At first, I thought this was an elaborate joke because fossil fuels are effectively "CO2 batteries."
Instead, it's compressed gas. Which is fine and possibly the best solution in certain contexts. But, it isn't exactly revolutionary or necessarily preferable to Li-ion most of the time.
Energy is extracted like from compressed gas, but the advantage of CO2 is that it can be liquefied at a relatively low pressure, so it can be stored at a relatively low volume in vessels that have to resist only to modest pressures.
So it is much easier to store a high amount of energy than it would be to store that energy in compressed air.
What I mean, is that for any international academic who has managed to get into US academia, it was always an option to consider Europe, where funding was always easier to get.
This reads like a bitter ex-employee. I guess you were in Germany?
There are plenty of European countries that do use English as the working language for technical fields, if there is not enough domestic talent.
What you say about the US research ecosystem may have been true until January 2025 but it is unfortuantely no longer the case. At the same time, the EU is finally getting its act together in both defense AND research funding. So I would forecast a sunnier future in Europe for scientists than the the US, at least for the next generation.
I don't know about defense, but on mathstodon people are having bitter laughs over the "500 million for research", when the UK alone with its faltering economy manages to get multiple times that in the same time frame.
Is it 500 million for research or 500 million for luring US researchers to Europe? They are vastly different things so we need to be on the same page for this to be a productive discussion.
My department (at a Norwegian university) is working on a headhunting plan. The way the ERC grants are structured, the applicant needs a sponsoring institute. So, we are identifying researchers who are working on relevant topics, if we think it will be a good fit (and/or if we have successfully collaborated with them in the past).
Some of the details are still being ironed out. The beauracracy is real! Even so, I guess the first emails will go out late next week.
How do you think that Norway’s wealth tax could impact its ability to draw talent from any other country? Knowing that, should you develop anything (drug, material, etc) and want to spin it out to a startup, you will be taxed on the unrealized valuation would weigh very heavily on me were I a researcher.
Full disclosure, I know that this isn’t everyone’s goal, but this is HN after all!
“I want to contribute to society, but if I earn more than X Millions of dollars 1% of my wealth will be taxed”
I guess don’t try to contribute to society then.
What you are describing isnt a hacker mentality, it’s one of an MBA graduate whose sole purpose in life is to maximize their own wealth. The idea that such a mentality is linked to this forum shows how far hacker culture has fallen and is deeply sad.
The problem is that the wealth tax is based on your assets. 51% ownership of your $10M early stage startup is $5.1M in wealth, not a liquid asset. Nevertheless, you will owe $51k/yr to the Norwegian government.
If you raise a second round at $15M, next year you owe $76k, so on. This creates an impossible situation for a founder of, let’s say, a fission reactor startup.
I could be wrong also, I was curious to hear a real life Norwegian’s thought about it.
A system like this only serves entrenched interests, not entrepreneurs or workers. Want to make a life saving drug? Have to sell off ownership of your company or use runway to pay taxes on something that could be absolutely worthless in the end or wind up losing control. Better off selling to Novonordisk!
I dont like the wealth tax, but your numbers are not accurate. There is a discount and deductions on the wealth tax, but after the last election the discount has been reduced drastically.
It's not normally a very large issue, but I really don't like it. Most companies on the exchange makes money, and those who are not on the exchange are taxed on their assets. So in most cases it works out, but not always.
Usually owners use dividends to withdraw money to pay the tax, but that means even more tax as you have to pay tax on the dividends too.
The right side wants to remove the tax on investments, and maybe compensate by increasing the corporate tax. That way the tax on the annual result will be a bit higher, but there will be no wealth tax. This also levels the playing ground when it comes to Norwegian and foreign investors as the tax won't be based on where the owner is from.
Gotcha! I did a 2 second google to illustrate what I was trying to ask in my original question about someone trying to recruit researchers. I did a ChatGPT query to see what my hypothetical would be and it quoted ~$44,880 USD, not taking it as gospel though.
I have worked at startups and got some worthless equity. I've also launched some (small) things on my own and am very interested in building large things, raising some money, etc.
Given OOP is actively recruiting I'm really just curious how this could effect your/their/someone in or interested in Norway's thinking when they could go anywhere in the EU or from TFA, remain in the US.
The US has a wealth tax that predominantly affects the middle class - property taxes. In some states, like mine, it can be 10K+ a year for a typical home!
It doesn't really discourage people from building their wealth and buying homes. It does a tiny bit - I've heard people say they rent to avoid property taxes. But barely.
So, if the middle class who do not have a lot of wealth can deal with it, I would imagine the wealthy can, too. Or, maybe they can't, because they have so much more mobility.
I see your point and it is similar when you consider a profitable company but think it is different from startup equity because you are raising capital you’re assigning a speculative dollar amount to build the business.
The only difference, really, is that housing as a market is just significantly less volatile. But in essence it's the same - you may pay property taxes on a valuation of 700,000 dollars but next week your house is only worth 100,000. That would be extremely rare, but it's possible.
On the other hand, valuations for startups and even some large companies like Tesla seem to have absolutely no relation to the actual value of the company. Whereas home appraisals are, generally, based on the actual value as calculated by real metrics - like square footage and zipcode.
So, maybe it's just easier to deduce the value of a home, I don't know. Or maybe the stock market is just too irrational. Part of me wonders if the stock market is so irrational because there's no wealth tax.
hacker culture =/= martyr culture. I fundamentally disagree with the central premise of your entire perspective.
Society is not entitled to value. If you have the skills to create value for others, then you will inevitably have to use capital to actually scale it. In the process, through voluntary transactions, that enterprise might profit and grow - creating more value for others in the process. The question is really: who profits? I think your perspective is exceedingly misplaced in that, by necessity, it intrinsically hands control of each new innovation to said MBA-types. If a society drafts policies that make it extremely difficult to take control of your own innovation and scale it according to your own wishes, then you are implicitly leaving that work to others who (more often than not) will not share your philosophies. If a society wants to enact policies that make it difficult for a person to take ownership over their own innovations, then they should not be shocked when it becomes extremely difficult to appeal to innovators in the first place. Instead of realizing that the commentor wants to take command of the destiny of their innovations, you go down this peculiar moralizing argument that's orthogonal to their entire point. How do you know they haven't created more value for society than you have, and why are you so comfortable demanding the nature of that value creation happen on your terms?
Also, this forum is managed by a VC firm. They explicitly support people taking charge of their own creations and scaling that to society. People are allowed to ask if a society has created legitimate bottlenecks to accomplishing that.
Well, with this ERC fund, we are trying to attract high quality research scientists. While there are many of these who also have entrepreneurial ambitions, it is a venn diagram, not a circle.
However, your critique of the wealth tax on unrealized gains is a big problem more generally. I have some interaction with the startup ecosystem these days here. Anecdotally, I have seen several founders choose to incorporate elsewhere in Europe or the US because of it. Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to quantify how many do not stay here because of it.
This aspect of the tax has had significant opposition for years, but nothing ever seems to come from it.
Opposition to tax on realized gains/assets is less vocal. Someone else here characterized that part as similar to property taxes in the US and I think that is fairly accurate.
ETA: we are looking for evolutionary biologists. Not many entrepreneurial personalities here, more like a lot of bird watchers (I say this lovingly). Over in the groups with translation potential is a different story of course.
I am glad the article finally made it through who/whatever is trying to keep it down.
But, c'mon Dan. I posted this 23 hours ago. That post is 2 hours old. How did it get flagged as a dupe? I searched before posting and could not find it anywhere.
Not finding the post on search is a separate issue - that's because the threads had been flagkilled, and killed posts (anything marked [dead]) doesn't show up on HN Search.
Yes and the two things are related insofar as "turning off flags" sometimes includes "rolling back the clock" on a post, depending on how much time has gone by.
I am generally very happy with the work dang does to keep this a community I enjoy.
It is more the lack of intervention on what is obviously a concerted effort to suppress discussion (specifically of involvement with the Com) that I find disturbing.
> xAI will continue on this steep trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced.
There is a lot of potential for using AI in drug discovery and development, biotech more broadly and chemistry/material science. Pharma is investing heavily in this right now. If useful, the output here could potentially also support Neuralink and even SpaceX.
Coupled with the line about the "true nature of the universe", I guessed this was really about entering that space.
But when you look at the careers page [https://x.ai/careers#open-roles], they are only hiring AI engineers. No biochemists or MDs, material scientists or any other natural science domains. So, if natural science discovery is actually on the road map, either:
- it is in the long term future
- they have no idea what they are doing
More likely, they are not going for natural science and this is basically just a play to compete with openAI. And, in that case, I don't understand how they convinced investors to put 6 billion dollars into it.
The “true nature of the universe” bit is that Elon believes that competing LLMs are too neutered because they disallow certain terms etc. (his words are much more politically charged and I do not agree with his take on this and many other things)
Therefore he believes that Grok can be an LLM trained on the voices of the people using his alleged free speech platform:X.
Elon’s vision of free speech is a world where you can say anything you want as long as it isn’t mean towards Elon or Alt-right ideology. Which is actually pretty hilarious to think about in the context of a training dataset for a generative model…it’s literally gonna be a bullshit generator.
Is the assumption here is that we can somehow understand the nature of the universe if we stop censoring the common man and have an unmuzzled LLM that talks like him instead of the Bay Area AI elites? My uneducated guess is well learn more about the true nature of the common clay^w man.
I agree this appears to be Musk's opinion of LLMs in particular.
However, as Musk has already got AI in his cars and was interested in the topic well before LLMs (founding investor in OpenAI when they were doing reinforcement learning), I'd be extremely disappointed if he had forgotten all of that in the current LLM-gold-rush.
The thing about “figuring out the true nature of the universe” is that you *have to do experiments*. It’s non-negotiable. There’s no amount of really hard thinking or parameters or GPU’s that will let you know the secrets of the universe. It’s astonishing to me that both the AI-maximalists and the AI-doomers are both seemingly unaware of this basic, fundamental fact of science.
Szegedy and some others were working on science-related (math and natural science) projects at Google prior to leaving. This is probably just piggy backing on their prior work without any commitment going forward.
Of course they're not going to make any fundamental contributions to natural science or mathematics (or likely even LLM training/understanding).
In 2013, I had an internship at a kind of industrial incubator and fund in Kongsberg, Norway[https://kongsberginnovasjon.no/?lang=en]. Although that was 11 years ago now, and a lot has certainly changed in the industry, physics has not.
At the time, they had an explicit focus on alternative energy technologies, so recieved a lot of proposals similar to this. I do not remember the details of my analyses anymore, but I do remember that every single one of them was rejected because none of them passed a basic back-of-the-envelope plausibility evaluation.
These projects basically fail because their output is poor compared to other solutions of similar or even lower cost.
It is also important to consider how much energy it takes to manufacture their solution in the first place. How long does it take for them to actually become net carbon negative? Does it even happen in the lifetime of the product? Sometimes the answer is no (in which case, what is even the point?)
The point might be as simple as a big building wanting reduced bills or energy independence without thinking one iota about the environment. It can also be to just signal that your big building is progressive and innovative, to attract companies to your commercial real estate.
