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Nvidia is the central bank of AI

economist.com

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Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#271

Post by butterNaN »

anu7df wrote: post #198

Cracks are starting to appear. Open Ai and Anthropic are publicly asking for slowdown in AI research. Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let's say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together. Bonus point…

It's always funny to me when they do the fear-propaganda, e.g. A statement like "There's a 10% chance that AI will destroy humanity in a decade". If a government were for the people, it can reasonably react with "Okay - if that's the case, you should shut down. And if not you will be arrested. Because if this is true, you're willingly building equivalent of a nuclear bomb."

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#272

Post by kennywinker »

ericd wrote: post #252
kennywinker wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely the position of the big ai companies. But it doesn't match my experience. Qwen3.8 27b is clearly smarter at coding than MANY bigger models. gpt-oss-120b for example, is almost 4x the size, and performs way worse at coding tasks. It's clear to me that you can build small models that work well at specific tasks. Python vs Rust is probably too fine grained a way to build a model. Coding in general see…

Gpt-oss—120b is like 1000 years old in AI years, whereas Qwen 3.8 27b is pretty young. What you’re seeing is that parameters aren’t apples to apples, and at a given parameter level, the new models are much, much better than the ones from a year or two ago. Like, to a comical degree.

Does that not prove my point? Bigger doesn’t automatically mean better. Quality of training data, and model structure, matters as much or more than size

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#273

Post by ElProlactin »

YokoZar wrote: post #266
ElProlactin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should educate yourself about accounting. First, under US GAAP rules (ASC 606), you cannot recognize revenue from a vendor-financed sale unless it meets certain criteria, the biggest one of which is: it has to be probable that the buyer will actually pay you. If a default is likely, revenue recognition is deferred until cash changes hands. Nvidia's massive revenue is therefore not from a bunch of dubious vendor-f…

"Create money" here doesn't mean literally fluffing the balance sheet like when the fed prints money (which would have accounting differences), it means spending the same money more rapidly than otherwise. This is NVidia's personal contribution to increasing the economy's Money Multiplier [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier ], which effectively increases the money supply from the broader economy's perspe…

You're conflating the money multiplier and velocity. They aren't the same thing. The multiplier is about banks turning reserves into deposits via lending while "spending the same money more rapidly" is velocity.

This doesn't apply to Nvidia extending trade credit and this description of bank money creation isn't even the accepted version today anyway.

Regarding velocity: a receivable on Nvidia's books isn't in M1 or M2 and nobody accepts it as payment. The AI company will still settle its bills with vendors and pay its employees in bank deposits. The "$10 running round the circle a million times" story is just netting. Clearinghouses have done this for centuries with literally 0 effect on the money supply.

If the OP's production company can't actually deliver $100 million of goods, someone has to write it down and no amount of velocity makes the company solvent. Net-60 payment terms are ordinary trade credit that any major B2B supplier extends. It's no different for Boeing, Caterpillar or [name a major manufacturer). If you're going to call this "money creation," you're saying that every net-30 or net-60 invoice is "money creation" too, which is ridiculous because it's patently false.

None of this is to say that there aren't legitimate circularity concerns about Nvidia, particularly around its equity stakes coming back as GPU orders. There are. But even those are about revenue quality and counterparty concentration, not monetary aggregates. Trying to make this a monetary argument when it's not actually weakens the circularity argument.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#274

Post by aprilthird2021 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #210
bluefirebrand wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation I have been getting the vibes that Sony is positioning themselves to back out of videogames. I don't think we're going to see a PS6.

There will be a PS6 and a NextBox… it’s just that Sony is cracking down on what some idiot MBAs have decided are “unrealized monitary streams”.

Everyone likes to deride idiot MBAs while also enjoying a stock market that returns on avg 8-10% per year vastly outpacing inflation in a developed, stable, wealthy country of all places. It's like that scene from margin call about normal people in big houses they can't actually pay for and big cars who pretend but would actually croak if things got really fair really quickly.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#275

Post by aprilthird2021 »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #267
Waterluvian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.

The thing is really that even entry level gaming is getting expensive. I was considering building a pc and everything is expensive, I was going to replace the disk of my ps4 thag I bought used for 100$ and the 1tb ssd costs 150$

Is $150 a lot in the grand scheme of hobbies?

That'll buy you:

- a set of used golf clubs

- a couple years of fishing licenses, bait, tackle, used fishing rods and line

- a couple really entry level tennis rackets, balls, and court reservation fees

- maybe a used bicycle

- a decent pair of running shoes from last year

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#276

Post by janalsncm »

e_y_ wrote: post #265
kennywinker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute has already lost value for me. Six months ago I thought you needed a 1T+ model to be useful coding. Now I am able to get by just fine with a 27b model. I see two factors converging to cause a collapse of this house of cards: 1. People are realizing that what they need isn't more general intelligence, it's more specialization. A small but well tuned coding model, a small but well tuned customer service model,…

LLMs needing less compute would actually be a good thing for Nvidia due to Jevons paradox. Right now token costs are an impediment to using AI more broadly, and more efficient models would help adoption in cases where AI has proven to be useful, like coding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Jevon’s paradox is a common talking point but it is not a law of nature. LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. The overall energy used to light homes has decreased.

And even if compute demand were perfectly elastic it’s only a good thing insofar as it drives demand for new Nvidia hardware. If tokens can be served from Apple hardware or Google hardware or Huawei hardware that doesn’t help Nvidia.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#277

Post by kennywinker »

e_y_ wrote: post #265
kennywinker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute has already lost value for me. Six months ago I thought you needed a 1T+ model to be useful coding. Now I am able to get by just fine with a 27b model. I see two factors converging to cause a collapse of this house of cards: 1. People are realizing that what they need isn't more general intelligence, it's more specialization. A small but well tuned coding model, a small but well tuned customer service model,…

LLMs needing less compute would actually be a good thing for Nvidia due to Jevons paradox. Right now token costs are an impediment to using AI more broadly, and more efficient models would help adoption in cases where AI has proven to be useful, like coding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Perhaps. But their huge valuation is based on them supplying the massive buildout of data centers that’s happening / planned.

If that dies because a lot of people’s needs turn out to be met by a system at home they can run a 30b-150b model on, a lot more of that money goes to apple or intel or amd.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#278

Post by phoghed »

butterNaN wrote: post #269
phoghed wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to hear exactly how the conflict of interest has impacted the specific studies and how they are wrong rather than conspiracy theory level speculation and hand waving at the entire category

I think is more than reasonable to be suspicious of studies funded by party with conflict of interest. Think of how many studies about climate change were funded by big polluters, for example. In 2026, the default outlook should be suspicion for any big private organisations with profit motive.

I think it’s less than reasonable to operate mainly on vibes, rumors, and hearsay.

You don’t need to think about climate change studies. Instead you can read the allegedly tainted studies we’re actually talking about and profess to all of us what is wrong with them. You can’t point to exactly where they’ve fudged them.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#279

Post by kennywinker »

janalsncm wrote: post #276
e_y_ wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs needing less compute would actually be a good thing for Nvidia due to Jevons paradox. Right now token costs are an impediment to using AI more broadly, and more efficient models would help adoption in cases where AI has proven to be useful, like coding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Jevon’s paradox is a common talking point but it is not a law of nature. LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. The overall energy used to light homes has decreased. And even if compute demand were perfectly elastic it’s only a good thing insofar as it drives demand for new Nvidia hardware. If tokens can be served from Apple hardware or Googl…

> LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes.

I mean… some homes definitely do. You must have seen those houses that are all lit up front the outside by lawn mounted spotlights.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#280

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #274
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a PS6 and a NextBox… it’s just that Sony is cracking down on what some idiot MBAs have decided are “unrealized monitary streams”.

Everyone likes to deride idiot MBAs while also enjoying a stock market that returns on avg 8-10% per year vastly outpacing inflation in a developed, stable, wealthy country of all places. It's like that scene from margin call about normal people in big houses they can't actually pay for and big cars who pretend but would actually croak if things got really fair really quickly.

MBAs aren’t making the stock market go up.

Inflation is.

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