The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia • Hacker News Board

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#471

Post by eru » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 9:21 AM UTC

9rx wrote: post #466

eru wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone currently invested is presumably in because they like the insanely high profit margin, [...] I'm invested in Nvidia because it's part of the index that my ETF is tracking. I have no clue what their profit margins are.

> I'm invested in Nvidia [...] my ETF That would be an unusual situation for an ETF. An ETF does not usually extend ownership of the underlying investment portfolio. An ETF normally offers investors the opportunity to invest in the ETF itself . The ETF is what you would be invested in. Your concern as an investor in an ETF would only be with the properties of the ETF, it being what you are invested in, and this seems…

Technically, all the Nvidia stock (and virtually all stocks in the US) are owned by Cede and Co. So Nvidia has only one investor.[0] There's several layers of indirection between your Robinhood portfolio and the actual Nvidia shares, even if Robinhood mentions NVDA as a position in your portfolio.

The ETF is just one more layer of indirection. You might like to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund#Arbitrage... to see how ETFs are connected to the underlying assets.

You will find that the connection between ETFs and the underlying assets in the index is much more like the connection between your Robinhood portfolio and Nvidia, than the connection between butterflies and thunderstorms.

[0] At least for its stocks. Its bonds are probably held in different but equally weird ways.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#472

Post by kragen » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 9:29 AM UTC

grajaganDev wrote: post #138

energy123 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar microgrids are cheaper and faster than nuclear. New nuclear isn't happening on the timescales that matter, even assuming significant deregulation.

Can you back up that solar microgrids will supply enough power to justify NVDA's current valuation?

Well, prediction is very difficult, especially with respect to the future. But the fundamentals look good.

Current world marketed energy consumption is about 18 terawatts. Current mainstream solar panels are 21% efficient. At this efficiency, the terrestrial solar resource is about 37000 terawatts, 2000 times larger than the entire human economy:

    ~ $ units
    Currency exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com (USD base) on 2024-11-25
    Consumer price index data from US BLS, 2024-11-24
    7290 units, 125 prefixes, 169 nonlinear units

    You have: 21% solarirradiance circlearea(earthradius)
    You want: TW
            * 36531.475
            / 2.7373655e-05

IEA reports that currently (three years ago) datacenters used 460TWh/year. In SI units, that's 0.05 terawatts. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-...

So, once datacenters are using seven hundred thousand times more power than currently, we might need to seek power sources for them other than terrestrial solar panels running microgrids. Solar panels in space, for example.

You could be forgiven for wondering why this enormous resource has taken so long to tap into and why the power grid is still largely fossil-fuel-powered. The answer is that building fossil fuel plants only costs on the order of US$1–4 per watt (either nameplate or average), and until the last few years, solar panels cost so much more than that that even free "fuel" wasn't enough to make them economically competitive. See https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... for example.

Today, however, solar panels cost US$0.10 per peak watt, which works out to about US$0.35 to US$1 per average watt, depending largely on latitude. This is 25% lower than the price of even a year ago and a third of the price of two years ago. https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#473

Post by adastra22 » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC

Den_VR wrote: post #94

adastra22 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Hotz is a hot Internet celebrity that has basically accomplished nothing of value but has a large cult following. You can safely ignore. (Famous for hacking the PS3–except he just took credit for a separate group’s work. And for making a self-driving car in his garage—except oh wait that didn’t happen either.)

You’re not wrong, but after all these years it’s fair to give benefit of the doubt - geohot may have grown as a person. The PS3 affair was incredibly disappointing.

Given the number of times he has been on the news for bombastic claims he doesn’t follow through on, I don’t think we need to guess. He hasn’t changed.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#474

Post by tucnak » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 10:06 AM UTC

talldayo wrote: post #265

xxpor wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Google's first mover moat? I switched to Bing/DuckDuckGo with absolutely no friction or moat jumping. Brands are incredibly powerful when talking about consumer goods.

> What is Google's first mover moat? AdSense

It's like people forget Google is an ad company

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#475

Post by adastra22 » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC

hshshshshsh wrote: post #123

adastra22 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Hotz is a hot Internet celebrity that has basically accomplished nothing of value but has a large cult following. You can safely ignore. (Famous for hacking the PS3–except he just took credit for a separate group’s work. And for making a self-driving car in his garage—except oh wait that didn’t happen either.)

What about comma.ai?

He promised Waymo.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#476

Post by hshshshshsh » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #475

hshshshshsh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about comma.ai?

He promised Waymo.

What specifically is in comma.ai that makes it less technically impressive? Comma.ai looks like epic engineering to me. I haven't made any self driving cars.

Why do you think otherwise? Can you share specific details?

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#477

Post by rfoo » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #307

rfoo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely fake though. It was more like their founder decided to start a branch to do AI research. It was well planned, they bought significantly more GPUs than they can use for quant research even before they start to do anything AI. There was a crack down on algorithmic trading, but it didn't had much impact and IMO someone higher up definitely does not want to kill these trading firms.

Who knows? That too is a bunch of mythmaking. One thing's for sure, there are no moats or secrets.

Well, I know. I still have connections back there. But yeah, I'm just a random guy on the Internet so what I said could be just myth too.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#478

Post by HDThoreaun » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 12:08 PM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #432

HDThoreaun wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deepseek uses cuda.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#479

Post by infecto » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 12:38 PM UTC

whizzter wrote: post #156

infecto wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. That sounds more difficult that getting things to play with commodity hardware. Maybe I am oversimplifying it though.

They have their own nn,etc libraries so adapting should be fairly focused and AMD drivers have a hilariously bad reputation historically among people who program GPU's (I've been bitten a couple of times myself by weirdness). I think you should consider it as, if they're trying to avoid Nvidia and make sure their code isn't tied to NVidia-isms, and AMD is troublesome enough for basics the step to customized solutions…

Thanks, I don't have any experience in this realm and this was helpful to digest the problem space.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#480

Post by ipdashc » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #429

ipdashc wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly d…

The 8KHz samples were encoded with relatively low encoding complexity PCM (G.711) at 8KHz. That gets to a 64kbps data channel rate. This was the standard for "toll quality" audio. Not 8kbps. The 8kbps rates on cellular are the more complicated (relative to G.711) AMR-NB encoding. AMR supports voice rates from about 5-12kbps with a typical 8kbps rate. There's a lot more pre and post processing of the input signal and…

> The 8KHz samples were encoded with relatively low encoding complexity PCM (G.711) at 8KHz. That gets to a 64kbps data channel rate. This was the standard for "toll quality" audio. Not 8kbps.

I'm a moron, thanks. I think I got the sample rate mixed up with the bitrate. Appreciate you clearing that up - and the other info!