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Nvidia's Risky Business

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Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#101

Post by twoodfin »

grey-area wrote: post #53
Ekaros wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much in value could Nvidia safely drop and over what period of time for it be fine for greater economy? What level of correction would be manageable? And I am pretty sure that their value will drop in 5 to 10 years.

Just for context, they make up 5% (yes 5%) of holdings in global index funds like VWRA. https://stockanalysis.com/quote/lon/VWRA/holdings/ That is an astounding figure and means markets are highly imbalanced, unless you think Nvidia represents 5% of the global economy.

4.7% of the discounted future earnings pie of 3761 of the largest current publicly traded global companies.

That’s still a lot, but “the global economy” over the horizon where those earnings are not discounted to 0 contains a lot more than what’s listed in VWRA today.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#102

Post by npunt »

YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

Are the switching costs of CUDA ecosystem potentially threatened because LLMs are now quite good at transcoding into other languages? In other words, is Nvidia's greatest strength (AI) also potentially its undoing?

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#103

Post by elictronic »

ravenstine wrote: post #84
YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

That's really interesting. I have no experience writing anything that involves GPUs/TPUs, but over the years I've consistently read that CUDA is the "real moat" of Nvidia, which I never totally believed, but the way you describe makes it seem like it's not actually a moat in the slightest. It just happens to be an ecosystem associated with hardware that is not only considered the gold standard but happens to be more…

Retraining a large high paid user base is often a non-starter. To put this in perspective, Boeing’s eventual retraining costs for all the pilots for the 737Max was around 5 billion dollars.

Looking at software more specifically the Linux foundation reported based on software dev salaries in 2008 it would be 1.4 billion to only write the Linux kernel.

Up until about 2023 there wasn’t enough money involved to have any reason to make a real CUDA killer even if you could get it adopted.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#104

Post by kllrnohj »

tomaskafka wrote: post #96
YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

I had a hard time understanding why didn’t AMD make a better developer experience for this two years ago, and am now even more baffled that even with all the LLMs they still don’t seem to have moved a single inch, despite this probably being a tens of billions dollars worth feature.

LLMs make the dev environment almost irrelevant. llama.cpp supports AMD with both ROCm and Vulkan and that's nearly all that matters now. TBD how much AMD's AI Halo play will change things if at all, but they got a lot of positive press in launch reviews for having an actually robust software story for once.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#105

Post by coredog64 »

bigyabai wrote: post #71
coredog64 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed. Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos

But people have been saying this about CUDA for twenty years , and we are not any closer to a replacement GPGPU paradigm today. The root comment in this thread was about Nvidia hedging their bet on lost AI market share. They recognize that a reduced pace in training and inference competition will undercut their business, but CUDA isn't a one-trick pony for LLMs alone. TPUs are - you can't even reuse the same architec…

> you can't even reuse the same architecture for training and inference

AWS begs to differ. They originally split between `Trainium` and `Inferentia` but now support both with `Trainium`

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#106

Post by Altaba »

motoxpro wrote: post #86
Altaba wrote: post #34

Ben is wrong; demand for compute, aka revenue backlogs, is mythical and will collapse, simply because of two reasons : 1. Circular investment/spending. 2. Too much capital in the system, so returns cannot be hit regardless because the barrier is too high. (Evidence being every capital cycle in history)

I think more interesting take here would be WHEN this will happen. I don't think Ben, or anyone else, thinks we wont have some sort of correction or stabilization in supply/demand (he has said as much) But when will that occur? 2 months? 2 years? 20 years?

well its typically when it becomes clear that the private equity firms taking the risk decide they can not get the returns they need, forcing the backstoppers such as Nvidia to take that burden, and the whole ecosystem collapses.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#107

Post by w10-1 »

yaportmax wrote: post #47
KaiMagnus wrote: post #27

IMO focusing on the hyperscalers is kind of misleading. Yes, for programmers and tech companies AI is kinda boring now, but AI integration in general is still kind of uncharted territory. There are so many small companies and individuals just getting started with AI today and I believe a large the customer base (and revenue) is still untapped. Hell, I’m discovering new use cases regularly still and the average misman…

This is what so many people on HN and the market are constantly missing. Jason Kottke almost didn't found his blog in 1998, famously quoted as saying: "I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested." Needless to say, the internet was a tiny joke in 1998 compared to what it is now. We are just barely scratching the surface of what's possible with AI, both in terms of the leading edge and in the 'torso' of…

Yes and no...

So much of the dotcom bust was essentially: "anything internet will work", but even after it was pretty easy to find different ways to publish web pages or migrate to new forms of social media, video, short-video, etc.

It's orders of magnitude harder to automate work, which is the business value proposition of AI (whether you are displacing worker or adding breakthrough capacity), and it's not clear the LLM hyperscalers will get the value-add from that.

On the consumer side, it might be a race to the bottom: same ad profits, but now you need AI to produce it.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#108

Post by lostlogin »

compiler-guy wrote: post #100
ravenstine wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I have no experience writing anything that involves GPUs/TPUs, but over the years I've consistently read that CUDA is the "real moat" of Nvidia, which I never totally believed, but the way you describe makes it seem like it's not actually a moat in the slightest. It just happens to be an ecosystem associated with hardware that is not only considered the gold standard but happens to be more…

To paraphrase the apocryphal Winston Churchill quote about democracy: “CUDA is the worst development ecosystem in existence. Except for all the others.”

‘Yes, I Am Drunk, But CUDA is Ugly. Tomorrow I Will Be Sober, And CUDA Will Still Be Ugly.’

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#109

Post by davedx »

People and pundits have been dooming and bearing on Nvidia for as long as it's been around. It increased in intensity when gpus were used for large scale crypto mining and it became material to their operations, and continued as AI ("the bubble") started to really take off.

Over those years, my NVDA stock has been by far my biggest winner. I'm now up more than 1500% on it.

Let the dooming continue

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#110

Post by mandeepj »

elictronic wrote: post #103
ravenstine wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I have no experience writing anything that involves GPUs/TPUs, but over the years I've consistently read that CUDA is the "real moat" of Nvidia, which I never totally believed, but the way you describe makes it seem like it's not actually a moat in the slightest. It just happens to be an ecosystem associated with hardware that is not only considered the gold standard but happens to be more…

Retraining a large high paid user base is often a non-starter. To put this in perspective, Boeing’s eventual retraining costs for all the pilots for the 737Max was around 5 billion dollars. Looking at software more specifically the Linux foundation reported based on software dev salaries in 2008 it would be 1.4 billion to only write the Linux kernel. Up until about 2023 there wasn’t enough money involved to have any…

Yet, Microsoft pulled it off with a new .NET Framework, and Apple with its new iOS SDK. There are many more examples besides those two.
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