Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 500 posts

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#331

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

aurareturn wrote: post #261
pjdesno wrote: post #176

The description of DeepSeek reminds me of my experience in networking in the late 80s - early 90s. Back then a really big motivator for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and fiber-to-the-home was the promise of video on demand, which was a huge market in comparison to the Internet of the day. Just about all the work in this area ignored the potential of advanced video coding algorithms, and assumed that broadcast TV-q…

Doesn’t your point about video compression tech support Nvidia’s bull case? Better video compression led to an explosion in video consumption on the Internet, leading to much more revenue for companies like Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. More efficient LLMs lead to much more AI usage. Nvidia, TSMC, etc will benefit.

No - because this eliminates entirely or shifts the majority of work from GPU to CPU - and Nvidia does not sell CPUs.

If the AI market gets 10x bigger, and GPU work gets 50% smaller (which is still 5x larger than today) - but Nvidia is priced on 40% growth for the next ten years (28x larger) - there is a price mismatch.

It is theoretically possible for a massive reduction in GPU usage or shift from GPU to CPU to benefit Nvidia if that causes the market to grow enough - but it seems unlikely.

Also, I believe (someone please correct if wrong) DeepSeek is claiming a 95% overall reduction in GPU usage compared to traditional methods (not the 50% in the example above).

If true, that is a death knell for Nvidia's growth story after the current contracts end.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#332

Post by stormfather »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #254
stormfather wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is silently catching up fast with Gemini. They're also pursuing next gen architectures like Titan. But most importantly, the frontier of AI capabilities is shifting towards using RL at inference (thinking) time to perform tasks. Who has more data than Google there? They have a gargantuan database of queries paired with subsequent web nav, actions, follow up queries etc. Nobody can recreate this, Bing failed to…

How quickly the narrative went from 'Google silently has the most advanced AI but they are afraid to release it' to 'Google is silently catching up' all using the same 'core Google competencies' to infer Google's position of strength. Wonder what the next lower level of Google silently leveraging their strength will be?

Google is clearly catching up. Have you tried the recent Gemini models? Have you tried deep research? Google is like a ship that is hard to turn around but also hard to stop once in motion.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#333

Post by kgc »

ed wrote: post #316
dplgk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is OpenAI's first-mover moat? I switched to Claude with absolutely no friction or moat-jumping.

One moat will eventually come in the form of personal knowledge about you - consider talking with a close friend of many years vs a stranger

Couldn't you just copy all your conversations over?

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#334

Post by pjdesno »

aurareturn wrote: post #261
pjdesno wrote: post #176

The description of DeepSeek reminds me of my experience in networking in the late 80s - early 90s. Back then a really big motivator for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and fiber-to-the-home was the promise of video on demand, which was a huge market in comparison to the Internet of the day. Just about all the work in this area ignored the potential of advanced video coding algorithms, and assumed that broadcast TV-q…

Doesn’t your point about video compression tech support Nvidia’s bull case? Better video compression led to an explosion in video consumption on the Internet, leading to much more revenue for companies like Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. More efficient LLMs lead to much more AI usage. Nvidia, TSMC, etc will benefit.

No, it doesn't.

Not only are 10-100x changes disruptive, but the players who don't adopt them quickly are going to be the ones who continue to buy huge amounts of hardware to pursue old approaches, and it's hard for incumbent vendors to avoid catering to their needs, up until it's too late.

When everyone gets up off the ground after the play is over, Nvidia might still be holding the ball but it might just as easily be someone else.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#335

Post by physicsguy »

aurareturn wrote: post #253
itissid wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI does not have a business model that is cashflow positive at this point and/or a product that gives them a significant leg up in the same moat sense Office/Teams might give to Microsoft.

Companies in the mobile era took a decade or more to become profitable. For example, Uber and Airbnb. Why do you expect OpenAI to become profitable after 3 years of chatgpt?

Interest rates have an effect too, Uber and Airbnb were starting in a much more fundraising friendly time.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#336

Post by mandevil »

aurareturn wrote: post #261
pjdesno wrote: post #176

The description of DeepSeek reminds me of my experience in networking in the late 80s - early 90s. Back then a really big motivator for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and fiber-to-the-home was the promise of video on demand, which was a huge market in comparison to the Internet of the day. Just about all the work in this area ignored the potential of advanced video coding algorithms, and assumed that broadcast TV-q…

Doesn’t your point about video compression tech support Nvidia’s bull case? Better video compression led to an explosion in video consumption on the Internet, leading to much more revenue for companies like Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. More efficient LLMs lead to much more AI usage. Nvidia, TSMC, etc will benefit.

It lead to more revenue for the industry as a whole. But not necessarily for the individual companies that bubbled the hardest: Cisco stock is still to this day lower than it was at peak in 2000, to point to a significant company that sold actual physical infra products necessary for the internet and still around and profitable to this day. (Some companies that bubbled did quite well, AMZN is like 75x from where it was in 2000. But that's a totally different company that captured an enormous amount of value from AWS that was not visible to the market in 2000, so it makes sense.)

If stock market-cap is (roughly) the market's aggregated best guess of future profits integrated over all time, discounted back to the present at some (the market's best guess of the future?) rate, then increasing uncertainty about the predicted profits 5-10 years from now can have enormous influence on the stock. Does NVDA have an AWS within it now?

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#337

Post by gamblor956 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #309

Even if DeepSeek has figured out how to do more (or at least as much) with less, doesn't the Jevons Paradox come into play? GPU sales would actually increase because even smaller companies would get the idea that they can compete in a space that only 6 months ago we assumed would be the realm of the large mega tech companies (the Metas, Googles, OpenAIs) since the small players couldn't afford to compete. Now that st…

Important to note: the $5 million alleged cost is just the cpu compute cost for the final version of the model; it's not the cumulative cost of the research to date.

The analogous costs would be what OpenAI spent to go from GPT 4 to GPT 4o (i.e., to develop the reasoning model from the most up-to-date LLM model). $5 million is still less than what OpenAI spent but it's not a magnitude lower. (OpenAI spent up to $100 million on GPT4 but a fraction of that to get GPT 4o. Will update comment if I can find numbers for 4o before edit window closes)

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#338

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

pjdesno wrote: post #230
AlanYx wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect that reinforces your point is that the ATM push (and subsequent downfall) was not just bandwidth-motivated but also motivated by a belief that ATM's QoS guarantees were necessary. But it turned out that software improvements, notably MPLS to handle QoS, were all that was needed.

Nah, it's mostly just buffering :-) Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality. Generations of Bell Labs and Bellcore engineers would rather have resigned than be subjected to what's considered acceptable voice quality nowadays...

>> Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality

What accounts for this difference? Is there something inherently worse about the nature of cell phone infrastructure over land-line use?

I'm totally naive on such subjects.

I'm just old enough to remember landlines being widespread, but nearly all of my phone calls have been via cell since the mid 00s, so I can't judge quality differences given the time that's passed.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#339

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ieee2 wrote: post #305
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #295

I'm curious if someone more informed than me can comment on this part: > Besides things like the rise of humanoid robots, which I suspect is going to take most people by surprise when they are rapidly able to perform a huge number of tasks that currently require an unskilled (or even skilled) human worker (e.g., doing laundry ... I've always said that the real test for humanoid AI is folding laundry, because it's an…

I saw such robot's demos doing exactly that on youtube/x - not very precisely yet, but almost sufficiently enough. And it is just a beginning. Considering that majority of the laundry is very similar (shirts, t-shirts, trousers, etc..) I think this will be solved soon with enough training.

Can you share what you've seen? Because from what I've seen, I'm far from convinced. E.g. there is this, https://youtube.com/shorts/CICq5klTomY , which nominally does what I've described. Still, as impressive as that is, I think the distance from what that robot does to what a human can do is a lot farther than it seems. Besides noticing that the folded clothes are more like a neatly arranged pile, what about all the edge cases? What about static cling? Can it match socks? What if something gets stuck in the dryer?

I'm just very wary of looking at that video and saying "Look! It's 90% of the way there! And think how fast AI advances!", because that critical last 10% can often be harder than the first 90% and then some.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#340

Post by xmodem »

distances wrote: post #314
lxgr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First mover advantage acquired and keeps subscribers. Does it? As a chat-based (Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus etc.) user, LLMs have zero stickiness to me right now, and the APIs hardly can be called moats either.

If it's for mass consumer market then it does matter. Ask any non-technical person around you. High chance is that they know ChatGPT but can't name a single other AI model or service. Gemini, just a distant maybe. Claude, definitely not -- I'm positive I'm hard pressed to find anyone in my technical friends who knows about Claude.

They probably know CoPilot as the thing Microsoft is trying to shove down their throat...
Post reply on HN