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

SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 235 posts

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#141

Post by JustExAWS »

yesco wrote: post #112
hobofan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business. By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.

I'd argue their brand might be too strong, ChatGPT has already begun to enter the same semantic space as "Velcro". Everyone I know seems to have tried it yet quickly you begin to realize that for most people ChatGPT == LLM, it seems everyone is using "ChatGPT" on completely different platforms. In the end, regardless of technical understanding, people will always shop around on price if the feature set is similar eno…

ChatGPT though isn’t where the profit id going to come from. Businesses using LLMs are and Amazon (AWS) is not selling access to Bedrock and neither is Google (GCP). Models are becoming a commodity. *Every* implementation I’ve done one of the requirements is to easily be able to switch between multiple models

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#142

Post by lenerdenator »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #124
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think. This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on). Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).

Softbank had 5% of Nvidia stock just before gen AI boom. Then they sold it when it was at its lowest. If they didn't it would have covered all their losses many times over with a profit of more than 200 billion dollars. It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-sells-entire-nvidia-st...

> It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend.

When you realize that most investors at that level are degenerate gamblers, and that they're even worse about thinking "the Generals were due!" than your buddy who can't look away from the DraftKings app for more than five minutes, it's not so baffling anymore. The only difference is that when you have that much money, you own the casino.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#143

Post by JustExAWS »

stingraycharles wrote: post #81
tarsinge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.

no but there’s the network effect that Google has / once had with search that OpenAI has with ChatGPT: user interactions. all that data and classification will help tremendously getting better datasets, which is equally important (or more important) than better algorithms.

And defaults matter - every browser that matters except for Edge defaults to Google as well as every mobile phone outside of China.

Both Google and Apple (ie any searches in Safari make money for Apple based on the Google deal) said there was no slowdown on Google searches and the “AI overview” by Google is “good enough”.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#144

Post by hobofan »

mvdtnz wrote: post #127
hobofan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta. I'm personally skeptical that they are able to pull off ads, at least on the short timescale they likely need to. They more or less have to nurture/disrupt a whole SEO industry, and the way big corps allocate advertising budgets are very slow to shift (many are still struggl…

Why should they give a fuck about the SEO industry? You think Google "nurtures" the SEO industry? They're selling ads to businesses and displaying them to consumers. SEO folks are just parasites in the system.

Yes of course Google nurtures the SEO industry. The first hit I get when I google SEO is a best practice site from Google themselves.

The person/department/agency that is responsible for doing SEO is the same one that is responsible for spending ad money on Google. It's in their best interest to internally sell "search" (no matter if organic/inorganic) as a good advertising channel and that creates great stickiness for Google's ad business.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#145

Post by oezi »

nromiun wrote: post #35
csomar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia current market cap is 4.84 trillion dollars. Yes, that's roughly 5 trillions of dollars. 5.83B is a rounding error.

Market capitalization is not equal to real money. Take a look at how Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Daily trading volume is roughly 200m units at roughly 200 USD per stock which equals 40bn in daily trades. So 5bn isn't nothing but over the course of a month it isn't particularly much.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#146

Post by boredtofears »

Topfi wrote: post #102
ForHackernews wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no viable alternative for either of those yet. Massive network effects around Microsoft office, and Google's only real competition is the equally-bad Bing.

Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results. And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less re…

> Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently

I wish this was true

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#147

Post by toomuchtodo »

lenerdenator wrote: post #142
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Softbank had 5% of Nvidia stock just before gen AI boom. Then they sold it when it was at its lowest. If they didn't it would have covered all their losses many times over with a profit of more than 200 billion dollars. It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-sells-entire-nvidia-st...

> It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend. When you realize that most investors at that level are degenerate gamblers, and that they're even worse about thinking "the Generals were due!" than your buddy who can't look away from the DraftKings app for more than five minutes, it's not so baffling anymore. The only difference is that when you have that much money, you own the casino.

It is hard not to love the degeneracy of Son Masayoshi as a gambler. The trick is to not take it seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799821

Bill Hwang of Archegos Capital Management is a close second (lost $20B in two days, and basically brushed off margin calls while his highly overlevered bets were collapsing, incurring $10B+ of losses at the investment banks he worked with).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-08/how-bill-... | https://archive.today/lM0SU

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

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#148

Post by esafak »

nly wrote: post #57
hobofan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business. By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.

It's hard to see how they become profitable enough to justify current valuations. The numbers are just mind boggling even in the optimistic scenario.

Their goal is obviously to take a fraction of the world's economy, proportional to the productivity lift they can attribute to themselves. That's in the trillions.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#150

Post by JustExAWS »

jorvi wrote: post #84
hobofan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business. By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.

> They have by far the strongest brand They don't really, because of Gemini and Grok. If it was OpenAI vs Claude then yeah, ChatGPT is known whereas Claude you have to be an enthusiast to know. But everyone using Google runs into Gemini and everyone using X runs into Grok, and people talk. Now even the laypeople know there is more than one AI, and they're from big brands that they trust. Which means that people will…

Twitter never had a meaningful customer base compared to Meta and it’s been declining since Musk took over.
Post reply on HN