Locator: 48682ARCHIVES.
Breaking: Anthropic (Claude) seeks to double its valuation to over 150 billion in talks with Mideast funds -- Financial Times -- this news broke after the information below was already posted.
- corroborates Tom Lee's statement -- see below: this is still the early states of AI;
- reminder: Anthropic was not part of the Trump-Musk Mideast Tour of The Mideast (TMMT) some months ago
- this tells me a number of things, to include:
- Anthropic wouldn't make this announcement if they didn't think the Mideast still has another $100 billion to invest in AI
- Anthropic is a very, very sophisticated chatbot; it's not a conversational chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT
From CNBC, mid-afternoon, Friday, July 25, 2025.
Tom Lee -- speculative bubble:
- speculation that inflation is coming back;
- speculation that we are on the precipice of a recession.
Tom Lee -- PTSD, due to:
- fear of tariffs;
- fear of "the Fed."
Tom Lee "only" invests in the "35 best large cap publicly traded companies."
Tom Lee:
- early stages of AI
Other:
- risk of recession: lowest "recession probability" year to date
- anyone who says this is a bubble didn't live through or doesn't remember the 1990s
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The Book Page
So, I’m reading The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester, c. 2019.
Chapter 8 on “GPS” was incredibly fascinating, but then I started reading Chapter 9 — and whoo-hoo!. It turned out to be the story of a machine that makes machines, a machine that was sent to Chandler, Arizona, in 2018.
The chapter begins:
Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freight aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a desert exurb of Phoenix, Arizona.
The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these profoundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their destination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheel trucks. On arrival and finally uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine — a machine too, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before.
Just like its cast-iron predecessors, the Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making technical devices by the precise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, of which perform their work electronically, without any visible moving parts.
......
......
The particular device sent out to perform such tasks in Arizona, and which, when fully assembled, is as big as a modest apartment, is known formally as an NXE:3350B EUV scanner It is made by a generally unfamiliar but formidably important Dutch-registered company known simply by its initials, ASML.
Each of of the machines in the order costs its customer about $100 million, making the total order worth about $1.5 billion.
Wow, wow, wow. I did not see that coming.
But it certainly connects a lot of dots.
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Continuing
On page 291, more of the ASML story.
Enormous machines such as the fifteen that started to arrive at Intel's Chandler (Arizona) fab from Amsterdam in 2018 are employed to help secure this goal. The machines' maker, ASML -- the firm was originally called Advanced Semiconductor Materials International -- was founded in 1984, spun out from Philips, the Dutch company initially famous for its electric razors and lightbulbs (sic). The lighting connection was key, as the machie tools that the compay was established to make in those early days of the integrated circuit used intense beams of light to etch traces in photosensitive chemicals on the chips, and then when on to employ lasers and other intense sources as the dimensions of the transistors on the chips became ever more diminished.
Then the process is explained in great detail.
Then:
With the latest photolithographic equipment at hand, we are able to make chiops today that contain multitudes: seven bilion transistors on one circuit, a hudred million transistors corralled within one square millimeter of chip space. But with numbers like this comes a warning. Limits surely are being reached -- remember, this was being written in 2018. The train that left the railhead in 1971 may be about to arrive, after a journey almost half a century, at the majesty of the terminus. Such a reality seems increasingly probable, not least because as the space between transistors diminishes ever more, it fast approaches the diameter of individual atoms. And with spaces that small, leakage of some properties of one transistor (whether electric, electronic, atomic, photonic, or quantum-related properties) into the field of another will surely soon be experienced.
There will be, in short, a short circuit -- maybe a sparkless and unspectacular short circuit, but a misfire nonetheless, with consequences for the efficiency and utility of the chip and of the computer or other device at the heart of which it lies.
So, they need new machines to make chips even smaller.
An American company (which ASML subsequently bought) had already developed a unique means of producing this particular and pecuiar type of EUV radiation. Some said the company's method verged on the insane, and it is easy to see why.
If everything works properly -- and at the time of this writing, it seems to be -- then the first of these supercomplex chips, made in this bizarre manner, will be on offer from 2018 onward. And Moore's law, by then fifty-three years old, will prove to have kept itself on target, again.
But.
How much longer? The use of EUV machines may allow the law's continuance for a short while more, but then the buffers will surely be collided with, at full speed, and all will come to a shuddering halt. The jib, in other words, will soon be up.
A Skylake transistor is only about one hundred atoms thick -- and although the switching on and off that produces the ones and zeros that are the lifeblood of computing goes on as normal, the fact that such minute components contain so very few atoms makes the storage and usage of these digits increasingly difficult, steadily more elusive. See also this post.
There are plans for getting around the limits, for eking out a few more versions of what might be called "traditional" chips by, among other things, making the chips themselves increasingly three-dimensional -- by stacking chip on top of chip and connecting each for forests of ultraprecisely aligned and very tiny wires. This would allow the number of transistors in a chip to keep on increasing for a while without our having to reduce the size of individual transistors.
Other talk:
- the curious one-molecule-thick substance graphene;
- molybdenum disulfide, black phosphorus, and phosphorus-boron compunds as possible alternatives to silicon.
And then finally: quantum.
Light squeezing, for example, allows some actual measurement (rather than calculatioin, which is the basis of immensely small numbers -- see page 298 -- the Planck length -- 0.0000 (34 zeroes) 16229 meters, or about twenty decimal places smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The time it would take a photo to journey through a Planck length: 5.49 x 10^-44 seconds.
Back to Intel's 14A chip:
