> Then in maybe one of the best rug pulls of all time, in July they quietly
changed their valuation to $500 million. A 75% cut in four months. I’ve
never seen anything like that since the 2008 financial crisis.
Not sure where the author is getting their information from but there is seemingly little correlation between the investment rounds quoted in this post and other online sources. No mention for example of the Series E that valued Groq at $6.9bn.
It’s good that you have done that but does that section make sense? It says there was a 75% revenue cut, but the prior number is valuation, not revenue. Or was valuation and revenue the same at that time (seems unlikely)?
Edit: some searching about suggests that Groq initially projected $2 billion in revenue for 2025, later cutting that forecast to $500 million. That appears to have be what this article is trying to say.
Cook’s greatest achievement - Apple’s supply chain - has, as set out in the ‘Apple in China’ book [1], turned into Apple’s biggest risk and weakness. The next CEO won’t be worrying about Siri or Vision Pro; they’ll be trying to deal with Apple’s reliance on China.
I sure hope Cook and teams have been actively working on this for a decade already.
The book is interesting in showing both a lack of early awareness of this weakness, AND some people clearly noticing, AND Apple being very powerful and resourceful when it notices a problem.
> In my view, the key features of a microprocessor are that it provides a CPU on a single chip (including ALU, control functions, and registers such as a program counter) and that it is programmable.
Which means that, pioneering as it was, this wasn’t a microprocessor.
Ken’s post is terrific btw for an overview of the candidates for the title of first microprocessor.
Edit please note the comments in the linked post by SemiAnalysis below who have lots of reports that the tool is legit but who are skeptical. They have clearly progressed somewhat since the tracker project!
> Evidence so far is scarce, so we repeat these claims with some healthy skepticism. But we should also note, external contacts and 3rd party reports are all telling us the same story: the litho tool is legit. Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information.
> Naysayers will point out a million reasons why this is improbable, difficult, etc. - and they are mostly correct.
> We're hopeful for success but skeptical given how many questions there are.
Money laundering. Or more of the usual, in that the rich have so much money that they've never had to invest intelligently. Just scream for endless growth and throw darts at the dart board.
That way when you hit the bullseye, you'll make da hueg profitz while all the employees of the company can't afford to buy houses.
This news article is a week old, meaning this post was clearly upvote-brigaded by reputation management software to try to bury the post about Substrate being a fraud.
It is wild that the founders have very little experience in the space, and that their claims are based on sparse research. That said, the Substack article doesn't seem any more credible. Other than the name DC Fusion LLC, I missed any indications that the founder was working on a fusion startup. The article correctly identifies as an opinion piece but doesn't seem worthy of credible referencing.
I don’t have the expertise to say whether I agree with the conclusions of the post but the experience and track records of the founders are surely relevant? Happy to be shown evidence that these sections of the post are wrong.
Very unlikely. Moving to Arm allowed Apple to have a single architecture across all their hardware and leverage iPhone designs as the starting point for Mac SoCs.
Not sure where the author is getting their information from but there is seemingly little correlation between the investment rounds quoted in this post and other online sources. No mention for example of the Series E that valued Groq at $6.9bn.