Gilder’s Guideposts Newsletters
Does Palantir Control Its Own Fate?
Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) is often described as an artificial intelligence company, but it does not build chips, operate large-scale data centers, or develop leading-edge AI models. Instead, Palantir sells software platforms that help organizations integrate, organize, and use their data to make operational decisions. Palantir’s value proposition is straightforward. Large institutions—particularly government agencies and defense […]
Jensen Huang’s Information Theory of Economics
As the author of a book, “Life After Capitalism,” on the information theory of economics, I reveled last week in vindication by none other than Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). In the study of the economy today, experts everywhere uphold economics as “the science of scarcity,” governed by “incentives,” measured by money, minted and […]
Taiwan Semiconductor Pulls Away
The global semiconductor foundry industry, which manufactures chips designed by fabless semiconductor companies such as Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Apple (NASDAQ: APPL), Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), has expanded dramatically over the past 15 years, boosted by demand for smartphones, cloud computing infrastructure, and artificial intelligence processors. As we noted in a […]
Why Nvidia Will Keep Winning?
Why does Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) keep winning? Every major AI company is trying to build an artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator to challenge Nvidia—or at least bypass it. Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), chips designed specifically for machine-learning workloads. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has Inferentia, its custom AI inference processor. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is designing its own chips. […]
The Moat Outside Nvidia
When investors talk about “moats,”—durable barriers to competition—they usually mean things a company owns: patents, factories, or proprietary technology. But some of the strongest moats in technology companies live elsewhere: beyond company borders, inside the minds of the people who build on their platforms. And those people are not employees. They are pursuing their own […]
Thinking Isn’t AI’s Hardest Problem
The big talk in artificial intelligence (AI) is about the race for faster compute, what you might call faster “thinking.” Lately, some attention has focused on the multiplying power needed to drive it. In truth, the AI world is hosting three races at once: faster compute faster communication faster synchronization Compute gets the most headlines. […]
Simple Systems Lose Wars
Or, Why “Keep It Simple” Is Stupid Everybody loves simplicity. Engineers lust after it. After all, complex systems multiply points of vulnerability or failure. Simple systems are easier to maintain and harder to break. In business, clarity wins. If your executives, employees, and customers can’t summarize your value in a sentence, you have a problem. […]
Who Aims the Gun?
Military Advantage Shifts from Mass to Mind A drone rises from a field, guided in real time by a human operator watching a live video feed. The pilot sees what the drone sees: a tank comes into view. The drone accelerates. The image fills the screen. Then: static. A machine worth millions of dollars is […]
From Ammunition to Algorithms: Are Drones Already Obsolete?
By Richard Vigilante For the past several years, commentators have marveled at a new asymmetry in warfare. A drone costing a few thousand dollars can destroy a tank worth millions of dollars. A loitering munition assembled from commercial parts can disable equipment worth a thousand times its cost. For centuries, military advantage flowed from industrial […]
Elon, Pete, and the Drone Wars
71 days. That’s how long it took Venom, a powerful, new, U.S. autonomous strike aircraft (aka a drone) to move from concept to flying prototype. 71 days. In traditional aerospace terms, that is almost indecent. For decades, the path from concept to first flight has stretched across years. Requirements proliferated with each committee’s two cents. […]