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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   14918 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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The goal of the CEO of any American company is implicitly if not explicitly the maximization of shareholder value

You're so confident. On what time horizon? One quarter? One year? Decades? As long as the company gets to exist? Do you realize that Jensen is a founder, and founders are not equal to board-appointed CEOs?

The idea that Huang is doing it as some grand geopolitical play (and where his company's bottom line is a secondary concern) is a bit hard to take seriously.

If the only way you can think of this is myopic mercantilism, then you are indeed culturally and civilizationally inferior to the Chinese and deserve to lose, get dunked on and consigned to the dustbin of history. You're inferior people, xiaoren. The Teacher had said:

The nature of the noble man is like the wind, the nature of the inferior man is like the grass. When the wind blows over the grass, it always bends.

Get bent already.

…But I think people like Jensen and Elon — tellingly, not Americans, but those who have adopted the nobler American ideal — are different. Jensen says:

First, in order to have a race to do well in a race, you have to understand the race and you have to understand the resources that you’re working with, the assets that you have, the assets you don’t have, your advantages and your disadvantages. And some of the things to realize is that AI is fundamentally at its core level. And going back to the three levels that we’re talking about, at each level we have to make sure that we understand the game.

And this game isn’t. There’s no 60 minute clock on this thing. This is an infinite game. And so most people aren’t very good at playing infinite games. You know, Nvidia is now 33 years old. We’ve been through three computer revolutions, from the PC revolution to the Internet to mobile, and now we’re in AI. And so you have to, in order to thrive across all of these different changes in the environment, you have to understand how to play games.

And so the things that I just described, understanding the game, understanding the assets, you have really important at the first layer, at the technology layer, the most important thing to understand is that the intellectual capital, and remember, 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. First, just take a step back and recognize that that important factor has to play into how we think about the game.

The next is AI factories. In order to do well there, you need to have energy. Because fundamentally we transfer, we transform electricity into digital tokens. Just as the last industrial revolution transformed atoms through energy into, you know, steel things and physical things that we know cars and things like that, buildings and things like that. And the generation before that, we gave it water into a machine called the dynamo. And what came out was electricity. And so now we have electricity go in and tokens come out. So the next layer requires energy.

The layer above that is just happening now. And it’s really, really important that we understand that ultimately the winners of the last industrial revolution wasn’t the country that invented it, it was the country that applied it. And the United States applied. Applied steel, applied energy faster than any country. Everybody else was worried about things like labor and, you know, horses being replaced by cars and, you know, those kind of matters. But the United States just. We just took it and ran with it.

And so the infrastructural layer above that is about the application of the technology. It’s about not being afraid of it, wanting to engage it, reskilling. Reskilling our workforce so that we’re able to apply it, encouraging people to adopt it. And so when you look at the, when you look at AI through the lens that I just described to the framework I just described, each one of the layers has its own, if you will, challenges and opportunities, and the game’s a little different in each one.

I don't think Jensen wants to sell out to China to make line go up. He wants to keep playing the infinite game.

But inferior men can only interpret a superior man's vision in terms of profit.

I still don't understand how exporting chips to China is supposed to help the US in the long run when the Chinese long run plan is to not import chips.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good. It reduces US trade deficit, providing funds for more useful things. Just 1 million chips is $25B, it's equal to the annual worth of those soy exports Trump frets so much about, it's like 5 times more than the much-hyped LNG boom. It derisks the circular investment bubble with NVidia as the nexus that's now a large part of US economy, and extends the timeline on which China stops importing them (ie the moment where domestic computing platforms are adopted by their top labs and shutting Nvidia out is not disruptive to DeepSeek V5 or Doubao-Seed 3 or whatever).
In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later, it's just that they'll develop and deploy stronger AI at larger scale and secure some advantages in the short term, in the limit literally ASI. An auxiliary argument is that they will use extra compute to speed up the necessary research. That can be debated and weighed against standard economic arguments.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good.

We were just discussing long vs short term thinking. Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

We're not in a more relaxed geopolitical environment. We're in an environment where China is doing everything it can to stimulate domestic chip production including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

If you believe that China is interested in being invulnerable to export controls and you believe that Nvidia use can lead to lock-in, it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later

Correct. I brought up the other argument in a previous thread where you responded with a non-sequitur about orange man having bad trade policy. Here I'm limiting myself strictly to your claim that chip exports would be beneficial in the long run for Nvidia.

Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

I have the exact opposite view on this. Market share is the long term play – maybe 30 years. Your “long term” AGI supremacy play is a no-term Hail Mary premised on some dubious assumptions and, frankly, low IQ racism about Chinese capacity for independent R&D.

including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

It's a philosophical commitment to independence. They enact protectionist measures for fledgling industries, and scale them down after achieving competitiveness, like they cut subsidies for EVs or batteries.

As I've repeatedly said, current Chinese AI software has low adoption, especially by talented collectives, and thus low development velocity; so long as it doesn't get adoption it doesn't matter if they can physically make good chips, they'll remain vulnerable to export controls and will have to do another multi-year moonshot after the next Democrat opportunistically cuts them off. H20 and RTX Pro 6000D are just not providing enough value to justify further software stagnation (not to mention reduced revenues to domestic manufacturers). H200, because it is both a powerful GPU and scales to large training clusters, seems to be marginally valuable enough so we see more nuanced regulation. After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.

it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China

As explained above, it does not follow and you're refusing to understand what they're doing.

After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.

Hardly. If Chinese chips become better than the best Nvidia has to offer, there is, as you say, little reason to ban imports since approximately nobody will want to use them. EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product.

Of course, if Chinese chips are better than Nvidia's best, the prospects for Nvidia market share become quite slim. You seem to want it both ways - Nvidia exports to China will ensure Nvidia's dominance in China (lock in! Efficiency! Yields!), but also China is going to ensure that domestic chips are the market leader.

EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product

Well, this reveals the problem with first principles thinking popular among rationalists. Tesla model Y is consistently one of the hottest EVs in China. They totally love Teslas. It genuinely has advantages over domestic cars, they constantly make videos where its FSD dunks on Xiaomi and other competition. Upper class Chinese buy Teslas.

(Of course, it's Tesla made in Shanghai. It so happens that Shanghai Gigafactory is about 2.3x more productive per worker.)

Similar logic can apply to Nvidia.

Jensen speaking here is mostly just CEO boilerplate. Obviously they'll say "oh yeah, we're in for the long haul", but that's not much in the way of evidence. I'll grant that founders have a bit more of a tendency towards pie-in-the-sky goals like 20 year plans and maybe geopolitical stuff, but Huang is still subject to the whims of shareholders. He doesn't even have extra insulation like Zuckerberg with a screwy voting shares system. And Elon makes plenty of boneheaded short-term decisions.

If the only way you can think of this is myopic mercantilism

Get bent already.

But inferior men can only interpret a superior man's vision in terms of profit.

Can you stop it with this nonsense please?

Can you stop with this nonsense please? He founded Nvidia, he navigated it strategically through every industry transition, proactively shaping them, he made a gamer hardware shop into the most valuable company on Earth and the kingmaker in the AGI race, he clearly intends to keep it in the running through all future transitions, and he understands Chinese competition very well. He knows that they're in a tough spot and Mellanox is not an adequate counter to Huawei's networking. He's trying to save not just his company but your asses, because he's existentially invested in them.

When he says that he's playing an infinite game rather than just chasing a quick buck that'd leave his headquarters irrelevant in under 20 years, this deserves infinitely more faith than your jaded dismissals of “CEO boilerplate”. You need to acknowledge that your standards of judgement and your theory of incentives are only fit for business done by inferior men. People are not created equal, opinions of people are not of equal worth, Jensen's opinion >>>>> median American's opinion.

Oh the high and mighty. The dude ran a company making hardware for gamers and crypto miners and got lucky that it ended up being civilizational important and that they bet on EUV big. He is by all measures obviously an excellent business man, impressively ahead of the game on this latest DRAM shortage. But none of that is evidence of some kind of long term view. Spare us the Ubermench talk, I thought we were supposed to be the nazis in decline.

It's impressive how you can make a $4.6T business in the US just being a lucky huckster, huh. Just like you can dance into becoming the president of a superpower while being a bumbling TV personality, rather than claw your way up over decades, starting from the flea-infested cave in Shaanxi. Blessed land, Manifest Destiny, a people chosen by Providence itself. I guess any mediocrity ought to feel invested in protecting it, then. Where else do you play and win in such lotteries.

But I don't share this theory. I don't think the US allows you to play on God Mode, and I think Jensen is not just an excellent businessman, and certainly not a “treasonous worm”. He is an industrial titan like Rockefeller or Carnegie, he genuinely has a long-term vision, and he demonstrably executes on it. America was made great by such men, and if it declines, it will be over forgetting their value.

Nazis were wrong about innate racial superiority. Most people are mediocre, whether Aryan or not. This doesn't mean that Nietzsche or Confucius were wrong about the existence of specific superior individuals.

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