This is just like selling / buying options in any other industry, e.g farming to buy something at a specified price in the future.
They've agreed to buy XYZ product at 123 time at a price between $100 and $200.
If prices plummet, they've still agreed to buy it at $100 (similar to selling an options $100 Strike PUT), but if prices skyrocket, they don't need to pay more than $200 (similar to buying an options $200 Strike CALL)
Anything in between is just the price, so if it's $150 then its just $150
It's not exactly the same as using options, but the rough idea.
I read a story of one datacenter years ago where their waste heat was heating the industrial complex around them. It was a nice change to see. Regulations around it would really help. Oh you want to do this? You need to reuse 80% of your waste heat to get approval, and have x% of power be renewable.
I had this happen many years ago, to the point there was no chance something wasn't listening. We suspected it was my partners iPhone with Facebook installed before they got better about preventing abuse like that, as it was a Facebook ad that showed up.
Were talking about something where we never use the product, would never use the product, but it came up in a conversation just between the 2 of us, and there were ads the next day.
Even if it was open source, you'd need to be able to verify what they ship matches the specs. Allowing you to flash whatever you want onto it helps, but you still need to validate the hardware.
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn't recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
Pretty much yep. Elon has a controlling interest in SpaceX so I think that was just his outright decision, unless he had to abstain and let the investors decide? I'm not sure if he had a controlling stake in xAI.
Edit: You also left off 'overvalued' when referring to xAI/Twitter. I think SpaceX honestly could have grown into it's individual valuation pre-merger.
I think people might see that sometimes, but not understand why, because they just see a starship blows up headlines and don't understand what is happening as it's a test program (for now), and the headlines / stories don't convey that.
So when things explode, sometimes it's fine, and the stock might go up because a lot of really important things still were tested, some for the first time, and they went well.
Other times, things will explode and it can cause huge delays, and while they learn something, it's still 'bad' compared to the above blow ups, and the stock will very likely go down when these ones happen.
And then sometimes, something goes wrong on the test pad and you blow it up, and that is very bad. It's a test pad, its meant for that, but it causes huuuuuge delays.
But OP is right, they brought this new chaos upon themselves by going public. They really shouldn't have done it yet.
There's a lockup period ya. I heard they reduced the duration though, but it's typically 6 months.
Anyone who bought at $135 the money went into SpaceX's balance sheet.
For now, anyone buying after the $135 is buying from people who bought those $135 shares.
Mark Cuban is famous for having zero cost collared his shares that he couldn't sell and getting out of the dotcom bubble with his money since it protected him from the downside that happened, so maybe it's possible they've done that here as well?
As long as they're all just LLMs with the same design im not sure they'll get a moat.
Someone will likely need to depart from the current thought process and come up with something new that is the next leap, but also not have how it works leak.
Like the next big thing after transformers, before anyone else catches on. Im sure they all have people researching new ideas.
But the new GPUs absolutely can run the GPTs from back then better. We just dont want that anymore, we want the better bigger models that continue to be as or more expensive as what it was back then.
When you replace the cards in 5 years it'll run it even better. We just wont want that then.
Edit: and gains dont have to be huge, even 5-10% between generations, but take that to 10 years like I said and it can be substantial.