No. But I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society. For instance by reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over.
That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.
> Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate?
Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money.
> Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?
The problem isn't who is the steward of the capital. The problem is that economically efficient thing to do for a single company is (given sufficient fab capacity, and a monopoly) to raise prices to extract a greater share of the pie at the expense of shrinking the size of the pie. I'm not worried about who takes the profit, I'm worried about the size of the pie.
> Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money.
It's not a certainty that they 'make a shitload of money'. Reducing the right tail payoffs absolutely reduces the capital allocated to solve problems - many of which are risky bets.
Your solution absolutely decreases capital investment at the margin, this is indisputable and basic economics. Even worse when the taking is not due to some pre-existing law, so companies have to deal with the additional uncertainty of whether & when future people will decide in retrospect that they got too large a payoff and arbitrarily decide to take it from them.
You can't just look at the costs to an action, you also have to look at the benefits.
Of course I agree I'm going to stop marginal investments from occurring into research into patent-able technologies by reducing the expect profit. But I'm going to do so very slightly because I'm not shifting the expected value by very much. Meanwhile I'm going to greatly increase the investment into the existing technology we already have, and allow many more people to try to improve upon it, and I'm going to argue the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.
Whether I'm right or wrong about the net benefit, the basic economics here is that there are both costs and benefits to my proposed action.
And yes I'm going to marginally reduce future investments because the same might happen in the future and that reduces expected value. In fact if I was in charge the same would happen in the future. And the trade-off I get for this is that society gets the benefit of the same actually happening in the future and us not being hamstrung by unbreachable monopolies.
> That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.
Lol it's not "monopolies" limiting fab capacity. Existing fab companies can barely manage to stand-up a new fab in different cities. Fabs are impossibly complex and beyond risky to fund.
It's the kind of thing you'd put government money to making but it's so risky government really don't want to spend billions and fail so they give existing companies billions so if they fail it's not the governments fault.
So, if a private company is successful, you will nationalize its IP under some guise of maximizing the benefit to society? That form of government was tried once. It failed miserably.
Under your idea, we’ll try a badly broken economic philosophy again. And while we’re at it, we will completely stifle investment in innovation.
there is no such thing as a lump-sum transfer, this will shift expectations and incentives going forward and make future large capital projects an increasingly uphill battle
There was a post[0] on here recently about how the US went from producing woefully insufficient numbers of aircraft to producing 300k by the end of world war 2.
One of the things that the post mentioned was the meager profit margin that the companies made during this time.
But the thing is that this set the America auto and aviation industry up to rule the world for decades.
A government going to a company and saying 'we need you to produce this product for us at a lower margin thab you'd like to' isn't the end of the world.
I don't know if this is one of those scenarios but they exist.
They are an intellectual property company holding the rights on plans to make graphic cards, not even a company actually making graphic cards.
The government could launch an initiative "OpenGPU" or "OpenAI Accelerator", where the government orders GPUs from TSMC directly, without the middleman.
It may require some tweaking in the law to allow exception to intellectual property for "public interest".
y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital formation to produce innovations going forward.
If we have public capital formation, we don’t necessarily need private capital. Private innovation in weather modelling isn’t outpacing government work by leaps and bounds, for instance.
because it is extremely challenging to capture the additional value that is being produced by better weather forecasts and generally the forecasts we have right now are pretty good.
private capital is absolutely the driving force for the vast majority of innovations since the beginning of the 20th century. public capital may be involved, but it is dwarfed by private capital markets.
They said remove legally-enforced monopolies on what they produce. Many of these big firms made their tech with millions to billions of taxpayer dollars at various points in time. If we’ve given them millions, shouldn’t we at least get to make independent implementations of the tech we already paid for?
20-25 year old drugs are a lot more useful than 20-25 year old GPUs, and the manufacturing supply chain is not a bottleneck.
There's no generics for the latest and greatest drugs, and a fancy gene therapy might run a lot more than $40k.