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SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

cnbc.com

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Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#201

Post by gottorf »

EFreethought wrote: post #162
toomuchtodo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Son made most of his money with Alibaba. I think he made 500x or 1,000x his original investment. Absolutely crazy. Almost everything he has done since then has lost money. When I read that he is investing in something, I just assume it will end badly.

Isn't that basically the venture capital model, though? Your winners go many times X, and the losers become worthless.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#202

Post by consumer451 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #196
consumer451 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main thought was "how bad is Softbank at their job to have only been in on NVDA for such a paltry sum?" Really living up their reputation? Or, am I way off-base here? I am just an outside observer and I would love to be educated. Did it makes sense for Softbank to be in so little on the company "selling shovels" to all their "gold mining" investments?

Or, how down bad is Softbank that it needs to sell its NVDA stake to raise $6B?

Someone needs to put this guy/team in an asylum, for the betterment of the country of Japan.

Microsoft (which has >50B into OpenAI)->Anthropic for biz use cases

Softbank->OpenAI. Yet again, the dumbest money ever?

There are many, far worse Softbank fails. How does this keep happening? Who is advising this team?

I am available. 80% sure that I could do better. I just genuinely hate to see capital being destroyed like this.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#203

Post by EFreethought »

gottorf wrote: post #201
EFreethought wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Son made most of his money with Alibaba. I think he made 500x or 1,000x his original investment. Absolutely crazy. Almost everything he has done since then has lost money. When I read that he is investing in something, I just assume it will end badly.

Isn't that basically the venture capital model, though? Your winners go many times X, and the losers become worthless.

At some point, a good VC would have a second winner.

And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#204

Post by pirate787 »

lisbbb wrote: post #186
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...

I had 250 shares I bought on a tip and sold for a decent profit then NVDA moon-shotted later that year. That's the story of my stock buying life right there.

I doubled my bitcoin profit and got out at $1,000!

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#205

Post by hyperadvanced »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #89

Fun thought experiment: If a company had a product with infinite value it would be irrational to allocate capital to shares since you could own the product instead. So the share price might even go down (it's hard to know what role money will play in a post-agi society). A smaller scale version of this might be happening here. Or it could be a bubble. Either way it's interesting!

Obviously we’re not ever going to see “infinite value”. I think it’s instructive to think of this on the margin or in terms of limits: would a putative AGI have an inflection point at which more of it produces less value, and even if it’s productive capacity were high, it could not be “infinitely high” (which would make it an economic absurdity).

Additionally, for the AGI producer (or platform host), there would have to be some way of price function that would cover the costs of operating or providing the AGI service.

Thus, a more realistic look at this is “purchasers of AGI would have no reason to purchase “more” of it beyond a certain threshold, after which it is no longer useful to their ends, however purchasing shares of the AGI producer would expose them to value from new customers who could use it better”

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#206

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

adastra22 wrote: post #199
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, GPUs are not a particularly ideal architecture for AI inference, it's just inference needs way more memory bandwidth than a general purpose CPU's memory hierarchy can handle. > What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A systolic array, and ultimately quite different than a GPU. This is why TPUs et all are a thing. In general with a systolic array you get a quadratic speedup. For example with a 256x256 array, it ta…

The tensor cores in your NVIDIA chip are systolic arrays.

Not in the same way as a TPU, and again, the ISA and overall threading architecture matter.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#207

Post by toomuchtodo »

EFreethought wrote: post #203
gottorf wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that basically the venture capital model, though? Your winners go many times X, and the losers become worthless.

At some point, a good VC would have a second winner. And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?

VC is just gambling with some status and ecosystem participation.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/charlie-mung...

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#208

Post by chii »

EFreethought wrote: post #203
gottorf wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that basically the venture capital model, though? Your winners go many times X, and the losers become worthless.

At some point, a good VC would have a second winner. And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?

> At some point, a good VC would have a second winner.

but you don't make the same type of deduction for lottery winners - surely a good lottery number picker should get a second win sooner or later!

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#209

Post by chii »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #153
lvl155 wrote: post #83

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.

> Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think. Neither is OpenAI's.

nvidia's moat is still pretty strong and deep, while there have been many other models in competition with openAI's.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#210

Post by EFreethought »

chii wrote: post #208
EFreethought wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, a good VC would have a second winner. And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?

> At some point, a good VC would have a second winner. but you don't make the same type of deduction for lottery winners - surely a good lottery number picker should get a second win sooner or later!

Lottery winners do not tell the world they are smarter than the rest of us, or go on podcasts, write op-eds or start websites telling the rest of us how the world should be run.
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