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Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

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Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#11

Post by ben_w »

dangus wrote: post #4

I think we are at the PS3/Xbox 360 phase of AI. By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered. Today, any game you make for a modern system is a game you could have made for the PS3/Xbox 360 or perhaps something slightly more powerful. Certainly there have been experiences that use new capabilities that you can’t literally put…

> By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.

I hope that's where we are, because that means my experience will still be valuable and vibe coding remains limited to "only" tickets that take a human about half a day, or a day if you're lucky.

Given the cost needed for improvements, it's certainly not implausible…

…but it's also not a sure thing.

I tried "Cursor" for the first time last week, and just like I've been experiencing every few months since InstructGPT was demonstrated, it blew my mind.

My game metaphor is 3D graphics in the 90s: every new release feels amazing*, such a huge improvement over the previous release, but behind the hype and awe there was enough missing for us to keep that cycle going for a dozen rounds.

* we used to call stuff like this "photorealistic": https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ktyr1/unreal_yes_th...

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#12

Post by narmiouh »

I think the fundamental issue is the uncertainty of achieving AGI with baked in fundamentals of reasoning.

Almost 90% of topline investments appear to be geared around achieving that in the next 2-5 years.

If that doesn’t come to pass soon enough, investors will loose interest.

Interest has been maintained by continuous growth in benchmark results. Perhaps this pattern can continue for another 6-12 months before fatigue sets in, there are no new math olympiads to claim a gold medal on…

Whats next is to show real results, in true software development, cancer research, robotics.

I am highly doubtful the current model architecture will get there.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#13

Post by alephnerd »

dvt wrote: post #7
alephnerd wrote: post #2

Glad to see Tom's blog on HN - as usual a great write up. A number of us have been chatting about this for several months now, and the take is fairly sober. Meta commentary but I've grown weary of how commentary by actual domain experts in our industry are underrepresented and underdiscussed on HN in favor of emotionally charged takes.

> actual domain experts Calling a VC a "domain expert" is like calling an alcoholic a "libation engineer." VC blogs are, in the best case, mildly informative, and in the worst, borderline fraudulent (the Sequoia SBF piece being a recent example, but there are hundreds). The incentives are, even in a true "domain expert" case (think: doctors, engineers, economists), often opaque. But when it comes to VCs, this gets ra…

Tom has had a fairly solid track record at Redpoint and now Theory in Data, Enterprise SaaS, and AI/ML. And it's not like we see many posts by engineers, doctors, or economists on HN either - most posts are listicles about the "culture" of technology, an increased amount of political articles growing increasingly tenuously related to the tech industry, and a portion of actually interesting technical content.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#14

Post by xbmcuser »

With all the major players like Amzn, Msft and Alphabet going for their own custom chips and restrictions on selling to China it will be interesting to see how Nvidia does.

I personally would prefer China to get to parity on node size and get competitive with nvidia. As that is the only way I see the world not being taken over by the tech oligarchy.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#15

Post by [deleted] »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

Glad to see Tom's blog on HN - as usual a great write up. A number of us have been chatting about this for several months now, and the take is fairly sober. Meta commentary but I've grown weary of how commentary by actual domain experts in our industry are underrepresented and underdiscussed on HN in favor of emotionally charged takes.

[deleted]

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#17

Post by pragmatic »

At a "telecom of telecom" we (they) were still lighting up dark fiber 15 years later (2015) when mobile data for cell carriers finally created enough demand. Hard to fathom the amount of overbuild.

The only difference is fiber optic lines remained useful the whole time. Will these cards have the same longevity?

(I have no idea just sharing anecdata)

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#18

Post by mg » 

    Fiber networks were using less
    than 0.002% of available capacity,
    with potential for 60,000x speed
    increases. It was just too early.
I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity. As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible.

If a minute of GPU usage is currently $0.10, a night of GPU usage is 8 * 60 * 0.1 = $48. Which might very well be worth it for an improved codebase. Or a better design of a car. Or a better book cover. Or a better business plan.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#19

Post by ivape »

One of the things before AI in the market was that capital had limited growth opportunities. Tech, which was basically a universe of scaled out crud apps, was where capital would keep going back into.

AI is a lot more useful than hyper scaled up crud apps. Comparing this to the past is really overfitting imho.

The only argument against accumulating GPUs is that they get old and stop working. Not that it sucks, not that it’s not worth it. As in, the argument against it is actually in the spirit of “I wish we could keep the thing longer”. Does that sound like there’s no demand for this thing?

The AI thesis requires getting on board with what Jenson has been saying:

1) We have a new way to do things

2) The old ways have been utterly outclassed

3) If a device has any semblance of compute power, it will need to be enhanced, updated, or wholesale replaced with an AI variant.

There is no middle ground to this thesis. There is no “and we’ll use AI here and here, but not here, therefore we predictably know what is to come”.

Get used to the unreal. Your web apps could truly one day be generated frame by frame by a video model. Really. The amount of compute we’ll need will be staggering.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#20

Post by cantor_S_drug »

mg wrote: post #18

Fiber networks were using less than 0.002% of available capacity, with potential for 60,000x speed increases. It was just too early. I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity. As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible. If a minute of GPU usage is currently $0.10, a…

With improvements on the algorithm side and new techniques, even older hardware will become useful.
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