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

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#481

Post by 9rx » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #471

9rx wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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#…

> Technically, all the Nvidia stock (and virtually all stocks in the US) are owned by Cede and Co.

Technically, but they extend ownership. An ETF is a different type of abstraction. Which you already know because you spoke about that abstraction in your original comment, so why play stupid now?

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#482

Post by richbhanover » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

vFunct wrote: post #264

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…

I worked on a network that used a protocol very similar to ATM (actually it was the first Iridium satellite network). An internet based on ATM would have been amazing. You’re basically guaranteeing a virtual switched circuit, instead of the packets we have today. The horror of packet switching is all the buffering it needs, since it doesn’t guarantee circuits. Bandwidth is one thing, but the real benefit is that ATM…

> ... guaranteed minimal latencies. You could now shave off another 20-100ms of latency for your FaceTime calls...

I already do this. But I cheat - I use a good router (OpenWrt One) that has built-in controls for Bufferbloat. See [How OpenWrt Vanquishes Bufferbloat](https://forum.openwrt.org/t/how-openwrt-vanquishes-bufferblo...)

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#483

Post by coliveira » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #439

coliveira wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatever you think about the Chinese system, they educate hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists every year. That's a fact.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#484

Post by indymike » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #431

indymike wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Invention is expensive. Innovation is less expensive. Production is (usually) the cheap part. Once the invention and innovation is paid off, it's just production...

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#485

Post by nokun7 » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

Very interesting and it seems like there is more room for optimizations for WASM using SIMD, boosting performance by a lot! It's cool to see how AI can now run even faster on web browsers.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

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Post by greenie_beans » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

reading this gave me a great idea for https://bookhead.net. thanks!!

also thank you for the incredibly informative article.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#487

Post by apitman » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

eigenvalue wrote: post #415

typeofhuman wrote: post #170

I'm rooting for DeepSeek (or any competitor) against OpenAI because I don't like Sam Altman. I'm confident in admitting it.

I really don't think he's a bad guy. He helped accelerate timelines and backed this tech when it was still a dream. Maybe he's not the brains behind it but he's been the brawn, and I think people should try to be more charitable and gracious about him rather than constantly vilify him.

People want a villain.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

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Post by ozgrakkurt » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #467

Vegenoid wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you don't have infinite money, considering whether to buy a thing is about the ratio of price to performance, not just performance. If you can get enough performance for your needs out of a cheaper chip, you buy the cheaper chip.

The AI industry isn't pausing because DeepSeek is good enough. The industry is in an arms race to AGI. Having a more efficient method to train and use LLMs only accelerates progress, leading to more chip demand.

There is no indication that adding more compute will give AGI

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#489

Post by xxpor » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 4:58 PM 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

But _why_ did AdSense work? They had to bootstrap with eyeballs.

Claude has effectively no eyeballs. API calls != eyeballs.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#490

Post by matt-attack » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #244

pjdesno wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I think most video on the Internet is HLS and similar approaches which are about as far from the ATM circuit-switching approach as it gets. For those unfamiliar HLS is pretty much breaking the video into chunks to download over plain HTTP.

Yes, but that's entirely orthogonal to the "coding" algorithms being used and which are specifically responsible for the improvement that GP was describing.

HLS is really just a way to empower the client with the ownership of the playback logic. Let the client handle forward buffering, retries, stream selection, etc.