Thursday, December 25, 2025
Nvidia Acquires Groq --December 26, 2025
Shay, link here. Once you've read the headline(s), this is the post I found most helpful.
- Joann Stern, WSJ, broke the story on my x thread, but it was Shay who really provided the back story.
Jonathan Ross, linked here.
The wealth wizard, link here. Note Groq.
1. This was about owning inference economics, not fixing a chip gap
Nvidia didn't aqui-hired Groq because it was behind on chips since Nvidia already dominates training and most inference & its roadmap (GB300, Rubin) continues to push cost-per-token down while expanding performance faster than nearly anyone else. Training is a one-time event while inference is where the new AI business model lives so as AI moves into real products the money shifts to whoever controls runtime.
2. The future where inference escapes Nvidia just got absorbed
Groq was one of the few credible proofs that latency-sensitive inference could eventually move off GPUs and over time that would have chipped away at Nvidia’s “unavoidable” status. The risk was amplified by Groq’s founder Jonathan Ross, who previously built TPUs at $GOOGL and already proved that custom silicon can compete in real workloads. This deal shuts that door before it could scale.
3. Deterministic inference was the missing layer
GPUs excel at flexibility and scale but they were never designed to guarantee perfectly consistent response times. That matters because real-world AI breaks when latency jitters: voice assistants pause, live translation lags, agentic workflows compound delays. Groq solved this by designing around large amounts of SRAM by keeping data close to the processor and delivering quick responses every time. That made Groq uniquely suited for real-time AI where latency matters more than peak throughput.
At this point, it’s hard to argue Nvidia just sells chips when it’s clearly building the platform that owns training, networking, and now real-time inference.
$20B today to avoid a $200B problem later.
Friday, December 5, 2025
The Fed -- History -- December 5, 2025
AI prompt: history of the huge fight to determine from which cities the fed governors would come.
Google search:
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Friday, November 7, 2025
The End Of The F-150 Lightning -- November 7, 2025
If this becomes a story, we'll track it here.
Right now, this story is absolutely everywhere. I kind of don't get it -- why it's such a big story. EVs may be a thing but EV-pickups are not.
I see dozens of pickup trucks every day in my area of north Texas, DFW-area. I almost never see any pickup truck towing anything except landscaping.
Know what people use to haul stuff? U-Haul. Busiest U-Haul centers in the country are in Texas.
Ford executives are in active discussions about scrapping the electric version of its F-150 pickup, according to people familiar with the matter, which would make the money-losing truck America’s first major EV casualty.
The Lightning, once described by Ford as a modern Model T for its importance to the company, fell far short of expectations as American truck buyers skipped the electric version of the top-selling truck. Ford has racked up $13 billion in EV losses since 2023.
Overall EV sales, already falling short of expectations, are expected to plummet in the absence of government support. And big, electric pickups and SUVs are the most vulnerable.
“The demand is just not there” for F-150 Lightning and other full-size trucks, said Adam Kraushaar, owner of Lester Glenn Auto Group in New Jersey. He sells Ford, GMC, Chevy and other brands. “We don’t order a lot of them because we don’t sell them.”
No final decision has yet been made, according to people familiar with the discussions, but such a move by Ford could be the beginning of the end for big EV trucks.
PDX Routes To Be Affected By Government Shutdown — ChatGPT — November 7, 2025
Safest
PDX–DFW is one of the safest routes in a 10% cancellation scenario.
It wasn’t listed in the original list because it falls into the "unlikely to be cut" category along with routes like:
PDX–SEA
PDX–SFO
PDX–DEN
PDX–PHX
PDX–LAX
Original List
Most likely to be cancelled first (High vulnerability — low frequency / seasonal / single-carrier)
PDX — Keflavík (KEF), Iceland — seasonal transatlantic or limited-season service; typically few weekly departures. (Seasonal / leisure). Portland Monthly
PDX — London (LHR) — long-haul transatlantic with limited weekly frequencies compared to domestic flows (1–7/wk historically). (Long-haul / low frequency). FlightConnections+1
PDX — Amsterdam (AMS) — long-haul, often limited weekly schedule. (Long-haul / low frequency). FlightConnections
PDX — Cancún (CUN) — seasonal leisure route (typically concentrated in high-travel months). Portland Monthly
PDX — Guadalajara (GDL) / other Mexico leisure cities — often fewer frequencies than major domestic routes; sometimes seasonal. FlightsFrom
PDX — Bozeman (BZN) — small non-hub mountain/leisure city, limited daily flights (often 1–2/day). FlightConnections
PDX — Missoula (MSO) — small city non-hub, typically low frequency (1–2/day or less). FlightConnections
PDX — Kalispell / Glacier (FCA) — seasonal/leisure, low frequency. FlightConnections
PDX — Provo (PVU) — Allegiant style service (inherently lower-frequency/low-cost leisure). FlightConnections
PDX — Idaho Falls / Jackson-area — small regional leisure markets, low frequency. FlightConnections
Medium vulnerability (one carrier or limited daily frequency but not strictly seasonal)
PDX — Guadalajara (GDL) (if served at reduced frequency) — (Mexico business/leisure mix). FlightsFrom
PDX — New York (EWR / JFK) when served by only one carrier on certain city-pairs (some flights can be 1–2/day depending on season). FlightsFrom
PDX — Minneapolis (MSP) (some frequencies by multiple carriers but spare flights are less essential than core West Coast trunk routes). FlightsFrom
PDX — Nashville (BNA) — usually fewer daily flights than big hubs (single-carrier patterns). FlightConnections
PDX — Some Florida cities (e.g., Fort Lauderdale, Tampa) — often medium vulnerability depending on season. FlightConnections
Lower vulnerability (unlikely to be cut early — high frequency / hub links)
PDX — Seattle (SEA) — very high frequency (largest route from PDX; huge weekly departures). Airlines will preserve this. FlightsFrom
PDX — San Francisco (SFO) / San Jose (SJC) / LAX — high-frequency West Coast trunk routes; lower chance of cancellation in a 10% cut. FlightConnections
PDX — Phoenix (PHX) / Denver (DEN) — hub connectors with multiple daily frequencies; less vulnerable. FlightConnections
PDX — Las Vegas (LAS) — multiple carriers and many daily flights; lower vulnerability. FlightConnections
PDX — Honolulu / Kahului / Kona (HNL/OGG/KOA) — Hawaiian routes are important leisure routes but often multi-daily; vulnerability depends on season & carrier. FlightConnections
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
How Did AWS Become The Leader In Cloud?
Updates
November 5, 2025: corporate overhaul. Link here. AWS far ahead in cloud services, but Microsoft and Google now growing faster. OpenAI signs seven-year deal with AWS to scale ChatGPT.
Original Post
AI prompt:
Above, in a visual you show AWS, CoreWeave, Google and Microsoft in the "Cloud Layer" box. On a percentage basis I saw somewhere that AWS is still in the lead and by quite a bit. How in the world did AWS did this coming? How i the world did AWS become the leader in cloud? Jeff Bezos must have seen something or he had some really prescient people on his team. Thoughts?
AI reply:
Yes — AWS’s rise is one of the most remarkable business foresights in modern tech history, and it happened largely because Jeff Bezos and a small internal team saw a need no one else recognized at scale.
Here’s the short version of how and why it happened:
🧩 1. The accidental discovery
In the early 2000s, Amazon realized it was repeatedly building the same internal infrastructure — databases, storage systems, and compute power — every time a new product launched (for example, Prime, Marketplace, Kindle). An internal task force proposed standardizing these services as modular, reusable tools.
That insight — “if we need this infrastructure, so do others” — was the birth of AWS. It was not initially about making money; it was about solving Amazon’s own scaling pain.
🚀 2. The right timing
By 2006, startups were desperate for computing power but couldn’t afford to buy servers. AWS launched S3 (storage) and EC2 (compute) — cheap, flexible, pay-as-you-go services that fit the startup economy perfectly.
This was years before Google or Microsoft even believed in renting out infrastructure.
Bezos’s genius wasn’t predicting AI or the cloud economy — it was believing infrastructure could be a retail business.
⚙️ 3. The invisible moat
Once developers built their apps on AWS, they stayed. Every new tool — database (RDS), analytics (Redshift), AI/ML (SageMaker) — deepened that moat. The “switching cost” became enormous.
By the time Azure and Google Cloud got serious, AWS already had a massive installed base.
🌍 4. The culture of builders
AWS didn’t just sell servers — it sold autonomy.
Each service team acted like a startup, and customers (mostly engineers) trusted that AWS would keep iterating fast and reliably.
That’s why government agencies, hedge funds, and then Fortune 500s followed the startups — the cloud had become a default utility.
📈 5. The compounding effect
Every dollar AWS earned was reinvested into more data centers and R&D. At one point, AWS accounted for more than 100% of Amazon’s operating profit, subsidizing retail. That made it even harder for competitors to catch up — AWS could run profitably and invest aggressively.
🧠 The prescience
Bezos’s insight wasn’t mystical; it was systemic thinking.
He saw that:
The internet would eventually be built on top of infrastructure — and whoever owned the infrastructure would own the margin.
He once told his executives that “your margin is my opportunity.”
With AWS, he reversed it — your infrastructure is my opportunity.
The timeline for AWS decisions between 2000 and 2020:
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