Nvidia is the central bank of AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#281

Post by CuriouslyC » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 12:52 AM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #199

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,…

> People are realizing that what they need isn't more general intelligence, it's more specialization. A small but well tuned coding model... It’s not quite as simple as that. Several studies have shown the opposite: models trained on more diverse knowledge tend to cross-pollinate across domains. So a more generalized model can actually perform better than a specialized one. That’s why you’re not seeing tons of tiny m…

The western labs are very AGI pilled, and their public models are distilled down from larger research-only models that are uneconomical to serve directly. They could (and probably will) start distilling models for more niche use cases eventually, but we're not there yet.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#282

Post by rich_sasha » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #280

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inflation isn’t making anything go up faster than inflation though!

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#283

Post by SturgeonsLaw » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

butterNaN wrote: post #271

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."

Yeah, I've worked in risk management and if a company said "what we're doing has a 10% chance of killing lots of people" it'd get shut down so fast it'd make your head spin

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#284

Post by roenxi » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112

master_crab wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“as long as it’s cash flow continues” is doing a lot of optimistic heavy lifting. The whole premise of the circular financing worry is that Nvidia sits in the middle of all the guarantees made to companies like OpenAI. If any of those companies become insolvent, Nvidia is on the hook for it. Also Nvidia isn’t really creating money. The 500B number is third party capital that already exists (BX, Apollo, etc).

> “as long as it’s cash flow continues” is doing a lot of optimistic heavy lifting It's not. It's stating a condition. For traditional banks, a stock crash can independently trigger a failure. > whole premise of the circular financing worry is that Nvidia sits in the middle of all the guarantees made to companies like OpenAI. If any of those companies become insolvent, Nvidia is on the hook for it Sorry, I meant reve…

> It absolutely is. Similar to the way banks create money [1]. The commitments support credit that wouldn't exist without it.

Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation - the amount of money in the system before and after the loan might be the same. Haven't been following Nvidia all that closely, but it seems a little bit unlikely that they're a commercial bank. Financial chicanery they may be doing but offering deposit accounts would be new territory. The loan has to be made in a very particular way for it to be money creation (notably, in a way that creates new money), and it should be illegal for most people to do that otherwise we'd all be printing our own money instead of the printing being directed to wealthy asset owners first and foremost.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#285

Post by RoadieRoller » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

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…

> So let's say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together.

The first messenger from Anthropic is out with this exact message. Stop us (them) or everyone will be killed by 2030

https://youtu.be/i30jVPqQeOM?si=yosxw4MLoVtPW-7v

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#286

Post by ericd » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:22 AM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #272

ericd wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah sorry, I should've continued, the bigger recent models are commensurately smarter. If you really want to make the point, then you'd need to show 27b being smarter than similar vintage bigger models. And in that case, there's confounding issues like efficiency, speed due to excessive thinking maybe to make up for the smaller amount of world knowledge baked in (qwen 27b's main issue iirc), etc - they're tuned for different things.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#287

Post by zug_zug » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

phoghed wrote: post #278

butterNaN wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In an alternate universe where all research is completely auditable and we all have infinite time, yes that's a valid approach. And you're welcome to spend your life going that route, but the rest of us are gonna trust our common sense on this.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#288

Post by jing09928 » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#289

Post by kelvinjps10 » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #275

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah but that was for my console. For building a entry level gaming pc you can be spending 1000-2000$

The ssd example was to illustrate how much more expensive pc components have gotten just a few years before you could buy it for 50$

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#290

Post by keeda » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #137

spott wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, but they would have to become insolvent in a way that makes compute lose value. The reason Nvidia is comfortable making these deals is because if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can. Granted OpenAI going insolvent likely means a drop in the value of compute…

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,…

This is the right kind of analysis, but we can look broader. Both the demand and supply situations are a lot more extreme and dynamic than appears at first glance. E.g. to your points:

1. Yes, smaller models will become more popular, especially as the tokenmaxxing trend dies down and people start stretching their budgets farther. That is a downward pressure on demand.

But along the same dimension, consider that currently only about 40 - 60% of the world uses AI for only about 5 - 15% of their work hours. That means there is still 2x growth from users and 7x - 20x growth from the rest of the work hours left to capture! That is 14x - 40x more demand. Then consider that agentic tasks require multiples more tokens, and that is the kind of usage that is most likely to be deployed, and also the kind of usage that is the least used right now. That's another huge multiple to be tacked on.

And the entire AI industry has been lamenting the extreme compute crunch they're facing (and also why Claude has 9's comparable to GitHub; whereas OpenAI has been chugging along because Altman was OK being called a "podcasting bro" while desperately scrounging for compute years in advance.)

Nvidia's meteoric rise is entirely due to this kind of exploding demand with extremely limited supply.

2. Competing hardware is definitely a threat, but it has its own hurdles. Because the real bottleneck is not Nvidia, it's TSMC.

Pretty much all demand for all chips in all devices in all the world flow to, like, 3 companies in the world that actually fabricate them, and TSMC is the biggest. And the supply is extremely tight, as the exploding costs of electronics clearly shows.

So now TSMC will of course try to keep all its customers happy, but it will inevitably be forced to choose which ones it will keep happiest. And those will be the customers who can pay it the most. And that would be the one with all the money from its de facto status as a monopoly (and possibly even a monopsony)...

Which would be Nvidia ;-)

So yes, compute per task is falling rapidly... but it's barely a dent in the humongous total addressable demand, and the amount of hardware to support that compute is still very constrained, and most of that supply will likely flow through Nvidia.