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Nvidia's Risky Business

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Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#31

Post by bwfan123 »

flyinglizard wrote: post #15
claytonjy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you might be looking for SemiAnalysis? I only read the free portions of articles but they have various paid options, mostly targeting investors with information and tools. https://semianalysis.com/

To me they come across as overzealous peddlers and hacks on some market pumping mission.

> overzealous peddlers and hacks

They are the marketing wing of the AI ecosystem. Their recent article on how SpaceX would drive 500B in data-center revenue was ludicrous-mode. Lets revisit this in a few years.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#32

Post by ey5e5uer5ur »

kaonwarb wrote: post #16
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know him, I subscribed for a while. Even his paid content is lacking. I'm looking more Valens Research kind of analysis. SemiAnalysis is also good in the higher tier. ps. Being influential in Silicon Valley just means you are influential, it does not mean substantial. Leopold is still influential and gets money thrown at him at $100s of million despite having no substance.

Criticism with no justification behind it is cheap.

irony

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#33

Post by mattnewton »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #21
jcfrei wrote: post #17

In many investment theses - like Nvidia's bet that demand for compute will keep growing - the first order assumption is usually correct. Yes, demand for more compute, chips, infrastructure is huge and each year some additional data centers will be built. Where such investment bets usually fail is in the second-order assumptions: Ie. the expectation of the growth of demand. This is where there's a high chance that the…

What makes this insanely hard to predict is that the compute needed for the same quality output has roughly gone down 90% every 18 months for ~5 years. 1) We don't know how long that trend will continue, but you do know where to look for when it may end (if smaller sized models continue to compress the knowledge effectively of larger models). 2) We don't know when the appetite for higher cost models might go down and…

I think efficiency is unlikely to result in lower demand for compute, instead more useful compute per watt increases the value of that compute; and we are not going to run out of economically useful things to do with it anytime soon on the demand side.

The harder thing to forecast for me is if we hit a wall on increasing efficiency, either on the model weights side or silicon side, with current approaches. If we have to switch to something like burning the model weights into silicon to continue to make gains, then the current math on general purpose accelerators might be upside down.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#34

Post by Altaba »

Ben is wrong; demand for compute, aka revenue backlogs, is mythical and will collapse, simply because of two reasons :

1. Circular investment/spending.

2. Too much capital in the system, so returns cannot be hit regardless because the barrier is too high. (Evidence being every capital cycle in history)

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#35

Post by odiroot »

pelotron wrote: post #22
cmiles8 wrote: post #20

Nothing goes up and to the right forever. Nothing. Building a business model on the belief that “this time is different” always finds storms on the horizon.

What if we build our whole economy on that belief?

Or at least our public pension systems.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#36

Post by dzonga »

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 & greatest in Nvidia hardware. Same as TPUs.

only time will tell.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#38

Post by clarkmoody »

> To translate such figures into comparable 2026 magnitudes, multiply by a factor of 1,200.

Perhaps this has something to do with the economic dislocations and world wars between the 1870s and today?

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#39

Post by rglover »

pelotron wrote: post #22
cmiles8 wrote: post #20

Nothing goes up and to the right forever. Nothing. Building a business model on the belief that “this time is different” always finds storms on the horizon.

What if we build our whole economy on that belief?

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#40

Post by pletnes »

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.
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