Tesla Universe on how U.S. sanctions on Huawei unleashed a wave of innovation

The resilience of companies previously seen as vulnerable to sanctions has surprised many.  Huawei, once thought to be in decline after restrictions cut off its access to key technology made a dramatic comeback in 2023 by unveiling the Mate 60 Pro.  This smartphone, powered by an advanced, domestically produced 7 nanometer processor, caught industry experts off guard.  Many believe that China's ability to innovate had been stifled by sanctions, yet Huawei's success told a different story.  The company has also built next-generation networking equipment using entirely local components, reinforcing its ability to navigate external pressures.  Rather than acting as barriers, trade restrictions have fueled advancements by forcing Chinese firms to develop alternative technologies.

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Texas Instruments, a major supplier of analog semiconductors reported a revenue shortfall of $2.3 billion due to reduced demand from Chinese buyers.

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For years, these [U.S. semiconductor] firms generated up to 30% of their revenue from China.  With demand shrinking, new concerns have emerged over whether these policies [tariffs and sanctions] are backfiring.  China's share of global semiconductor production has surged.  In 2020, it accounted for around 15% of the world's total output.  By 2023, that figure climbed to nearly 30%.

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China's influence extends beyond chip manufacturing.  Domestically-produced processors are now powering critical infrastructure, including data centers, telecommunications networks and artificial intelligence platforms.  Major companies are replacing imported components with locally-developed alternatives, reshaping the supply chain.  By 2023, over 60% of China's cloud computing industry was running on homegrown technology, demonstrating the shift away from foreign providers.

~ "China SHOCKING Tech Breakthrough: Did U.S. Sanctions Backfire?," Tesla Universe, March 17, 2025

Huawei Mate 60 Pro

Deirdre Bosa on how Trump's previous tariffs supercharged China's AI efforts

Not only have those previous tariffs not worked, but they actually supercharged China's AI efforts in some very unexpected ways...  Necessity is the mother of invention...  The previous tariffs, they laid the groundwork for DeepSeek's breakthrough.  Additional restrictions could supercharge at another much larger, definitely state-backed, Chinese company, Huawei.  And it could supercharge them in chips, the very foundation of the race.  Now without access to Nvidia's highest GPUs, DeepSeek built a model on less performance chips, H20s, which according to Reuters has led other Chinese companies to ramp up their own orders for those cheaper chips.  Now, as additional tariffs threaten to cut off access to them, Chinese AI companies may be forced to turn to Huawei's alternative.  Now again, they're not the best and they're not the preferred hardware, but they may be good enough and getting better.  This morning, the FT [Financial Times] reports that the company has significantly improved the yield, or amount of advanced AI chips that it can produce, a near doubling from about a year ago.

~ Deirdre Bosa, "How stricter chip restrictions could backfire to benefit Huawei," CNBC, 0:25 mark, February 25, 2025

Nassim Taleb on antifragility

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.  Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile.  Let us call it antifragile.  Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.  The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.  This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance... even our own existence as a species on this planet.  And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk. 

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors.  Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well.  Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility.  I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time. 

It is easy to see things around us that like a measure of stressors and volatility: economic systems, your body, your nutrition (diabetes and many similar modern ailments seem to be associated with a lack of randomness in feeding and the absence of the stressor of occasional starvation), your psyche.  There are even financial contracts that are antifragile: they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility.

Antifragility makes us understand fragility better.  Just as we cannot improve health without reducing disease, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses, antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum.

~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile (2012)

Kevin Duffy on how great investors and companies are antifragile

Defense wins championships.  Great investors go to the head of the line by being prepared for a bear market and in a position to benefit from forced selling.  Likewise, great companies get stronger in recessions because they're built for survival.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, May 19, 2022

Nassim Taleb on antifragility

When you ask people, "What's the opposite of fragile?," they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong.  That's not it.  The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

~ Nassim Taleb, "The Tavis Smiley Show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org, December 3, 2012

Gad Saad on joining the battle of ideas

That's a concern that I often receive from people. They write to me, "Hey, professor. I really want to get engaged. But... I'm not some fancy professor. I don't have a large audience." And I tell them, "Look. It's trench warfare. Right? It's house-to-house. It's trench-to-trench. Some of us have big platforms. Great, we use that. But you don't have to have a big platform to contribute to the battle of ideas. Your professor says something that is insane, challenge them politely. Someone says something on Facebook that you disagree with, engage them politely. You hear something happening at the pub that you think you might weigh in on? Don't refrain from doing so.  And usually there's a couple of reasons why people refrain from doing so.

"Well, if I weigh in, I might lose their friendship." Well, guess what? If their friendship is not sufficiently anti-fragile - to use my friend's Nassim Taleb's point... if our friendship is not sufficiently anti-fragile that it could withstand the stressors of us disagreeing about some important point, then you know what? Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.  I don't need friends like that.  I prefer to have two really good friends that I can have deep meaningly conversations with than a bunch of cowardly castrated morons who are going to be completely triggered because I say something that is contrary to them.

~ Gad Saad, "How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense," 41:15 mark, Stansberry Investor Hour, October 8, 2020

Andy Grove on crisis and business

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.

~ Andy Grove