[Teever]

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.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-a...

[rvnx]

In the case of NVIDIA it's even more sneaky.

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".

[whimsicalism]

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.

[inetknght]

> y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital

Reflexively, I count that harm as a feature. I don't like private capital markets because I've been screwed by private capital on multiple occasions.

But you are right: I don't understand how these actions would harm. So please do expand your concerns.

[freeone3000]

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.

[whimsicalism]

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.

[freeone3000]

It’s challenging to capture the additional value and the forecasts are pretty good because of continual large-scale government investment into weather forecasting. NOAA is launching satellites! it’s a big deal!

Private nuclear research is heavily dependent on governmental contracts to function. Solar was subsidized to heck and back for years. Public investment does work, and does make a didference.

I would even say governmental involvement is sometimes even the deciding factor, to determine if research is worth pursuing. Some major capital investors have decided AI models cannot possibly gain enough money to pay for their training costs. So what do we do when we believe something is a net good for society, but isn’t going to be profitable?