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The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

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Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still wild to me that toasters have always been $20 but extremely expensive lasers, digital chips, amps, motors, LCD screens worked their way down to $20 CD players.

So... Electric toasters came to market in the 1920s, priced from $15, eventually getting as low as $5. Adjusting for inflation, that $15 toaster cost $236.70 in 2025 USD. Today's $15 toaster would be about 90¢ in 1920s dollars... so it follows the story.

On average toasters have always been $20. Wasn't $5 an outlier during dotCom crash homegoods firesales? There are some outliers. I just think it's wild that some coils cost the same as a radioactive laser, ICs, amps, motors, etc. There's a certain minimum cost and the complexity doesn't matter.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling 100 chips for $1 profit is less profitable than selling 20 chips for $10 profit.

Margin only goes down if a competitor shows up. Getting more "performance" per chip will actually let nvidia raise prices even more if they want.

Since you no longer need CUDA, AMD becomes a new viable option.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this when talking on the phone with someone with a significant accent. 1. it takes considerable work on my part to understand it on a cell phone 2. it's much easier on POTS 3. it's not a problem on VOIP 4. no issues in person With all the amazing advances in cell phones, the voice quality of cellular is stuck in the 90's.

I generally travel to Europe, and it baffles why I can't use VoLTE there (maybe my roaming doesn't allow that), and fallback to 3G for voice calls. At home, I use VoLTE and the sound is almost impeccable, very high quality, but in the places I roam to, what I get is FM quality 3G sound. It's not that cellular network is incapable of that sound quality, but I don't get to experience it except my home country. Interest…

In which countries?

3G networks in many European countries were shut off in 2022-2024. The few remaining ones will go too over the next couple of years.

VoLTE is 5G, common throughout Europe. However the handset manufacturer may need to qualify each handset model with local carriers before they will connect using VoLTE. As I understand the situation, Google for instance has only qualified Pixel phones for 5G in 19 of 170-odd countries. So 5G features like VoLTE may not be available in all countries. This is very handset/country/carrier-dependent.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bene…

On desktop, CPU decoding is passable but it's still better to have a graphics card for 4K. On mobile, you definitely want to stick to codecs like H264/HEVC/AVC1 that are supported in your phone's decoder chips.

CPU chipsets have borrowed video decoder units and SSE instructions from GPU-land, but the idea that video decoding is a generic CPU task now is not really true.

Now maybe every computer will come with an integrated NPU and it won't be made by Nvidia, although so far integrated GPUs haven't supplanted discrete ones.

I tend to think today's state-of-the-art models are ... not very bright, so it might be a bit premature to say "640B parameters ought to be enough for anybody" or that people won't pay more for high-end dedicated hardware.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVDA is valued at $3.5 trillion, which means investors think it will grow to around $1 trillion in yearly revenue. Current revenue is around $35 billion per quarter, so call it $140 billion yearly. Investors are betting on a 7x increase in revenue. Not impossible, sounds plausible but you need to assume AMD, INTC, GOOG, AMZN, and all the others who make GPUs/TPUs either won't take market share or the market will be w…

I thought the valuation of public companies at 3x revenues or 5x earnings has long since sailed?

Tech companies are valued higher because lots of people think there's still room for the big tech companies to consolidate market share and for the market itself to grow, especially as they all race towards AI. Low interest rates, tech and AI hype add to it.

Funny timing though, today NVDA lost $589 billion in market cap as the market got spooked.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#436
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. First mover advantage is strong. This is why OpenAI is much bigger than Mixtral despite what you said. First mover advantage acquired and keeps subscribers. No one really cares if you matched GPT4o one year later. OpenAI has had a full year to optimize the model, build tools around the model, and used the model to generate better data for their next generation foundational model.

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

>What is OpenAI's first-mover moat?

The same one that underpins the entire existence of a little company called Spotify: I'm just too lazy to cancel my subscription and move to a newer player.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

High interest rates are supposed to force the remaining businesses out there to be profitable, so in theory, the startups of today should be far faster to profitability or they burn out.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally travel to Europe, and it baffles why I can't use VoLTE there (maybe my roaming doesn't allow that), and fallback to 3G for voice calls. At home, I use VoLTE and the sound is almost impeccable, very high quality, but in the places I roam to, what I get is FM quality 3G sound. It's not that cellular network is incapable of that sound quality, but I don't get to experience it except my home country. Interest…

In which countries? 3G networks in many European countries were shut off in 2022-2024. The few remaining ones will go too over the next couple of years. VoLTE is 5G, common throughout Europe. However the handset manufacturer may need to qualify each handset model with local carriers before they will connect using VoLTE. As I understand the situation, Google for instance has only qualified Pixel phones for 5G in 19 of…

VoLTE can very well be 5G now, and it can vary from country to country, but my first memoryof VoLTE is originally started with LTE/4G networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be a 100 fold uptick in jingoists in the last 3-4 years which makes my head hurt but I think there is no consistent "underestimation" in academic circles? I think I have read articles about the up and coming Chinese STEM for like 20 years.

Yes, for people in academia the trend is clear, but it seems that WallStreet didn't believe this was possible. They assume that spending more money is all you need to dominate technology. Wrong! Technology is about human potential. If you have less money but bigger investment in people you'll win the technological race.

Orwellian Communism is the opposite of investing in people.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#440
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>What is OpenAI's first-mover moat? The same one that underpins the entire existence of a little company called Spotify: I'm just too lazy to cancel my subscription and move to a newer player.

Not exactly a good sign for OpenAI considering Spotify has no power to increase prices enough such that it can earn a decent profit. Spotify’s potential is capped at whatever Apple/Amazon/Alphabet let them earn.
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