largest consumer of chips. And so getting locked out of the Chinese market was a real risk for any chip firm. And it had made them all hesitant to actually take on Chinese companies or the Chinese government when they faced legal issues. ........... a lot of concern and uncertainty about how A.I. systems will be deployed by other countries for military uses and for intelligence gathering. .......... China still has a large stock of existing A.I. chips that it imported before the ban was in place. ............ In Taiwan, TSMC is the island’s most prestigious employer. It’s the country’s largest exporter. And so when it has a request, its request is quickly granted, whereas in the U.S., semiconductors are one important industry among many, and so they just get less political priority as a result. And when they face problems, they’re solved less quickly for that reason. ........... if you look at the individuals who founded the chip industry in the U.S., a disproportionate number of them were foreign-born, whether it’s Andy Grove, the longtime C.E.O. of Intel, born in Hungary, or Morris Chang, who I mentioned, who built up chipmaking in Texas Instruments before he moved to Taiwan. He was born in mainland China. You can go through a lot of the key C.E.O.s and founders of the early chip firms or the C.E.O.s of today’s biggest U.S. chip firms, and you’ll find a disproportionate number of immigrants there as well. ........... if more of those people could move to the U.S. And many of them would like to. They just can’t get the visas or the work permits that they need. .......... And when I think about Huawei today, I think back to the telegraph cables debates of 100 years ago. And in some ways, not much has changed. ......... a book on decision-making in China called “Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion,” which is an extraordinary account of high politics in China over the last half-century ....... how it is that Chinese leaders make decisions. .

CHATGPT IS THE SWISS-ARMY KNIFE FOR YOUR CREATIVE WORK Last week over 100 Generative tools were released – from resume builders to Bloomberg Finance GPT. ...... I liken this to the similar explosion of eCommerce and B2B sites in 1997 – 2000. ..... Amazon would help you buy everything, but collectors loved eBay, and overstock still exists as does Zappos for shoes and Zulily for fashion. .

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