Remember when Amazon.com was “Amazon.org”? If your answer to the previous question is yes, then you’re aging yourself.
Whether yes or no, there’s modern learning to be had in past pejoratives attached to Amazon in the late 1990s, and right up to 2001. That was when the then internet retailer reported its first profitable quarter. Until then, “Amazon.org” was a popular quip about this “non-profit” that seemingly would never find a path to profitability through internet sales.
Online commerce seemed a bit niche at the time. As the 1990s ended and Amazon was still suffering massive quarterly losses, over 90% of transactions were still settled by a check sent through the mail.
How things change. Which is the point. Thanks to the very rare, but highly energetic opposite thinkers in our midst, tomorrow is often another country (George Will) relative to today.
This is worth keeping in mind as a bipartisan collection of U.S. Senators – Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons on the Democratic side of the aisle, Jim Banks and Tom Cotton on the Republican side – pursues government force to restrain Nvidia from selling its most advanced, “frontier” AI chips in China.
The Senators wrap their stab at industrial policy in “national security” sanctimony as though progress in China that is enhanced by American know-how and market-leading products looms as some kind of threat to the U.S. No, trade is the opposite of war.
Trade relentlessly lifts those who engage in it on the path to innovation and productivity leaps that couldn’t happen nearly as fast without work divided. Put another way, the genius of labor division doesn’t lose its brilliant luster when it’s enterprising people in China and the U.S. dividing the work. Which is a statement of the obvious, but also a digression.
Pivoting back to the previously mentioned Senators eager to arrogate to themselves control over what Nvidia can sell in China, and to whom, their conceit is astounding. And in a sense hilarious. Implicit in their efforts to control the Nvidia AI chip flow to China is a presumption that the Senators have a sense of what AI chips will power ongoing advance in the space. Except that they don’t. Neither seemingly do those in the proverbial AI arena.
For evidence, we need only consider Anthropic’s recent, rather limited release of Claude Mythos, an AI deemed so powerful and potentially disruptive that it’s only been made available to very few in what’s being described as a “controlled partnership.” Was the latter just brilliant marketing? Readers and markets can decide.
So far, however, it’s evident from a rising private valuation placed on Anthropic ($1 trillion as of last week) that Claude Mythos has leaped ahead of competitors. That it has is something that could perhaps persuade Senators Warren et al to cease attempting to centrally plan AI’s evolution, along with the chips poised to power it.
That’s because Claude Mythos was trained not by one of Nvidia’s frontier chips (“frontier something that’s happily never reached in technology as is), but Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trainium 2, an AI chip not presently seen as frontier anything. Hmmm.
Who would have predicted this? In the question we find the problem with export controls, and most certainly the folly of U.S. senators well outside the proverbial AI arena attempting to predict the future of an industry that they plainly don’t grasp in the present.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com