So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this. If you did, how much money did you make on financial speculation? It seems like being this far ahead should have made you millions even without a lot of starting capital (look at NVDA alone)
> So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this.
I do claim that I have a tendency to be quite right about the "technological side" of such topics when I'm interested in them. On the other hand, events turn out to be different because of "psychological effects" (let me put it this way: I have a quite different "technology taste" than the market average).
In the concrete case of LLMs: the psychological effect why the market behaved so much differently is that I believed that people wouldn't fall for the marketing and hype of LLMs and would consider the excessive marketing to be simply dupery. The surprise to me was that this wasn't what happened.
Concerning NVidia: I believed that - considering the insane amount of money involved - people/companies would write new languages and compilers to run AI code on GPUs (or other ICs) of various different suppliers (in particular AMD and Intel) because it is a dangerous business practice to make yourself dependent on a single (GPU) supplier. Even serious reverse-engineering endeavours for doing this should have paid off considering the money involved. I was again wrong about this. So here the surprise was that lots of AI companies made themselves so dependent on NVidia.
Seeing lots of "unconventional" things is very helpful for doing math (often the observations that you see are the start of completely new theorems). Being good at stock trading and investing in my opinion on the other hand requires a lot of "street smartness".
Re: NVIDIA. I wholeheartedly agree. Google/TPU is an existence proof that it is entirely possible and rational to do so. My surprise was that everyone except Google missed.
