They have already leveraged their stock beyond their entire pre-AI market cap. There is no return to the old days now. If the AI boom goes bust on them, they have left themselves impossibly exposed. They will owe more money than they can possibly pay back.

They took what should have been a slam dunk to sell shovels for a gold rush with a nice fallback to previous viable business into an existential threat to their business.

A lot of the “AI” layoffs were using it as a plausible excuse for layoffs they wanted to do anyway. So I don’t anticipate a lot of them coming back.

In fact, if the models are ingesting this, they will get dumber because training on LLM output degrades things.

Challenge there being that seems to have proven elusive. It’s not too surprising, but trying to use machine learning for robotics is actually really hard.

Driving is much easier, training data with video, audio, and other sensor input complete with how the human manipulated steering and two pedals.

But direct human interaction with the environment is both much more complicated than three controls and is not instrumented. They are trying to build training data from remote operators, but it turns out we aren’t very good at controlling these things remotely anywhere close to acting directly. We are terrible teachers and there’s a fraction of the actionable data that other more successful models had to work with.

If an AI sees a video of someone doing something, it can make a similar video, but can’t model how that might map to what it would see as unrelated motor and hydraulic operation.

Note that Tesla was clearly a viable business, I don’t see the justification for it being 3 times the value of ford, gm, Toyota, and Honda all put together.

Generally people are not challenging the fundamental possibility of these as viable business, just that they don’t make sense at their valuations.

Though I’ll agree that open ai particularly should get some skepticism. To the extent that actionable business models might emerge, I don’t see openai actually in a position to be a big party of any of it. Microsoft and Anthropic seem to mostly own business revenue, ChatGPT is generally not even providing the models people select when they are able to choose.

OEM license revenue represents a tiny tiny bit of their financials these days. They could just charge nothing for it and business wise no one probably notice much of a difference.

It is foundational to a lot of what they do, but older devices are just as good for their subscription and tie in revenue. Hell I use my work subscription for office from Linux, complete with OneDrive filesystem synchronization. Microsoft gets all their money from my headcount even as I don’t even use Windows.

But that capex could bite them hard if revenue falls to follow from it. That’s pretty much the only exposure investors care about.

Familiar but with a difference in my case.

I’ve spent my entire career alternating between two experiences.

One is being grilled why I an delivering what I think should be done instead of what the executives told me to do.

The other is getting awards and promotions when it turns out that I was right and the customers loved it.

It happened to work for me to do it my way, though my executives have usually simultaneously rented the implication they don’t have good vision, they also know how to leverage my success for themselves. Particularly this most recent promotion has been stalled to reward better drones instead, but it’s looking like they have to pivot back to rewarding the folks the paying customers actually like instead of those that feed the executive egos.

It’s not just an abstract number, but leveraging it changes the value. If they hypothetically tried to leverage 2 trillion with of their stock, it wouldn’t be worth 2 trillion.

Of course the needle would probably barely move if they tried to leverage 50 billion.

Still number 1.

California, Oregon, and Washington GDP all together is about $5.1 trillion, and US overall is 10 trillion ahead of China.

Still number 1

This is based on the World Bank 2024 numbers, US had $28.7 trillion, China 18.7, and California 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

Oh robot butlers would be huge, but no one is even vaguely close to that. All the demos have been remote controlled, demonstrating that can make dumb robots, but that’s not really new…

Yes, but it sounds like the kid jumped into the street without looking and physics were not on favor of getting from 17 mph to 0 in time.

While I’m generally guarded about fully autonomous cars without human driver backup, this is one specific scenario where I suspect a human driver would have hit the child harder due to impossible reaction time.

Robo taxis are a thing… but not much of a thing and it’s not Tesla.

Don’t worry, while they may have worse business results than a lot of other companies, displaying steeper loss of market, whose non car initiative have failed, whose leader squandered his reputation to throw in with a political movement that hates EVs in hopes of political clout that evaporated within a few months…

They still have a market cap bigger than all their competitors combined, because why not…

Yes, but even then you’d expect the faltering to be reflected, just earlier. As the analysts estimate low profits you’d expect the stock to suffer a sharp decline then.

Given how overvalued Tesla is arguably in general and that the rationalization is that while it’s not the biggest and best brand now, but their growth trajectory should carry them past all the other automakers, it’s insane that they are only down 11% from their late december highs, and still showing a $1.4 trillion market cap…

It’s not a company that looks like growth nor do their current results look to justify that crazy valuation. They are valued at 3x Ford, GM, Toyota, and Honda combined, despite having more modest business results than any of them.

Yes, this local move upward on beating estimates despite a bad result is normal, but the broader trend of this stock is still anything but.

They squandered their reputation to gain political clout that seems to have evaporated and are locked into EVs in a market where that’s no longer subsidized and a great deal of EV interest is muted now and other manufacturers are able to push out compelling EV cars. You know that Musk is going to take your money and spend it how he sees fit including obscene bonuses to himself…

I just don’t understand Tesla investors at all at this point…

Well it’s not a problem in arm environments generally, just in x86 land, and the bootloaders don’t have a good shot of figuring it out on behalf of the kernel either… There is an ACPI table but no one cares about it in Linux land and is almost never used in Windows land (EMS does support it) and as a result most systems don’t bother doing it at all.

I have trouble getting real displays working all the time…

Needing to know which serial port is which and manually tellling the kernel via console=ttyS0,115200 or whatehaveyou is annoying…

What other displays could people mean?

Same for me. In Linux, I plug in USB-C and both monitors in the chain light up every time without thinking.

For some reason, dual boot into Windows and it always disables one of the two by default until I manually go in and tweak it alive, and then it will do it again next time I plug in.

Now back in the day, futzing with XFree86 config files and CRT monitors and absolutely lots of ‘voodoo’ to match what Windows pretty simply did with display configuration. But nowadays at least with kwin wayland compositor on nVidia proprietary drivers, it always does exactly what I expect without asking, and Windows is the one that assumes that I don’t want to use all the displays that are connected.

Windows seems pretty clunky by comparison nowadays when it comes to display configuration.

Now juggling my bluetooth audio… I think Windows still has the advantage. I have no idea why sometimes my bluetooth microphone just doesn’t work under Linux. I do appreciate the ability to manually select the bluetooth codec in Linux where in Windows it ‘guesses’ and often guesses wrong, throwing it into ancient headset codec territory when I’m trying to listen to music, because who knows what has made Windows think the microphone device is open…

Networking… Linux wins hands down with VPN connectivity, much much easier to manage all my VPNs in one place in the ‘casual’ user scenario instead of a litany of competing ‘endpoint managers’ in Windows. When VPNs step on each others routing tables, well no OS makes that easy but at least Linux network namespaces makes it possible for me to have multiple network ‘worlds’ in one place to reconcile the conflicts…

Probably the other area where Windows has a bit of an advantage is a consistent binary driver model. In Linux if you are an out-of-tree driver, it’s going to suck to keep up with changing in-kernel APIs to keep your source compatible, let alone have a module running without a recompile after a minor kernel update. I guess the silver lining is almost everyone decided to have their drivers ‘in-tree’ to make sure they are maintained and don’t need a lot of ugly #ifdefs to contend with multiple kernel behaviors… Then there’s nVidia and some commercial filesystems that either cannot or will not go in-tree…

AMD is largely left behind. They are trying real hard to pitch their MI products as an nvidia alternative, but no one is biting. Strangely some of their line is even more exotic to try to host than the highest end Nvidia gear.

So they are relatively less exposed to a crash than nVidia. On top of not doing that lending to their customers…

I have a number of colleagues in Europe that normally I occasionally see. Since ICE ramped up last year, none of them have set foot on American soil at all. No one wants to risk even legally being in this mess.