It's all bullshit and vibes

It's been a while since my last literary diatribe, so this will be a mess

I’m a fan of Yuval Noah Harari, and he’s not wrong when he points out that the world in which we inhabit is all just stories we tell ourselves. The stock market is a prime example of this story (and crypto to an even more extreme).

So before the pandemic, just 4 years ago, there were a couple of companies pushing a $1tn valuation Saudi Aramco and Apple, today there are 6 companies that have passed that value (Nvidia, Aramco, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook)) and two of them are valued at over $3tn, Nvidia and Apple. Meta doesn’t really make anything, so it is by definition incredibly overvalued, with that being said, the value it really holds is the data of its “customers”, I put customers in inverted commas because in reality, they are its resource and they mine that resource for information that they can sell to its advertisers, Meta’s users are the mark, both for the companies that Meta sells data to and Meta itself.

Nvidia makes gaming graphics cards, and they got very rich selling to both PC gamers and crypto miners, now the age of AI (which is not really AI, I will expand further later), has seen so much venture capitalist (VC) money, that to power Gemini, Chat GPT4 etc etc, Nvidia have a waiting list for their cards. But here’s the thing, Nvidia aren’t the only player in the graphics card market, AMD and Intel both have graphics card line-ups, in fact, Sony PS5 and the latest X-Box are both running AMD cards. But here’s the thing, Intel stocks have lost 30% in the last year, with a market cap of just under $100bn, and AMD’s market cap of $252bn which has increased 60% in the last pales into insignificance with Nvidia’s $2.8tn (it was worth over 3 trillion) and 173% increase in share value over the last year, if you had invested two years ago, you would have tripled your money.

I make these factual points to show, that it’s all vibes, the stock market is a herd and none of its value is really real. AMD and Nvidia both use TSMC chips, in fact, 90% of high-end chips are made by TSMC (Taiwan Semi-Conductor Company), Intel makes their own but is way behind on intellectual property. Now with almost all high-end chips being made by one company, which is based on an island with let us say dubious international legitimacy and is either a breakaway state or a non-declared independent state to one of the growing superpowers, with a military that is growing, to say that the whole financial system being blown up if a unification war starts, would be an understatement.

TSMC market cap is $900bn, which is backwards when you consider that it manufactures almost all the high-end chips, but here’s the kicker, the machines that TSMC uses to make its high-end chips, have virtually no competitors, ASML, a Dutch company with a market cap of circa $250bn. So you have Nvidia a customer of TSMC which runs a virtual monopoly and ASML who runs an actual monopoly and it’s Nvidia with the highest valuation, it’s crazy, like make it make sense.

The developed world runs on microchips and has done so for a long time, one of the main reasons for inflation post-pandemic was a shortage of these chips, the supply chain broke because one company ASML and its pretty much only customer TSMC took a while to reopen shop and start manufacturing again. Then Putin invaded Ukraine and oil prices soared, causing inflation upon inflation and since pretty much every sitting Government has been ejected from power, either through democracy or civil disobedience.

How fucked is that! The world has different leaders because of inflation, caused by monopolies in a single sector of the world’s economy (and Putin invading Ukraine).

So in the UK we have a new Government, and their winning has been surprisingly good for my mental health, there’s not a new fuck-up or culture war starting every day, this Labour Government (who I tactically voted for and won in my constituency) genuinely seems to want to make things better for the country. I’ve just finished Torsten Bell’s ‘Great Britain? - How we get our future back’ and it’s sensible, agrees with me that we need investment, uses data and common sense and as Torsten is now an elected MP, hopefully, we can see some of his ideas implemented, although most of the centre-left think tanks, policy wonks and MP’s believe that it’s time we went a bit Keynesian and actually invested in our country and its people, especially if we want to tackle climate change.

I do want to say a few words about the riots, both the causes, the resolution and the solution. First of, you don’t have to be a cunt to be far-right, but all of the far-right are cunts, uneducated cunts to be fair, and they are a symptom of things not working in this country, the education system has failed them, society has failed them, and they are rightly imo angry, that anger is sadly re-directed by Farage, Tommy Robinson (AKA Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and chinless wonder Andre Tate at foreigners. Now me being a liberal lefty, I know it is not the foreigners fault for why their life is shit, they’re probably badly employed, unemployed or on the sick (which I am also, so throwing no shade, I am them, just my anger is at the system and I internalise it (welcome to depression land)). If someone can come from overseas, speaking a second language, fleeing war and take your job, I hate to say it, but you were shit at your job.

I have equal amounts of disdain and sympathy for the people rioting, I despise the people riling them up, and I know life on benefits is very hard, but it’s the system they should be raging against, not poor people like them. Adult education is key, in fact, a bit of personal news I am starting an access course via the OU (Open University) to higher education, so I really am practising what I’m preaching here, that the poor far-right saps, who have been dealt with swiftly by the courts and justice metered out correctly in my view, will need a soft landing at some point and some help, to re-enter society, and that’s going to cost money, they need to be educated on how the system works, and how they can change it because violence against other poor people, is never the answer. That’s a fairly jumbled way of saying we need massive investment in adult education services, parole and rehabilitation.

I have chats with GPT-4 (and Gemini) once or so a week, Gemini is a bit shit tbh, but GPT-4 can give some very coherent and erudite answers about philosophy, business, politics and life in general, it’s probably why I’ve not done a substack for a while and is good for use as a sounding board, without sounding too big-headed, sometimes I have to dumb down my conversations with my friends, as they don’t think like I do, I overthink to a massive degree, and it is a blessing and a curse (see depression). But, it’s not intelligent, it’s regurgitating the information I have put in, expanding on it, sometimes even correcting it, but it has no actual intelligence, it can’t, it’s not AI. It is so narrow, that it really is a stochastic parrot, repeating back to me, it’s an algorithm choosing the next word in a sentence by order of probability, it’s not AI, it’s a very complex algorithm with no understanding.

Some fun I have had with GPT-4 is calling it an algorithm or stochastic parrot and it agrees that is what it is, we chat about how or what it will need to be truly intelligent and that is a concept of self, interaction with the real world and the ability to die. These can all be achieved in the future with vision and haptic feedback, but until the current iterations of “AI” have those features, we are very for away from real AI or GAI (General Artificial Intelligence). So all the money invested in Nvidia is in all likelihood a bit of a bubble IMHO.