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

tomtunguz.com

131–140 of 218 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting gold in the math Olympiad is a pretty strong indicator of operating independently on substantive problems. A year ago they need an extensive harness to get silver, and two years ago they could hardly multiply 1000x10000. Terence Tao tweeted yesterday about using GPT5 to help quickly solve a problem he was working on.

Yes but why did ChatGPT work on math Olympiad problems? Because it got a prompt giving it the instruction and context etc. Why did GPT5 help Terence Tao solve a math problem, because he gave it a prompt and the context etc. None of these models are useful without a human prompting them and giving it tasks, goals, context etc, they don't operate independently, they don't get ideas of work to be done, they don't operat…

You should see what happens when you let them talk to each other

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

#133

The biggest issue with Nvidia is their revenue is not recurring but the market is treating their stock as it were, which is correlated with all semi stocks, with a one-time massive CAPEX investment lasting 1-2 years. Simple as this - as to why its just not possible for this to continue.

Same could be said of the covid-darlings - zoom, pelaton etc. They got bid up assuming the present to continue into the future. That is the nature of the markets. Same story with fake meat companies. Across time you will find this pattern - 3d printing etc, all ushering some new faddish technology. Also, explains the investments into openai as a hedge against capex slowdown, so there is a captive customer.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVDA stock does not trade at a huge multiple. Only 25x EPS despite very rapid top line growth and a dominant position at the eve of possibly the most important technology transition in the history of humankind. The market is (and has been) pricing in a slowdown.

> > the eve of possibly the most important technology transition in the history of humankind. Funnily enough when you spend some months thinking into this intensively the result is that a monetary investment into the company that will bring about the singularity / AGI is the most irrational thing one can do. If the enterprise is successful and the singularity/AGI is benign you won't need money anymore, if the experim…

They are doing it for the love of the game, IMO

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

#135
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is not near. At best, the domains where we send people to years of grad school so that they can do unnatural reasoning tasks in unmanageable knowledge bases, like law and medicine, will become solid application areas for LLMs. Coding, most of all, will become significantly more productive. Thing is, once the backlog of shite code gets re-engineered, the computing demand for a new code creation will not support bu…

> AGI is not near There's also plenty of argument to be made that it's already here. AI can hold forth on pretty much any topic, and it's occasionally even correct. Of course to many (not saying you), the only acceptable bar is perfect factual accuracy, a deep understanding of meanings, and probably even a soul. Which keeps breathing life into the old joke "AI is whatever computers still can't do".

When an agent can work independently over an 8 hour day, incorporating new information and balancing multiple conflicting goals—then apply everything it learned in context to start the next day with the benefit of that learning, repeat day after day—then I'll call it AGI.

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

#136
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is not near There's also plenty of argument to be made that it's already here. AI can hold forth on pretty much any topic, and it's occasionally even correct. Of course to many (not saying you), the only acceptable bar is perfect factual accuracy, a deep understanding of meanings, and probably even a soul. Which keeps breathing life into the old joke "AI is whatever computers still can't do".

> AI can hold forth on pretty much any topic, and it's occasionally even correct. You consider occasionally being correct AGI?

Did I really need to use the /s tag? But a four-year-old is occasionally correct. Are they not intelligent? My cat can't answer math problems, is it a mere automaton? If we can't define what "true" intelligence is, then perhaps a simulation that fools people into calling it "close enough" is actually that, close enough.

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

#137
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? It's trading at 55x EPS and 41x forward EPS.

Consensus EPS for FY27 (~CY26) is $6.40. Buy side is higher!

That's 30x for earnings that will be known Jan 2027 (1 year and 3 months away). It's 40x earnings for Jan 2026 (3 months away).

For reference Enron was 40x earnings for current year forward estimates early in the year of the crash.

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

#138
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…

I just had to double check (have not been paying attention for a couple of years) but indeed it seems GPU underutilization remains a fact and the numbers are pretty significant. Main issues are being memory bound so the compute sits idle.

The actual computation speed isn't as important nowadays but it doesn't really change the conclusion with respect to whether they're underutilized.

Because the main reason for the price premiums in AI-class GPUs are the gobs of insanely fast memory, and that is very much not underutilized. AI companies grab GPUs with as much memory (at the fastest memory bandwidth) as possible and underclock the GPU to save on power. Linus Tech Tips had a great video about the H200 that touched on this this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNumJwHpXIA

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

#139
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can hold forth on pretty much any topic, and it's occasionally even correct. You consider occasionally being correct AGI?

Did I really need to use the /s tag? But a four-year-old is occasionally correct. Are they not intelligent? My cat can't answer math problems, is it a mere automaton? If we can't define what "true" intelligence is, then perhaps a simulation that fools people into calling it "close enough" is actually that, close enough.

> There's also plenty of argument to be made that it's already here

Given you start with that I would say yes the /s is needed.

A 4 year old isn’t statistically predicting the next word to say; its intelligence is very different from an LLM. Calling an LLM “intelligent” seems more marketing than fact based.

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

#140
post #26

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)

I think the high-density data centers that are being built to support the hyperscalers are more analogous to the dark fiber overbuild. When you lit that fiber in 2015, you (presumably) were not using a line card bought back in 1998.

Everything in that data center is depreciating as soon as they turn on the power.

AC, ups, generators not to mention the severs.

That's the thing with fiber it was still useful. The cards at either end are easy to add, waaaayyy cheaper and higher perf (they're were no cards on end of dark lines) 15 years later.

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