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SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

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211–220 of 235 posts

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#211

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?

This is one of my arguments that startups are mostly about luck - because smart people who are highly incentivised to pick wimmers, with all the data they need to pick winners, all the people and compute they need to pick winners, can't pick winners.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#212
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.

> 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. SoftBank have holdings in Arm and likely to know what is coming down the pipeline.

Wouldn't that be insider trading?

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#213
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing is, laypeople aren't using anything other than Google Search even for LLM answers. If I want an LLM answer to "is erythritol bad for you", I'm not firing up ChatGPT. I'm just typing it into Google, and the LLM answer it spits out is pretty good. ChatGPT needs to be significantly more compelling for most people to use it for one-shot LLM answers over Google Search. And the minute Google removes the one-shott…

I have no idea on the data, but anecdotally I'd dispute this. Regular folks in my life (i.e. non-techies) routinely talk to an LLM and use it to answer questions that 5 years ago they'd have searched for.

The techies are the ones who are steering clear and sticking with search engines in my experience.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#215

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.

Mayoshi has made a lot of bets since Alibaba. Almost all of them have tanked. Over this amount of time and bets, he should have more winners.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#216

"All in on OpenAI" Hahah! Fucking hell, openai is going to fail big time, they have nearly a 1,5 TRILLION USD in debt. There is no way they can handle that, their only option is to cozy up with trumo and make the tax payers pay for all that.

Ah, because you didn't post any sort of source I looked it up. Seems your 1.5Tn figure is in "spending commitments" and not current/hard debts. I.e. budget earmarked for datacenters and research from '25-'35 or so.

Yup. They have minted deals to spend, and im pretty sure there is a hefty fine if they cant pay or do indeed backtrack from the deal. Either way OpenAI is operating in a completely absurd way, and is no where near worth what they claim. Kinda lika Tesla is.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#217
post #200
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays Maybe I'm out of touch but I don't know anyone for whom that's true. They all use either games or Office or Photoshop type stuff. I mean you can replace it but all the options - mac, linux or chromebooks have friction.

Gaming on PC or using Adobe software is very far removed from the average in 2025. Same if you use any Office application after work hours. Heck, even Canva is, the vast majority of users are not creating on their systems, solely consuming and would be served more than well enough with only their phones. In countries where most of the population has gotten access after modern multitouch smartphones became a thing, most do use these over notebooks/PCs as their primary device, like India.

And friction on MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android or iOS, I don’t see that considering the vast majority still switched to 10 despite the departure from a decades long established environment and, lest we forget, quite a lot of XP/98 software also did not work well on more modern Windows, again, not really a problem for these either. There is no reason not to switch despite the brand, which I again must emphasize, is ok. They are fine enough with the status quo, even though alternatives would be more stable, secure, have better battery life, etc. I just dislike the idea that some in the space cling to that better alternatives are surely going to be adopted and the only reason they aren’t by the masses is compatibility, slight differences in UI, etc.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#218
post #86

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.

Keep in mind how severely the quality of Google search results or e.g. any consumer facing piece of Microsoft software (Windows, Office, OneDrive, etc.) have deteriorated to the point it has far transcended the more nerdy corners of the web, yet both continue to retain a strict grip, thanks to buy in/brand strength.

I have been using DDG for years and even with Google quality having plunged it is neither better nor less expensive (nor the default when non technical users just type in the search bar of their browser). Yahoo has shown that even with immense brand recognition people will still switch if the alternative is really better. And if Google was 2x more expensive than DDG they’d switch too.

Regarding Microsoft it’s not as easy to switch as going on another website, OpenAI doesn’t have that ecosystem lock in.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. SoftBank have holdings in Arm and likely to know what is coming down the pipeline.

Wouldn't that be insider trading?

No: SoftBank bought Arm in 2016, then refloated in 2023. They have good lawyers and a lot money.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#220

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.

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