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Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

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Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#411

Post by badestrand »

depr wrote: post #387
Eridrus wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware of dual class shares, but preferences are typically 1x, and none of the deals were for less than the amount raised, so they're not relevant here. The fact that these are not really acquisitions doesn't change the fact that Groq the entity now has $20b.

Groq doesn't keep that money, it goes to VCs. They claim the company is "pivoting", not "selling" and avoid the payout trigger.

Money can't just "go" somewhere, it needs a reason first, at least for book-keeping. I mean, VCs can get their invested capital back but on top of that, how would that money be transfered? $20B is a lot and for sure the VCs will not just write an invoice of $18B for consulting services.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#412

Post by njuhhktlrl »

IceWreck wrote: post #404
bossyTeacher wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology. A really strange agreement where top executives of a company "join" another company for the benefit of the other company. If it quacks like a duck...

This is exactly what Google did with Windsurf and similar to what Meta did with Scale AI. Seems like a rising trend,

Remember ex3dfx.com setup by former employees?

This is exactly what nvidia tried to do with 3dfx 25 years ago. They have experience of screwing people over!

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#413

Post by KronisLV »

wyre wrote: post #205
aschobel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For coding I don’t use any of the previous gen models anymore. Ideally I would have both fast and SOTA; if I would have to pick one I’d go with SOTA. There a report by OpenRouter on what folks tend to pay for it; it generally is SOTA in the coding domain. Folks are still paying a premium for them today. There is a question if there is a bar where coding models are “good enough”; for myself I always want smarter / SOT…

FWIW coding is one of the largest usages for LLM's where SOTA quality matters. I think the bar for when coding models are "good enough" will be a tradeoff between performance and price. I could be using Cerebras Code and saving $50 a month, but Opus 4.5 is fast enough and I value the piece-of-mind I have knowing it's quality is higher than Cerebras' open source models to spend the extra money. It might take a while f…

I just use a mix of Cerebras Code for lots of fast/simpler edits and refactoring and Codex or Claude Code for more complex debugging or planning and implementing new features, works pretty well. Then again, I move around so many tokens that doing everything with just one provider would need either their top of the line subscriptions or paying a lot per-token some months. And then there's the thing that a single model (even SOTA) can never solve all problems, sometimes I also need to pull out Gemini (3 is especially good) or others.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#414

Post by qcnguy »

SirMaster wrote: post #280
tickerticker wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They bounced millions of queries off of ChatGPT to teach/form/train their DeepSeek model. This bot-like querying was the "distillation."

Why would OpenAI allow someone to do that?

They don't anymore. They introduced ID verification shortly after, but it's hard to stop completely while also scaling fast.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#416

Post by tgma »

lumost wrote: post #405
tgma wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implicit promise is only partially true. Very rarely you can find a proven talent that will actually forego significant salary. Often time when that happens the person is close to founders and will have a significant role in shaping the startup and will get quasi-acquired too. This promise may have been more true before 2010s where public companies were not paying as much in liquid cash and private companies were…

That just means you’re pulling from the lower end of the talent pool. There is nothing wrong with this, but usually talent is correlated with outcome. Most hot startups which are going places are near impossible to get into even for folks with good offers.

Your last sentence is not mutually exclusive with my statement. Both could be simultaneously true. The sheer number of big company employees compared to hot startup makes it hard for everyone good to get into the startup, especially considering they usually have more specific needs. That said it could also be the case that the hot startup cannot easily get good employees from big company.

My point was more that the high end ones they do get are usually in the front piece of the airplane in the acquisition split. Also, the really hot startups are actually paying quite a bit of cash upfront so the original premise of employee sacrifice isn’t as true.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#417

Post by thehim58 »

Eridrus wrote: post #358
jbkkd wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who worked in a company that got "not acquired" in a similar deal. She didn't see a dime out of it, and was let off (together with a big chunk of people) within 6 months.

Can you say more about why mechanically she didn't get anything? If you exercise your options you have real stock in the company, so I don't see how you can get shafted here. Did investors do some sort of dividend cash out before employees were able to exercise their options? (Obviously shady, but more about investors/leadership being unethical than the deal structure). Would love to know more about how this played o…

Hey, husband of that friend here, The bought company had huge debts to the investors (it is a startup, not tiny but small one, ran for several years) and after cashing those out from the purchase deal, the employees were left with shares that were worth 0$. (might be that the founders also grabbed some money out of that purchase, no one knows tho)

The employees of that bought company were given an incentive by the buying company to stay for a while and help tearing down and integrating their product into the buying company.

One could say shady, I'd say that it was just a bad deal.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#418

Post by stuaxo »

kasey_junk wrote: post #348
sigmoid10 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As this gets more common, I think it will eventually lead to startups having a hard time attracting talent with lucrative equity compensation. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until this catches on among employees, but I already wouldn't take any positions in startups with a significant payment in equity anymore. The chances are slim that this pays out anyways, but now even when you are successful, noo…

At my last job search I didn’t consider any equity based startups seriously because of this trend. It was already such a tenuous path as it stood, but now with the norm established it seems like it’s become impossible for a rank and file employee to get paid out. I’m more curious how angel investors are being treated in these exits. If _they_ dry up the whole pipeline goes away

The chance of rank and file employees getting anything has always been small now its smaller.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#419

Post by Eridrus »

thehim58 wrote: post #417
Eridrus wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about why mechanically she didn't get anything? If you exercise your options you have real stock in the company, so I don't see how you can get shafted here. Did investors do some sort of dividend cash out before employees were able to exercise their options? (Obviously shady, but more about investors/leadership being unethical than the deal structure). Would love to know more about how this played o…

Hey, husband of that friend here, The bought company had huge debts to the investors (it is a startup, not tiny but small one, ran for several years) and after cashing those out from the purchase deal, the employees were left with shares that were worth 0$. (might be that the founders also grabbed some money out of that purchase, no one knows tho) The employees of that bought company were given an incentive by the bu…

Thanks for the details.

It's definitely true that common stock gets $0 if the acquisition price is That sort of sounds like the startup wasn't doing well, and the acquisition wasn't for a lot of money (relative to amount raised), which seems very different from these Groq/Windsurf situations.

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