231–240 of 390 posts
This industry is the most intense game of musical chairs I've seen in a long time.
i grew up thinking finance was boring. after 2008, i started to pay a bit of attention, but the last few years of financial shenanigans have been absolute cinema, it feels like we are approaching the season finale.
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> I also don't get why there commiting so much to the future, are they sure of the quality of the products and their demand that much? It's one big game of musical chairs, and everyone can hear the phonograph slowing down. OpenAI is making these desperation plays because they've ran out of hype. GPT-5 "bombed", the wider public doesn't believe AI is going to keep getting exponentially better anymore. They're out of o…
I find it funny how people say GPT-5 "bombed". I noticed a significant improvement in maths and coding with GPT-5. To quantify were I've found the models useful: - GPT 3.5: Good for finding reference terms. I could not trust anything it said, but it could help me find some general terms in fields I was unfamiliar with. - GPT 4: Good for cached, obscure knowledge. I generally could trust the stuff it said to be true,…
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I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this type of deal recently: notably, it is often taken to imply something more or less shady is going on. I’m not sure when such arrangements became a thing, but I know equity stakes have long been an important part of enterprise SaaS deals. The reasoning is relatively straight-forward: if a large client commits to a vendor in a way that holds some risk to the former and will materi…
The skepticism is not sudden. Various kinds of circular deals were common in 1999/2000, shortly before the bubble burst, when telecom equipment makers subsidized their customers in order to prop up sales.
Again, I'm in no way denying either that (1) exists or that there's almost certainly an AI bubble -- I just think this difference is material.
For example, I would classify the recently proposed deal between NVIDIA and OpenAI as a case of (1), but this deal between AMD and OpenAI as (2). Namely, because I think it's clear that the chips act as well as recent advancements by Chinese manufacturers are threatening to NVIDIA's market-leading position and OpenAI investigating new vendors suggests they have suddenly become concerned with reducing cost of goods. Indeed, if both the leading Chinese firms and OpenAI were shown to be able to work with other vendors without sacrificing speed to market it would materially impact NVIDIA's stock price. AMD, on the other hand, is not trying to subsidize an existing client, but convince a market leader to take a risk.
The NVIDIA deal, then, suggests to me that certain limits have been reached in the industry, while the AMD deal does not provide me with any further evidence as to the existence of a bubble.
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On the flip side of it (and where most institutional investors are mentally) is that if OpenAI is to ever achieve AGI, it must invest nearly a trillion dollars towards that effort. We all know LLMs have their limitations, but next phase of AI growth is going to come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, maybe even Microsoft, and not some stealth startup. E.g., Only Big Tech can get us to AGI due to sheer massive amounts of…
That “only big tech can solve AGI” bit doesn’t make sense to me - the scale argument was made back when people thought just more scale and more training was gonna keep yielding results. Now it seems clear that what’s missing is another architectural leap like transformers, likely many different ones. That could come from almost anywhere? Or what makes this something where big tech is the only potential source of inno…
Neurosymbolic architectures are the future, but I think LLMs have a place as orchestrators and translators from natural language -> symbolic representation. I'm working on an article that lays out a pretty strong case for a lot of this based on ~30 studies, hopefully I can tighten it up and publish soon.
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> It's fantastic news, because OpenAI and AMD will now work together to develop decent software libraries for AI on AMD chips. Too fast to jump to conclusion. I'd say they will work together to develop software specifically designed for OpenAI products. It is a giant question mark whether we'll get libraries for general purpose computing out of this.
OpenAI and AMD both have strong incentives to chip away at Nvidia's dominant position, and the best way to do that is by releasing software tools to the public. Ask yourself: What would first-class PyTorch/Triton and Jax support for AMD hardware do to Nvidia's dominance and pricing power?
I would not put my bets on private companies' goodwill. I'd rather believe they'll do whatever is most important for their business priority, understand things at their face value, and then hope for the best.
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I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this type of deal recently: notably, it is often taken to imply something more or less shady is going on. I’m not sure when such arrangements became a thing, but I know equity stakes have long been an important part of enterprise SaaS deals. The reasoning is relatively straight-forward: if a large client commits to a vendor in a way that holds some risk to the former and will materi…
I generally agree with your point. OpenAI committing to buying a bunch of AMD hardware and doing the work to integrate support for it in their systems is a risk for OpenAI and a benefit for AMD (as demonstrated by the AMD stock popping on the announcement). So the warrants give OpenAI equity upside to offset risk. I think the skepticism comes from the recent OpenAI/Oracle deal which seemed kind of circular due to pay…
As @stingraycharles notes above, the AMD stock went up a lot already and this "may finally enable AMD to get a foot in the door in the whole large scale AI market."
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On the flip side of it (and where most institutional investors are mentally) is that if OpenAI is to ever achieve AGI, it must invest nearly a trillion dollars towards that effort. We all know LLMs have their limitations, but next phase of AI growth is going to come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, maybe even Microsoft, and not some stealth startup. E.g., Only Big Tech can get us to AGI due to sheer massive amounts of…
Theres a phrase for this. Financial engineering.
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>AMD just doesn’t know how to compete with Nvidia. They know exactly how to compete with Nvidia but choose not too. >But Lisa Su can’t bring herself to compete. Because she is colluding with her cousin Jensen.
“He’s my cuz so I’ll let him win the biggest business battle there is.” I dunno, doesn’t have the ring if credibility to it.
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AMD is giving OpenAI warrants (cf options) to buy AMD shares at 1c/share, but these only vest if OpenAI goes thru with AMD purchases as intended. It seems to basically give OpenAI an incentive to go thru with the deal.
The stock popped quite a bit today, so investors seem to think this is a good deal for AMD. I tend to agree, may finally enable AMD to get a foot in the door in the whole large scale AI market.
The title didn't make this obvious (at least not to me) but it's OpenAI that has the option to buy 10% of AMD. Not the other way around. In case you're wondering how OpenAI could afford to buy 10% of AMD while they are hemorrhaging money -- the terms of the deal allows OpenAI to buy 160 million shares at 1 cents a share. I could be thinking about this the wrong way but it appears that AMD is basically subsidizing the…