- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.
All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society.
We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
There are no modern examples in the USA precisely because there is no political will to fund them. That political will is undermined because private companies are large and strong enough that they can influence politicians and prevent projects they they would have to compete with.
Your argument has the implication the wrong way around.
Meanwhile, look at China. The vast majority of China's cometlike economic success can be directly attributed to state funding, and many of its successful projects are directly state-run. That's because China still plays industrial politics that are concerned with economic growth and public welfare instead of rent-seeking.
The current system rather heavily optimizes the ability to make resources into more resources for the shareholders. See e.g. Uber.
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."
Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally.
> Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Shinkansen.
Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow.
While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that.
If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever.
So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities.
There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.
When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent.
(NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government!
I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians.
The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention:
* Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?
* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.
Not to detract from your point, but Waymo's happen to use electric iPace Jaguar cars in several cities that they serve, but their original self driving taxi service used gasoline minivans at beginning in Phoenix, AZ. EV vs ICE is orthogonal to Waymo's self-driving car technology. Waymo was a pure R&D self driving project for 15 or so years that Google/Alphabet dumped insane amounts of money into before a car ride was ever sold to the public. The are a few competitors to Waymo, at various stages, so market forces likely still would have resulted in self driving car technology eventually arriving, but as its competitors are also well funded, so it seems like it still takes a large org to turn university prototypes into a real live product.
As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!
The reason the world is so dependent on a single company is because it costs country-breaking amounts of money to keep-up with the semiconductor manufacturing technology. You can only have cheap semiconductors if there are very few entites building them.
Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
That job market only existed in a handful of countries for a ~40 year period on all of human history.
Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable basis for a society.
I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
Surely you're not suggesting...
And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.
That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.
It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.
Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are competing against double income no kids kind households?
The second one will have more money in the modern context so they're better off. At some times in the past, they wouldn't have been better off because their expenses would increase more than their income. Basically it's about cost of childcare.
What's not okay is that only they have to accept the short end of the stick and the others can profit from that.
But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?
It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract...
Username checks out.
It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.
But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.
If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).
For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.
Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-h...
TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips.
But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.
Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?
At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms
It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
Of course, we also destroyed Russia and made it an oligarchy by giving them bad advice ("shock therapy") after it collapsed. Like basically everything else (including the existence of Facebook) this is Larry Summers' fault.
I would argue that "socialist planning system" had its successes, but in the long run didn't survive the competition, at least in the case of the USSR.
TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.
Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.
Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.
Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
> LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue
That's because Google forced theirs to summarize its search results and search results don't work anymore because we only have one website left.
I very much is not. That logic could be used to justify just about anything, from slavery to littering.
You don’t live in a world populated by just yourself, there are people around you affected by your actions. Be respectful and mindful that what you do affects others. And yourself as well, even if you don’t immediately see it.
Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?
