Friday, April 07, 2023

7: Richard Feynman

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7: Ratan Tata

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7: Adam Grant

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7: Jeff Bezos



How to pre-sell your online course .

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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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Tuesday, April 04, 2023

4: Video

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. .

Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology A start-up in New York is among a group of companies working on systems that can produce short videos based on a few words typed into a computer. ....... to create new kinds of artificial intelligence systems that some believe could be the next big thing in technology, as important as web browsers or the iPhone. ........ Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, unveiled the first video-generation systems last year, but did not share them with the public because they were worried that the systems could eventually be used to spread disinformation with newfound speed and efficiency. ........ The ability to edit and manipulate film and video is nothing new, of course. Filmmakers have been doing it for more than a century. .......... Soon, experts believe, they will generate professional-looking mini-movies, complete with music and dialogue. ...... what the system creates currently. It’s not a photo. It’s not a cartoon. It’s a collection of a lot of pixels blended together to create a realistic video......... Dr. Isola has spent years building and testing this kind of technology, first as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at OpenAI, and then as a professor at M.I.T. Still, he was fooled by the sharp, high-resolution but completely fake images of Pope Francis. .......... Companies like Runway, which has roughly 40 employees and has raised $95.5 million, are using this technique to generate moving images. ......... They believe the technology will ultimately make video-creation as easy as writing a sentence. ....... “In the old days, to do anything remotely like this, you had to have a camera. You had to have props. You had to have a location. You had to have permission. You had to have money” .... “You don’t have to have any of that now. You can just sit down and imagine it.” .

We Spoke To The Guy Who Created The Viral AI Image Of The Pope That Fooled The World Over the weekend, a photo of Pope Francis looking dapper in a white puffer jacket went mega-viral on social media. The 86-year-old sitting pontiff, it appeared, has some serious drip. But there was just one problem: The image is not real. It was made using the AI art tool Midjourney. ...... Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area ....... ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris’ ......... When Pablo Xavier first saw the Pope images, he said, “I thought they were perfect." So he posted them to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe, and then on Reddit. He was shocked when the images quickly went viral. “I was just blown away,” he said. “I didn’t want it to blow up like that.” ......... He said he was banned from Reddit hours after posting the image there. “I figured I was going to get backlash,” he said. “I just didn’t think it was going to be to this magnitude.” ........ He said he’s already seen posts in which his images have been co-opted by those looking to criticize the Catholic Church for lavish spending. “I feel like shit,” he said of his images being used in such ways. “It’s crazy.”



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4: China

Can the U.S. See the Truth About China? “The New China Playbook,” Keyu Jin, a professor at the London School of Economics and a board member at Credit Suisse, is trying to rework the foundation of what she sees as the West’s deeply flawed understanding of China’s economy, its economic ambitions and its attitude toward global competition. ......... “We’re in an incredibly dangerous world right now,” says Jin, who was born in Beijing and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and whose father, Jin Liqun, served as a vice minister of finance for China. “Without more effort made to understand each other’s perspectives, peaceful coexistence may not be possible.” .......... China’s current economic challenge is to overcome its middle-income trap,(the term for when wages rise in a country but then stall as a result of higher costs and declining competitiveness) something that the United States might not relate to. ........ in the electric-vehicle sector, (China’s electric-vehicle market and infrastructure is far and away the world’s largest) where everybody started from the same place, China was able to leapfrog. Lots of companies say that even at the risk of technological misappropriation, China is too lucrative a market to pass over. They would rather take the risk............. coexistence of different political systems, different economic systems, a multipolar world — I think that’s one of China’s global agendas. .......... The Chinese people believe that a substantially weakened Russia might not be in the interest of China, because if there were the sense that the United States needed to seek out an opponent, China would be next. ............. there’s room for a vibrant debate on Chinese social media. .......... the Chinese people are generally willing to trade security for freedom ...... For sure, there’s much more control over media than in the past. ......... social media is used for two-way monitoring.(a way for citizens to monitor their government and vice versa) .......... There was a lot of criticism about government; there were protests last year over land seizures. These were not hidden. But the Chinese government does exhibit a great deal of paternalism. Officials think that a public narrative that is uncontrolled can lead to instability or more divisiveness. ............ “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” ......... the model that worked for China when it was building factories is not going to be the system that would work for innovation, where you need people to be able to get rich, where you need solid intellectual-property protection, where you have to have clear and transparent policies and rule of law. ............. the Chinese leaders have this notion that the United States is doing everything it can to try to stop China from growing. Or they believe that whatever China does is not going to elicit more trust. So I think this blind spot is that the leadership is convinced that there’s no way out of this. .......... China thinks that its economy should be the largest in the world, not because it’s rich but because it’s large: 1.4 billion people! ......... China’s best technologies, the ones that are really successful right now, artificial intelligence or batteries (China’s CATL company, for example, is the world’s largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries, which are used for electric vehicles) or its payment system (China’s retail-payment system is largely run through QR codes and digital wallets and is operated by tech companies. Banks are cut out of the process) — all of that is based on domestic competition. ......... the first time I came to the United States (Jin came to the United States to study at New York City’s Horace Mann School as part of an exchange-student program) in 1997, my classmates were asking me about human rights in Tibet. In China, meanwhile, we were busy building and developing and reforming. ..........

China is a country that has done the most economically for the most number of people in the shortest amount of time.

.... If you look at the new generation, they are open-minded on a whole range of issues, so much more than their parents. They care about animal rights, worker rights, social inequity. That shift gives us hope that China will progress.



How China Is Fighting the Chip War With America During his speech to the party congress, Xi Jinping, who was granted his third term as the top leader of the country, mentioned “technology” 40 times, promised to “win the battle in key core technologies” and emphasized innovation and technological self-sufficiency......... Competition and conflict with the United States have led to the rise of techno-nationalism in China. President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Chinese tech corporations such as Huawei fueled the first wave of techno-nationalism in the country. President Biden’s export controls and addition of other Chinese companies to a list of sanctioned entities has renewed Chinese determination to close the gap in its technological prowess with America. ......... And for the first time, the Communist Party congress has added a category to its top priorities: “ke jiao xing guo,” which means a great power underpinned by technology, science and education. Science and technology are now at the core of China’s development, and self-reliance has become a national imperative. ........... A day after Mr. Biden’s export controls, the local government of Shenzhen, China’s prominent technology hub, hammered out an ambitious plan to accelerate breakthroughs of its semiconductors industry, supported by a gamut of detailed financial incentives, preferential tax policies, research and development subsidies and talent programs for enterprises in the entire ecosystem. .......... Thirty percent of the revenue of American semiconductor companies comes from sales to China, which imported more than $400 billion worth of chips in 2021. China will have to rely on domestic chip producers now, which are expected to meet about 70 percent of its market demand by 2025. .......... To meet this challenge, China is turning to its strongest form of techno-nationalism, the juguo tizhi, or “whole of the nation” approach, whereby all national resources are mobilized to achieve a strategic objective. It was used in the past to reap Olympic gold medals but is now also designated for core technologies like quantum information and biotech. .......... China invested as much as $11 billion in quantum computing between 2009 and 2011, compared with $3 billion by the United States. The government-led Big Fund in semiconductors has channeled almost a trillion renminbi (around $137 billion at current exchange rates) of private and public funding into the industry. .......... Even the central bank has introduced special low-interest loans on the order of 200 billion renminbi (almost $30 billion) for high-tech firms. Hundreds of national labs, which carry out the most advanced research, are being rolled out to boost basic research. More are sure to come amid a technology war. .......... While the state will continue to play the key role of mobilizing large amounts of funding for long, complex and uncertain investments, it will be left to the market and enterprises to determine what technologies are made, how to make them and where the resources flow. ......... Provincial governments, such as in Shenzhen, make sure that no barriers are too great for promising entrepreneurs: pushing regulators for a fast track to I.P.O., state financing and even jobs for their spouses. But setting limits to their involvement — such as caps on the equity stake they can take or the extent of financial subsidy — is aimed at reducing waste, corruption and overlaps. ........... Behind the mastery of critical technologies are markets, money and talent. Chinese markets are ready for a big innovation drive: Consumers are more sophisticated and demand higher quality. Only companies with better technologies can win. ............. Economic maturation means that low-hanging fruit has been plucked and financial resources will flow to more uncertain areas with higher returns. It is no coincidence that

last year domestic revenues in China’s semiconductor industry surpassed $157 billion, with 19 of the 20 fastest-growing semiconductor companies globally being Chinese

......... Last year, the industry that saw the largest surge in wages was semiconductors. Basic research, the bedrock of cutting-edge technologies, is notably lagging. And China is rapidly increasing the state budget for science. ........ the juguo system leverages public and private power unlike anything else in the world .......... Techno-nationalism may speed up the rate of convergence, but it is unlikely to close the distance with a fast-moving train. Core technologies take time to develop — years of cumulative learning and knowledge. ....... China has a motto of “taking over on the bend,” which means surpassing in areas where others have no latent advantage. Germans excel in manufacturing traditional cars, but China has made a significant push in the development for electric vehicles, renewable energy and new materials. It is simultaneously betting on new directions for semiconductors. Advanced packaging techniques make chips with low-end processing nodes perform like high-end ones. Chip materials like silicon may be swapped for new-generation ones........... China wants to become a bigger, smarter Germany, one with industrial capacity, leveraging artificial intelligence, next-generation communications and robotics. ........ not only a race for technological supremacy but also the ultimate competition between two radically different systems.
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