Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia is the central bank of AI

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 365 posts

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#291

Post by kennywinker »

ericd wrote: post #286
kennywinker wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-5-3-codex%2Cqwen3-...

Shows qwen3.8-27b along side seven larger models of ~similar vintage. Only one scores above 27b.

Many of those are closed models so idk their exact parameter count / active param count, but it hardly matters - i’m sure all of them are far above 100b params

My point is not that bigger is pointless. It’s just clearly not the only road to take to make a model better, which is obvious just from seeing how models of the same size have gotten better over the past few years

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#292

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

rich_sasha wrote: post #282
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBAs aren’t making the stock market go up. Inflation is.

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

Well… yes.

But I think the undersold part would be inflation is likely far more correlated to rate and values the stock market going up, than the disclosed and reported inflation numbers given to you by the people directly responsible for monetary adjustments.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#293

Post by ericd »

kennywinker wrote: post #291
ericd wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-5-3-codex%2Cqwen3-... Shows qwen3.8-27b along side seven larger models of ~similar vintage. Only one scores above 27b. Many of those are closed models so idk their exact parameter count / active param count, but it hardly matters - i’m sure all of them are far above 100b params My point is not that bigger is pointless. It’s just clearly not the only road to take to make a mod…

Thanks! That's very helpful as a way to discuss.

First off, I'd include Qwen flash-next and GLM 5.3 to show some of the other strong open weight models, and they predictably dominate it, but they're much larger. But, it shows up right next to DSv4 Flash 0731 on the overall index, and that's much larger. It's a great model! But then scroll down and hit Time Per Task, and you'll see that DSv4 Flash takes 3.6 seconds per task to Qwen's 21.1. That's what I meant when I said this:

>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.

It can make up for its shortcomings by iterating a lot longer, and using way more thinking tokens. And that's a great trade if you don't have the vram to run the bigger models, but speed is pretty important for getting things done... And that's why DSv4Flash is great, too, despite being much larger, and scoring similarly on the intelligence index.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#294

Post by lstodd »

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.

[dead]

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#295

Post by vannevar »

It would be more accurate to say Nvidia is the central bank of data center projects. The vast majority of capex associated with AI is for data centers, not the actual technology. Nvidia needs to create data center projects to sell to, hence its role in financing them.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#296

Post by vayup »

I am a bit confused at people looking at this negatively. If Nvidia believes AI demand is extraordinarily high, and that it requires a large capital outlay to serve that capital, isn't this what they should be doing?

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#297

Post by User23 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49

> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…

Monetarily Nvidia isn’t creating any money at all.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#298

Post by m4rtink »

jmalicki wrote: post #171
m4rtink wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This almost seems like we need a strategic reserve for semiconductors- kinda like we have it for food, to prevent suppliers from throwing it away when they are suddenly able to sell something much more lucrative.

The CHIPS Act in the US did set aside a reserve for older processes used for automobile, defense, and industrial semiconductors - but that's not gaming GPUs that used the previous process node.

Sure, semiconductors for important industrial uses are critical & I agree gaming GPUs are much less critical. Still RAM & storage multiplying in price over such a short ammount of time also can't be good for the economy & society, so some sort of strategtic reserve could help there as well.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#299

Post by drschwabe »

SleightOfHand wrote: post #148
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…

> if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can This is the big point IMO since I have never given $1 to OpenAI but I subscribe to Vidu and Typecast, and have given money to Kling, Hailou, and even Gemini in the form of Google Workspace. So these other guys have products and use cases, which OpenAI has never been able to crack beyond ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was never worth paying for, IMO. If OpenAI dies, it's not b…

To each their own. When OpenAI droped Sora and focused more on Codex, the product improved dramatically and I'm probably not the only one who dumped Claude Code subscription in favor of Codex; OpenAI's is miles ahead of Anthropic and has been since at least the release GPT 5.6 Sol - even the PR and generous resets is far better than how Anthropic is nickel and diming by requiring paid subscribers to pay yet more credits to even use their best available model (which is not even as good as OpenAI's top 2 models)

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#300

Post by BobbyTables2 »

spott wrote: post #113
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).

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…

If AI wasn’t a thing would Nvidia be worth 1/10th is current value?

Gaming is lucrative but not THAT lucrative…

Post reply on HN