> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.
As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the opportunity) and Nvidia was already investing heavily.
Intel wasted the last decade because they elected a shareholder optimizing CEO who chose to prioritize shareholder payouts and attempts at controllig the ecosystem rather than pushing it forward over investments.
Now they're completely outclassed by TSMC and have to partner with UMC to compete.
The point is that thing can change. Intel was king a decade ago. TSMC is on the summit at the moment. Intel can be back in a few years if their plan works out:
As compared to a hypothetical product that is better than whats available today. With literally a trillion dollars on the line I find it very difficult to believe no one will come and scoop this opportunity up. The real value in GPUs is the datacenter segment which largely didnt exist, certainly not in that state it is today before the LLM take off. Takes time to develop products but theyll arrive eventually.
Well there's not really a trillion dollars on the line. This is a valuation, not revenue.
All this says is that AI and LLMs are extremely over hyped, and the market believes Nvidia's tech is the only viable supplier of the platform LLMs run on.
These are things we already knew, so it's not surprising the market is quadrupling what it thinks Nvidia is worth.
Yes there is a trillion dollars on the line here. Market cap is what matters to investors end of the day, everything else is just influencing it. Yes the market is saying Nvdia is the only supplier for AI and LLM hype, but its also saying they will continue to be the only supplier long term and that seems deeply flawed to me.
While there's certainly a feedback cycle involved, market cap is decided by investors in the large. The stock price is just reflecting buys and sells of those investors. People believe AI has a lot of money and hype in it, and Nvidia supplies necessary equipment for AI, so they buy Nvidia. As a result the stock price goes up, and the market capitalization goes up accordingly.
As a thought experiment, imagine buying 50% of a company on the open market and then seeing the price go up accordingly as the market does, then saying it must be even more valuable than I thought! And buying the other half of the company at the higher price. You caused that "value" by buying.
No one investor has a trillion dollar opportunity, and no competitor does either. Making an assumption that a competitor will come along and zero out Nvidia because they have a better AI chip is not rational. For one the value of Nvidia isn't solely based on this, and by the time you've made your AI chip the market is going to have changed.
Considering how insanely inflated the public's expectations of what LLMs can do, despite the fact that they are only a mirage of intelligence, it would probably be foolhardy to build a new AI chip to replace them.
I suppose for AMD they could see their stock increased by such a margin if they could just produce a chip that convinced the market, but were they not already trying to do that?
Yep, I remember 8 years ago Intel trying to sell us their CPU solutions for AI. It was hard to make things work and in the end performance were not there. We were comparing against consumer gpu like the GTX 1080.
Before AI/ML was hot, and before even the Bitcoin paper was released. NVidia was investigating/experimenting/investing in the concept before there was any kind of 'killer app' for it.
And even better, NVidia understood not everyone wants to use plain old C for their GPGPU coding, and early on staring with CUDA 3.0 in 2010, introduced C++ support and PTX.
Later on they acquired PGI, which thanks to PTX, had C, C++ and Fortran compilers, thus adding Fortran into the mix.
Followed along by all the IDE, graphical debuggers tooling and library ecosystem.
Meanwhile Intel and AMD were doing who knows what at Khronos stuck in their "C is good enough" mentality, and barely released useful developer experiences.
My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.
Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing".
"Complete understanding" isn't a real objective. Understanding more than we knew before is more realistic, and yes, I'd say we understand more than we did before, if you take a sample every 5 years or so. Every 5 years is better and better. People keep working on it and always will. The alternative is giving up and stopping all research I guess?
Better how? The most you can definitively say is we understand things differently every 5 years. I doubt there exists a partial order of universal comprehensions, and even if it does exist I wouldn’t be surprised to find that all our so-called “developments” rank exactly equal under it.
As if one was hunting for Pi, knowing it could never be fully resolved, but still: “more digits is closer!”. Except they started with a “4.”
I suppose it's impossible to prove the specifics of the conspiracy, but that Jack Ruby, a guy running strip clubs for the mafia, takes it upon himself to publically shoot Lee Harvey Oswald kind of proves to me that there was some kind of conspiracy. What other explanation could there possibly be? What Oswald might have said if we were kept alive... no one will ever know. But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him? Temporary insanity, deeply patriotic fan of JFK, or tying up loose ends on orders -- what makes more sense?
"But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him?"
I was a teenager living outside the US when I learned about JFK's assassination. It was a Saturday morning where I was and I remember it vividly more from the shock reaction of my parents than from the radio news report (I heard the news first and told them about it).
From that moment onwards the news coverage was intense. When Ruby shot Oswald we were struck with a sense of disbelief—even with my naïve sense of US politics, law enforcement, etc. the first things that came to mind were why would the seemingly sleazy Ruby want to shoot Oswald at all, second, how did US law enforcement let it actually happen. Either the US was in more chaos than the news was reporting and it was a free-for-all over there, or that Ruby's ulterior motive was more than just loyalty to the US/JFK.
I wasn't alone in thinking this, many were of this opinion and it was the first thing that came to our minds. I'd stress we'd formed that opinion within days if not hours of the news—that's well before any of the conspiracy theories or 'grassy knoll' stories emerged.
Some who knew Ruby theorized that he wanted to be a national hero by killing JFK's killer. Those who knew him said he was fairly emotional and hot-headed too.
> But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him?
That line of thinking can power any conspiracy theory.
Do you really think there are only 3 options for his motives? Why not “an impulsive criminal businessman with a gun filled with rage in the hours after a presidential assassination in his town during a Cold War looks for a way he can personally feel some modicum of control in a world that is mostly chaotic”.
I do the same thing, don't hook it up to internet, never update, don't use smart features, watch everything off a separate Kodi box.
But TVs have become so hopelessly enshittified I would support legislation at this point. I am sure they are making a lot of money serving these ads ensuring the behavior will only continue and no "normal tvs" will even be sold.
Really good post and great example of how someone can incorporate these tools into their work. Maybe there will be a new resurgence of proc gen games that finally manage to get past the same-ness problem with more diverse, interesting generated environments.
As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the opportunity) and Nvidia was already investing heavily.