cafeconomics

Introduction In Chip War, Chris Miller argues that advanced computing power now underpins economic competitiveness, military capability and scientific progress. The race for AI leadership is therefore also a race for semiconductor supremacy. That claim sits awkwardly with an older assumption. If AI runs on data, countries with the largest populations, India and China, should lead it. They don't. The binding constraint has moved from data to compute, and it is now moving again, toward the electricity that powers compute. "Compute is king" is probably a transitional phase. The Early Assumption: More People, More Data, More AI Power For a decade the logic seemed airtight. More people generate more digital activity, which yields more data and better AI. That logic was built for an earlier generation of systems. Recommendation engines, ad targeting, facial recognition and fraud detection learn from behavioural data such as clicks, payments, faces and location trails. Populatio...

In the age of AI no one has time or inclination to read tomes. It's time for some ethical cheating! So here are AI generated summaries of best selling books on Amazon. 1.Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari ) The Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago): What set Homo sapiens apart from other human species was our ability to communicate about things that do not physically exist. By creating and believing in shared fictions—religions, myths, nations, and legal constructs—thousands of unrelated individuals could cooperate flexibly. The Agricultural Revolution (12,000 years ago): Harari argues that agriculture was "history's biggest fraud." It did not make the individual farmer's life better or healthier than a hunter-gatherer's; it led to worse diets, longer hours of hard labor, vulnerability to drought, and population explosions that trapped humans in permanent settlements. The Unifiers of Humankind: Global unity was forged by thr...

​In 1992, Acer founder Stan Shih sketched a simple diagram on a whiteboard that went on to govern corporate strategy and globalization for three decades: The Smiling Curve . ​Shih’s thesis was elegant and intuitive. In a globalized electronics supply chain, value concentrates at the two extremes. Upstream, high margins reward abstract intellectual property, fundamental R&D, and circuit design. Downstream, lucrative returns flow to distribution, brand equity, software ecosystems, and customer solutions. ​In the middle sat the trough: fabrication, assembly, and testing. It was the commoditized valley of death—labor-heavy, capital-draining, and subject to intense price competition. For years, the mantra across business schools and boardrooms was unambiguous: go asset-light, capture the IP, outsource the bending of metal and etching of silicon, and collect software-like rents. The historical paradigm: A deep "Commodity Trough" in the middle, leaving fabrication...