"If you choose two rabbits, you will not catch either one"
- Attributed to Anton Chekhov
DeepSeek Again
I don't like talking about the same topic twice, but the last newsletter came out in the middle of the DeepSeek hysteria. Now that people have had some time to investigate a bit more, there are certainly some weird things going on...
It was reported that DeepSeek was able to produce their model with $5 million. That number was mind-boggling, but you can't trust a single word from a Chinese company. What many people may not know is that the US restricts Nvidia from sending any chips to China. Because of this, people concluded that this company made some truly incredible breakthroughs, which shook the stock market.
I want to direct your attention to the following image, which shows Nvidia's revenue, with Singapore split from the group.
What this means is that a staggering amount of Nvidia's chips are heading to Singapore. Chamath Palihapitiya discussed this in more detail during this week's All-In podcast.
Firstly, Singapore has ~100 total data centers. Those data centers utilize ~876 megawatts. For those with no idea what that means, the data centers are relatively small. This leads to the obvious question, where are all of those chips going? I believe the US government is going to need to do some investigation here, and have a sneaky suspicion that China found a back-door to exploit.
Meme of the week
Ray Dalio on the US Economy
Ray Dalio is a well-known investor, hedge fund manager, and author. Over recent years Ray has dedicated his life to researching and synthesizing the history of how nations, economies, and populations rise and fall.
This week Ray met with David Friedberg for an important interview. In the interview they discussed Ray's new book, which highlights the major economic issues the US is currently facing, along with clear recommendations for how to start to fix the problems.
What I took from this was a sense of urgency for the government to cut spending. This is a heated topic, so I advise you to watch the interview and draw your own conclusions.
Autonomous Vehicles
Travis Kalanick, the Uber CEO from 2010-2017 and current CEO of CloudKitchens, joined this week's All-In podcast and touched on his vision for the future of AVs.
The first point he made was about the feasibility of a near-term fully electric vehicle future. For California to switch to all EVs, it would take a 2x increase in the state's energy capacity. This would be at least a 5-10 year activity. Imagine doing this for the entire country and you can really see the limitations.
Travis had a take which I found very interesting - we will likely see a larger share of AVs that are ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles as opposed to EVs. This makes a lot of sense, especially if existing ICE vehicles can be semi-easily retrofit with the necessary tech. Not many people are thinking about this.
One final visionary concept - a roboticized and automated world of the future, where parking lots are no longer needed. They may be replaced with buildings that are the equivalent of data centers, but for autonomous vehicles and robotics...A place for recharging, storage, and maintenance. What happens to real estate prices when the 10-30% of city real estate that is currently used for parking can be repurposed? What company is preparing for this? There is a lot of cool stuff to look forward to in the future!
A Non-Addictive Painkiller
The FDA approved a new class of painkiller, the first new approval in over 20 years. This non-addictive, short-term, moderate-to-severe treatment is a huge breakthrough and one we should celebrate. The drug is called suzetrigine and it will be sold as Journavx.
There have been a lot of cool text-to-code website building tools that have come out over the last year, but today I want to highlight one I just found recently.
You may have played with v0, Bolt, Lovabble, or some other great tools, but uizard is one you need to try out. If you're new to these tools, they generate both code and a UI preview from a prompt, allowing you to edit, copy, and integrate them seamlessly into your personal or work applications. As an example, I used Bolt to generate my landing page, and was able to create this site using the animations from The Matrix in ~10 minutes:
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