Whether AGI is THE goal, or it’s THE mean to reach goals for human beings,
Category: lenS & thoughtS
Governments, tax, shareholders
Isn’t governments the invisible shareholder of all corporations?
Say tax is 25% , essentially gov will take 25 of 100 profit before tax, and the rest $75 are called profit after tax and is distributed to shareholders.
Does it sound odd?
Isn’t governments essentially a permanent 25% shareholder of the company, and the ratio is net by itself.
How convenient.
Btw, shareholders are should give their shares a 25% hair cut.. if they own 50% of a company, they just own 37.5% in case of 25% tax.
Nvidia and BTC
Following the previous post that Nvidia is the central bank, Nvidia also has an interesting relation with BTC.
As Nvidia and compute technology improve, miners buy newer and more expensive machines to stay competitive. Because everyone can access the same better technology, the advantage is quickly competed away through higher hash rates and mining difficulty.
As a result, miners collectively spend more capital to compete for the same fixed amount of new Bitcoin. Higher industry-wide mining costs mean miners require higher BTC prices to justify that investment, creating upward pressure on the Bitcoin price.
The better the Nvidia mining revenue, the higher the BTC price!
In previous mode: larger nominal economy + more dollars + higher price level -> higher nominal gold price
How similar!
Nvidia is the central bank
Token is an asset.
Your account has a number – the number of tokens you can use.
Those tokens can be used to do anything. You either get what you want from tokens, or you make something out of tokens and sell / exchange it for other stuff.
It’s an asset that is so versatile that is like “money”.
In accounting, money is an asset.
In economy, money is the medium of exchange.
Tokens are like money in those regards.
Token factories are like banks.
The factory prints tokens with electricity.
Nvidia’s servers, at the frontier, determines the speed of inflation.
If Nvidia’s next gen servers are too good and sells cheap, token can be printed fast! Thus the token on hand can be depreciated.
In that sense, Nvdia is like Fed that controls inflation.
Meta’s metaverse vision
Random thoughts – maybe Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is still the future.
But the technology path is bit different.
Current AI-based digital human and world is the key to that vision than the digital human or universe created in 2021-23 era.
Thoughts from people more than 75 year ago
Where is our thought leader these days?
Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.
Wiener_Norbert_The_Machine_Age_v3_1949
Meanwhile,
I think affluent middle class is key to a lot of things, especially for the US.
The rise of cheap Chinese open-weight models is a shock, if not an “attack”.
“Middle class” that is merely existing without a lot of options in life is not affluent middle class. Free will doesn’t prevail in this case.
What concerns me (3)
Is that today’s major platforms like X and TikTok/Douyin can be used as “thought weapons”.
People/organizations can push a post (twit or video) to millions of people if it fits their interest, regardless of who creates the post in the first place.
At certain scale and with enough repetitiveness, this action can alter a person’s or a group of people’s thoughts.
This influence is sold.
People/organizations can buy the influence without disclosing the intention.
Common folks are blindfolded.
It’s not like an influencer wants more people to see his/her posts to grow impact.
It’s paying for “thought weapons” to achieve certain goals inexplicitly.
And sometimes, these goals could be evil, or self-interested.
Meanwhile, users who “owns” the attention “sell” their attention for nothing; payers pay to the platforms – they are not even bribing the ones that have original ownership.
What concerns me (2)
Is that current companies or leader of companies at the frontier of AI and robotics talks about advancement everyday, but they said little about ethics, at least in the public domain.
Who to provide jobs if factories are run by robotics? and decisions are made without human in the loop?
How to preserve humanity in a world with automatic war machines / weapons?
Interesting levels
| Security | Apr. 30 close | Recent bottom close | Bottom vs. Apr. 30 | Intraday trough vs. Apr. 30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SK Hynix (000660) | ₩1.286m | ₩1.322m on Jul. 30 | +2.8% | −3.1% at ₩1.246m on Jul. 29 |
| QQQ | $667.74 | $661.73 on Jul. 29 | −0.9% | −1.0% at $661.14 |
| SOXX | $461.44 | $465.00 on Jul. 29 | +0.8% | +0.6% at $464.08 |
| SMH | $506.72 | $504.22 on Jul. 29 | −0.5% | −0.6% at $503.63 |
These names bottomed at end of Apr levels.
From capex to backlog
For the past few quarter, capex figures and related comments from hyperscalers are the key metrics to watch, especially for gauging future demand for semiconductor companies.
The higher the capex number, the higher the revenue estimates.
This worked but became less useful lately.
Investors don’t like it if only the capex is growing, which pushes hyperscalers free cash flows to negative territory.
Investors want to see higher demand signal, which can justify these higher capex numbers.
Thus, backlogs or RPOs (emaining performance obligations) are more important now.
| Quarter | AWS backlog | Microsoft commercial RPO | Google Cloud backlog | Oracle total RPO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1Q25 | 189 | 315 | 90 | 130 |
| 2Q25 | 195 | 368 | 106 | 138 |
| 3Q25 | 200 | 392 | 155 | 455 |
| 4Q25 | 244 | 625 | 240 | 523 |
| 1Q26 | 364 | 627 | 462 | 553 |
| 2Q26 | 496 | 678 | 514 | 638 |
Another thing to watch is the weighted-average backlog duration of these backlogs – within how many years will backlog become revenue?
Microsoft explicitly commented about 2.3 years.
RPO, including OpenAI, has a weighted average duration of 2.3 years. And roughly 30% will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months, up 37% year-over-year. The remaining portion recognized beyond the next 12 months increased 112%.
In addition, utilization is also an indicator.
Amazon said “lion’s share” of AWS compute capacity for 2027 had already been reserved during 2q26 earning call, which is very good to hear.