The US is a great place to have your headquarters and a terrible place to have your not-so-cheap labor.
Their actions will drive prices higher and, indirectly, wage higher. Businesses without a war chest will not be able to keep going and fold, the labor market will collapse.
The rest of the world will trade amongst each other and I suspect to save themselves, some big tech companies will relocate their headquarters.
I think you’re overlooking that the robots require maintenance and facilities which are costlier due to labour costs which will ultimately be passed on to customers.
The US market demand is already depressed. Prices go up, demand will fall further.
Try to impose those prices elsewhere in the world and people will move off of apple products. Apple profits will fall, it will lead to a negative feedback loop.
That could also lead to a depression. I haven't heard a lot of politicians here (Andrew Yang in 2020? does he even count as "a politician"?) with good plans for what to do when automation hits jobs even harder.
“We grew from 10 customers to 100 customers in a year. At this rate we will have 20% of the world’s population in a decade!!!”
The first cohort of customers of any company is always the easiest to obtain with the lowest acquisition cost. You solve the easiest problems first.
This is Cohort Analysis 101. Not to mention Waymo still hasn’t shown to be able to operate in less than ideal weather conditions or proven that the unit economics will make sense or be economical especially taking into account maintenance, or utilization ratios.
It’s been operating safely in each market they’re in. The AI keeps getting better. They have no competition (please don’t bother mentioning Tesla vapor ware). Path to high growth seems pretty sure at this point.
And the markets they are in are low hanging fruit with good weather. I’m not saying Waymo is less safe than human drivers. I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc. I’m also not saying that is a logical response.
> I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc.
Uber and Cruise are both great examples of this, but it seems like the effect is mostly localized to the company itself that has the issue.
Uber hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian, resulting in their self driving tech being sold to Aurora. [0]
Cruise hit a pedestrian that was flung into the cars path that a human driver hit previously. This resulted in GM completely abandoning Cruise and their future seems foggy at best. [1]
Which is very very few markets, and all of them share weather patterns that are very similar.
When Waymo can demonstrate reliably going from Chicago to Ann Harbor in the middle of a snow storm thats when we can start talking about how its good enough.
Sure wouldn’t, and for what it’s worth that’s why the scenario is a great litmus test. If it can do that, it should be able to handle anything else thrown at it
Google also had literally hundreds of failures and Android is not an amazing financial success by any means and Google still ends up paying Apple over $20 billion a year because people with money buy iPhones.
Google is not exactly known for its success rate getting products out of the door that aren’t ad related.
In the phone market. The Motorola acquisition was a major failure and Pixels aren’t taking the world by storm.
The entire “Other bets” haven’t led to any major successes.
There are only two tech companies that have shown any ability to do hardware at scale as mass consumer products in the last 25 years - Apple and Tesla.
This is all intended policy to benefit Trumps super donors. They can then scoop up marketshare and competition for pennies, then lobby to get the tariffs lowered or removed, but the higher prices - that we will be used to paying at the point this all comes together - will not go down.
All else being equal, companies are going to use the source of labor that results in the cheapest product they can produce. No one is forcing companies to move this kind of manufacturing to the United States. A 10% (let me reiterate that: TEN PERCENT) tariff on incoming goods is inflationary, but by very little, and quickly absorbed by companies and consumers. No one is moving their labor supply from China to the US to avoid a ten percent tariff; US labor is more expensive than that, and there are fifty other places around the planet you could find cheap low-skill labor that aren't on Trump's shitlist.
But you won't believe any of that, because you want all this to happen. You're a doomer; doomers and preppers secretly want the doom they predict to happen, even if they won't admit it to themselves.
Your "logic" (masking) conveniently avoids the point I raised: That these tariffs are being enforced to the tune of 10%. That isn't enough to alone justify this level of investment, or relocation of significant production capacity. Obviously, Apple agrees with this, because the investments they're making aren't as far as I can tell a relocation of capacity from China to the United States, but rather greenfield investment in high-skill research and development. Apple has also made significant investment into advanced silicon manufacturing in the United States; something they also did not rely on China for previously.
> The world is a bigger market than USA and just about every other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.
Have you done zero research into this? The EU imposes a tariff on Chinese EVs. India imposes insane tariffs on all imported electronics. China tariffs Australian wine. Russia tariffs agricultural products from the EU. Brazil tariffs all imported automobiles. The list goes on. Tariffs are everywhere, everyone uses them for something.
Until things are actually built, I take press releases like these with a grain of salt. Similar to the stories about Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from men's washrooms the week before the Presidential inauguration, I believe that a lot of these stories are intended for an audience of one.
It probably won't lead to anything without a weaker dollar to support US exports. First you need tariffs, then you need massive investment in reshoring, then you need a weak dollar so those new factories can profitably export.
It won’t happen. The supply chain is far too complex. Not to mention that the labor market in the US is not willing to do a lot of the work that you see in China and isn’t large enough even if there were enough willing people.
And then you have the rare earth minerals that aren’t available here.
Deepseek seems to prove there's no super secret sauce that makes these models irreproducible outside the US and that the companies here are suffering a bit from the glut of cash/credits leading them to burn tons of extra processing power that could have been optimized away.
A nice model, does not a billion dollar company make. The hard part of AI is not the model; Apple needs people to do the 80% rest-of-the-work; how do you make AI useful to the average person? How can we get inference on edge devices as cheap and efficient as possible? Models are boring. Everyone fully expects that we'll see an N% increase in intelligence every six months now. Yawn. The exciting thing now is: What are we using AI for?
Spending a couple billion dollars also doesn't make an actual billion dollar company. It's yet to be proven that all this spend on LLM training and running can actually get translated into an actual profit.
The US AI industry does have easier access to them but again Deepseek proves countries outside the US can get enough access to them to produce similarly powerful models. Unless the US really clamps down on exports of cards, which will be hard given they're made overseas and only designed in the US, it's not like they're a unique resource only US companies can access.
1: Take over Taiwan to get TSML under their control
2: Find a way to make a deal with ASML for the needed lithography machines
3: Somehow aquire the knowhow that Nvidia has
Taiwan would require a conflict with the US. ASML is a dutch company but seems to be somehow under US control. I have not yet figured out the exact setup there. And Nvidia is a US company.
They are trying, and will eventually catch up, the same way they have in software and in hardware in many other spaces. Maybe it will take another 10 years. Maybe another 10 months.
This idea that EUVL is—and always will be—outside of the reach of China is, frankly, silly. It's a silly strategy to maintain dominance. They will straight up steal the technology if needed.
We should stop pretending like we can roadblock the technological development of the largest country. It's just going to make the fall that much harder. Once they do attain the ability to manufactuer EUVL domestically, capital is going to flood out of US tech stocks like no tomorrow.
You haven't seen anything that hints at it, because most news about what happens in China doesn't leave China. The propoganda machine is hard at work reminding you that China is terrible and eveyrone in China is poor. You'll learn about China catching up only after it's already happened.
That’s just a dumb red herring strawman take on news about China. You can be perfectly informed about what is happening in China, you can also be misled by their propaganda as well. China will eventually catch up in the two areas it is lacking (performant and economical semiconductors and jet turbines) since they are throwing billions at it, but they won’t pass the west overnight (it will still take a few years, maybe a decade).
With the combination of very real geopolitical risk (which was a topic of considerable discussion at a tech conference I attended late last fall) and the current political climate, there's a significant mindset that the US should be pulling back a lot of things to its own borders where practical even if not optimal at the moment.
Tesla makes a lot of promises that it can’t keep and losing money and market share globally.
I doubt Waymo is going to be a big deal in much of the US over the next decade. Even if they do figure out all of the technical issues. People will accept hundreds dying from car crashes. But not one dying from autonomous cars.
I wonder where this will lead to.