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The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

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Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#461

Post by eru »

e_y_ wrote: post #434
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - because this eliminates entirely or shifts the majority of work from GPU to CPU - and Nvidia does not sell CPUs. If the AI market gets 10x bigger, and GPU work gets 50% smaller (which is still 5x larger than today) - but Nvidia is priced on 40% growth for the next ten years (28x larger) - there is a price mismatch. It is theoretically possible for a massive reduction in GPU usage or shift from GPU to CPU to bene…

On desktop, CPU decoding is passable but it's still better to have a graphics card for 4K. On mobile, you definitely want to stick to codecs like H264/HEVC/AVC1 that are supported in your phone's decoder chips. CPU chipsets have borrowed video decoder units and SSE instructions from GPU-land, but the idea that video decoding is a generic CPU task now is not really true. Now maybe every computer will come with an inte…

> Now maybe every computer will come with an integrated NPU and it won't be made by Nvidia, although so far integrated GPUs haven't supplanted discrete ones.

Depends on what form factor you are looking at. The majority of computers these days are smart phones, and they are dominated by systems-on-a-chip.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#462

Post by eru »

vFunct wrote: post #268
aurareturn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t your point about video compression tech support Nvidia’s bull case? Better video compression led to an explosion in video consumption on the Internet, leading to much more revenue for companies like Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. More efficient LLMs lead to much more AI usage. Nvidia, TSMC, etc will benefit.

I agree that advancements like DeepSeek, like transformer models before it, is just going to end up increasing demand. It’s very shortsighted to think we’re going to need fewer chips because the algorithms got better. The system became more efficient, which causes induced demand.

It will increase the total volume demanded, but not necessarily the amount of value that companies like NVidia can capture.

Most likely, consumer surplus has gone up.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#463

Post by eru »

9rx wrote: post #319
aurareturn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t your point about video compression tech support Nvidia’s bull case? Better video compression led to an explosion in video consumption on the Internet, leading to much more revenue for companies like Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. More efficient LLMs lead to much more AI usage. Nvidia, TSMC, etc will benefit.

Yes, over the long haul, probably. But as far as individual investors go they might not like that Nvidia. Anyone currently invested is presumably in because they like the insanely high profit margin, and this is apt to quash that. There is now much less reason to give your first born to get your hands on their wares. Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc., and especially those not named Google, have nothingburger m…

> Anyone currently invested is presumably in because they like the insanely high profit margin, [...]

I'm invested in Nvidia because it's part of the index that my ETF is tracking. I have no clue what their profit margins are.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#464

Post by eru »

vFunct wrote: post #264
pjdesno wrote: post #176

The description of DeepSeek reminds me of my experience in networking in the late 80s - early 90s. Back then a really big motivator for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and fiber-to-the-home was the promise of video on demand, which was a huge market in comparison to the Internet of the day. Just about all the work in this area ignored the potential of advanced video coding algorithms, and assumed that broadcast TV-q…

I worked on a network that used a protocol very similar to ATM (actually it was the first Iridium satellite network). An internet based on ATM would have been amazing. You’re basically guaranteeing a virtual switched circuit, instead of the packets we have today. The horror of packet switching is all the buffering it needs, since it doesn’t guarantee circuits. Bandwidth is one thing, but the real benefit is that ATM…

> The horror of packet switching is all the buffering it needs, since it doesn’t guarantee circuits.

You don't actually need all that much buffering.

Buffer bloat is actually a big problem with conventional TCP. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14298576

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#465

Post by troad »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #387
ipdashc wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly d…

Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation", but the rumbling of the vocal coords isn't the entire audio data which is present in-person. Clicks of the tongue and smacking of the lips make much higher frequencies, and higher sample rates capture the timbre/shape of the soundwave instead of rounding it down to a smooth sine wave. Discord defaults to 64kbps, but you can…

> Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation"

Huh? What? That's not even remotely true.

If you read your comment out loud, the very first sound you'd make would have almost all of its energy concentrated between 4 and 10 kHz.

Human vocal cords constantly hit up to around 10 kHz, though auditory distinctiveness is more concentrated below 4 kHz. It is unevenly distributed though, with sounds like and being (infamously) severely degraded by a 4 kHz cut-off.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#466

Post by 9rx »

eru wrote: post #463
9rx wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, over the long haul, probably. But as far as individual investors go they might not like that Nvidia. Anyone currently invested is presumably in because they like the insanely high profit margin, and this is apt to quash that. There is now much less reason to give your first born to get your hands on their wares. Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc., and especially those not named Google, have nothingburger m…

> Anyone currently invested is presumably in because they like the insanely high profit margin, [...] I'm invested in Nvidia because it's part of the index that my ETF is tracking. I have no clue what their profit margins are.

> I'm invested in Nvidia [...] my ETF

That would be an unusual situation for an ETF. An ETF does not usually extend ownership of the underlying investment portfolio. An ETF normally offers investors the opportunity to invest in the ETF itself. The ETF is what you would be invested in. Your concern as an investor in an ETF would only be with the properties of the ETF, it being what you are invested in, and this seems to be true in your case as well given how you describe it.

Are you certain you are invested in Nvidia? The outcome of the ETF may depend on Nvidia, but it may also depend on how a butterfly in Africa happens to flap its wings. You aren't, by any common definition found within this type of context, invested in that butterfly.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#467

Post by aurareturn »

Vegenoid wrote: post #402
aurareturn wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usage of existing but cheaper nvidia chips to make models of similar quality is the main takeaway. So why not buy a more expensive Nvidia chip to run a better model?

Because if you don't have infinite money, considering whether to buy a thing is about the ratio of price to performance, not just performance. If you can get enough performance for your needs out of a cheaper chip, you buy the cheaper chip.

The AI industry isn't pausing because DeepSeek is good enough. The industry is in an arms race to AGI. Having a more efficient method to train and use LLMs only accelerates progress, leading to more chip demand.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#468

Post by aurareturn »

ReptileMan wrote: post #419
aurareturn wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be for Nvidia? Explain more.

Well so far the paradigm is for powerful silicone that only Nvidia could deliver - so they could charge high margins. Theoretically they could be on top if the paradigm changes to big volume slower and lower margin one. But there may be another winner.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to value.

Do AMD chips offer more value than Nvidia chips?

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#469

Post by munksbeer »

ozten wrote: post #401
munksbeer wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see close to zero possibility that the majority of the work will be shifted to the CPU. Anything a CPU can do can just be done better with specialised GPU hardware.

> Anything a CPU can do can just be done better Nope. Anything inheriantly serial is better off on the CPU due to caching and it's architecture. Many things that are highly parallizable are getting GPU enabled. Games and ML are GPU by default, but many things are migrating to CUDA. You need both for cheap, high performance computing. They are different workloads.

Yes, I was too hasty in my response. I should have been more specific that I mean ML/AI type tasks. I see no way that we end up on general purpose CPUs for this.

Re: The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia

#470

Post by dragonwriter »

munksbeer wrote: post #347
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - because this eliminates entirely or shifts the majority of work from GPU to CPU - and Nvidia does not sell CPUs. If the AI market gets 10x bigger, and GPU work gets 50% smaller (which is still 5x larger than today) - but Nvidia is priced on 40% growth for the next ten years (28x larger) - there is a price mismatch. It is theoretically possible for a massive reduction in GPU usage or shift from GPU to CPU to bene…

I can see close to zero possibility that the majority of the work will be shifted to the CPU. Anything a CPU can do can just be done better with specialised GPU hardware.

In terms of inference (and training) of AI models, sure, most things that a CPU core can do would be done cheaper per unit of performance on either typical GPU or NPU cores.
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