You want to punish NVIDIA for calling its shots correctly? You don't see the many ways that backfires?
That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.
Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate?
> I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society
Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?
Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money.
> Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?
The problem isn't who is the steward of the capital. The problem is that economically efficient thing to do for a single company is (given sufficient fab capacity, and a monopoly) to raise prices to extract a greater share of the pie at the expense of shrinking the size of the pie. I'm not worried about who takes the profit, I'm worried about the size of the pie.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Lol it's not "monopolies" limiting fab capacity. Existing fab companies can barely manage to stand-up a new fab in different cities. Fabs are impossibly complex and beyond risky to fund.
It's the kind of thing you'd put government money to making but it's so risky government really don't want to spend billions and fail so they give existing companies billions so if they fail it's not the governments fault.
Under your idea, we’ll try a badly broken economic philosophy again. And while we’re at it, we will completely stifle investment in innovation.
One of the things that the post mentioned was the meager profit margin that the companies made during this time.
But the thing is that this set the America auto and aviation industry up to rule the world for decades.
A government going to a company and saying 'we need you to produce this product for us at a lower margin thab you'd like to' isn't the end of the world.
I don't know if this is one of those scenarios but they exist.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-a...
They are an intellectual property company holding the rights on plans to make graphic cards, not even a company actually making graphic cards.
The government could launch an initiative "OpenGPU" or "OpenAI Accelerator", where the government orders GPUs from TSMC directly, without the middleman.
It may require some tweaking in the law to allow exception to intellectual property for "public interest".
