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Nvidia's Risky Business

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Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#131

Post by HDBaseT »

grey-area wrote: post #53
Ekaros wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much in value could Nvidia safely drop and over what period of time for it be fine for greater economy? What level of correction would be manageable? And I am pretty sure that their value will drop in 5 to 10 years.

Just for context, they make up 5% (yes 5%) of holdings in global index funds like VWRA. https://stockanalysis.com/quote/lon/VWRA/holdings/ That is an astounding figure and means markets are highly imbalanced, unless you think Nvidia represents 5% of the global economy.

There is a number of index funds holding 7.5% of NVIDIA.

This consolidation is scary. I've started putting a little bit in emerging markets and China. I cannot trust the US long term, hopefully I'm wrong!

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#132

Post by YuechenLi »

kevstev wrote: post #125
ravenstine wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I have no experience writing anything that involves GPUs/TPUs, but over the years I've consistently read that CUDA is the "real moat" of Nvidia, which I never totally believed, but the way you describe makes it seem like it's not actually a moat in the slightest. It just happens to be an ecosystem associated with hardware that is not only considered the gold standard but happens to be more…

I think OP is overstating it a bit tbh. So Nvidia has the market for the hardware, which helps, but there is literally no alternative to CUDA. Nvidia keeps it a scalpel for skilled users, its not super easy to use, but unlocks orders of more magnitudes of power for the use cases it excels at vs CPUs. I don't have access to anything like it in the Apple ecosystem. AMD has had years to try and counter it, but just has…

I think there is a misconception here: CUDA is not even close to being C for assembly used by Nvidia's GPUs, PTX is, and it uses JIT to compile to Nvidia's GPU assembly, SASS. It honestly easier just to have LLMs write PTX directly than to go through CUDA C/C++ at all.

Again, "CUDA" isn't a programming language, it stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture; "C/C++ for CUDA" are the high-level languages that compiles to PTX and then SASS as well CPU orchestration code via NVCC.

And to be honest, pretty much everything you can do in CUDA C/C++, you can also do in HLSL/GLSL compiled to SPIR-V, as long as the Vulkan hardware extension is available.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#134

Post by rglover »

Melatonic wrote: post #124
rcr-anti wrote: post #74

For awhile I've found two things hard to square, that the hardware and software making up current gen AI will bring us to a socioeconomic singularity, and the reality the thing they're mostly trying to emulate is a few pounds of meat and fat running on tens of watts equivalent. On one hand the current AIs are obviously super human in some tasks, get completely dunked on in others by far simpler organisms. My cat can…

You make a good point. Maybe the AI apocalypse will actually be when someone hooks up a cat brain to a super advanced AI.

No need. The 'apocalypse' will come purely out of the hubris and greed chasing untold fortunes as opposed to a healthy, considered integration.

The decision to scare the shit out of normal people early on was a short-term decision that will cost everyone dearly (it led non-technical people to believe in things about LLMs that just aren't true—even worse, they've now made difficult business decisions on bad information with seemingly limited consideration of secondary effects).

The amount of short-sightedness alone should give pause, but at least in America, we seem to have collectively lost our minds in worship of the almighty dollar.

Judgment day approaches.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#135

Post by rglover »

cmiles8 wrote: post #41
CodesInChaos wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of things go up forever, as long as you denominate them in an inflationary currency ;-)

There’s a massive difference between “going up forever” and “point B is higher than point A.” The current setup can’t sustain a downturn, even if yes 20 years from now point B is likely to be higher than present. That’s the danger. Those that are going to get wiped out by the AI bubble burst aren’t wrong about AI being huge long term, they just put themselves in a position to not survive the storms that happen betwee…

This is the best articulation of this problem/paradox I've read yet.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#136

Post by ceehex »

ijidak wrote: post #121
YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

Genuine question. Given that LLMs are supposed to allow us to rewrite anything, and I am an LLM believer, what I don't understand is: how does CUDA continue to be a moat in a world where LLMs can rewrite entire software development stacks? If NVIDIA is right about AI, isn't this same technology going to erode the software side of this same software moat?

well done you realised no one knows what they are talking about

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#137

Post by motoxpro »

Altaba wrote: post #106
motoxpro wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more interesting take here would be WHEN this will happen. I don't think Ben, or anyone else, thinks we wont have some sort of correction or stabilization in supply/demand (he has said as much) But when will that occur? 2 months? 2 years? 20 years?

well its typically when it becomes clear that the private equity firms taking the risk decide they can not get the returns they need, forcing the backstoppers such as Nvidia to take that burden, and the whole ecosystem collapses.

I guess my point is that until that collapse, returns are very very very good. This can (and probably will) go on for a decent amount of time more, regardless of the inevitable things you point out.

My guess is at least another 2 years, as most people don't use AI yet, or maybe more precisely, AI is not used in the underlying workflows (which are invisible to the consumer) that make up most people's jobs.

Who knows if I am right. My original post was just pointing out that what you say is about timing, not whether it's true or not, because of course its true.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#138

Post by robocat »

YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

> Google's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board

Nvidia's sells hardware yet their market cap is about the same as Google's.

How much value could Google get by selling hardware too? Google'd be selling to competitors, so difficult to capture much of the value and would decrease Google's value as an AI company. Maybe a child company?

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#139

Post by ragall »

pletnes wrote: post #40
dzonga wrote: post #36

Nvidia has been playing a dangerous but profitable game since the Crypto boom. but now I think they probably have bitten more than they can chew. Apple already proved with their unified memory - that as long you have the capacity you can run capable models locally - thereby goes demand for inference if everyone is running some model locally. For training - Chinese models have proved that you don't need the latest & g…

Nvidia sell iot boards with unified architecture. Would not be shocked if they launch pc/laptop/server boards at some point.

I'd be happy enough if Nvidia decided to launch an update to the now dated (2019) Shield streaming box, which is still the best on the market as to codec support and image quality.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#140

Post by bdangubic »

robocat wrote: post #138
YuechenLi wrote: post #68

Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute…

> Google's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board Nvidia's sells hardware yet their market cap is about the same as Google's. How much value could Google get by selling hardware too? Google'd be selling to competitors, so difficult to capture much of the value and would decrease Google's value as an AI company. Maybe a child company?

Google sells TPUs already, to competitors :)
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