461–470 of 620 posts
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Nvidia just needs the winner to be an Nvidia customer. OpenAI is replacable.
If OpenAI folded, you’d have the one LLM company that consumers know suddenly gone. Which seems like the opposite of an AI success story. People will start looking at valuations more carefully. Investors will get jittery. Spending on GPUs will drop, as will NVidia’s stock price. I’m not sure that NVidia views OpenAI as replaceable.
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Once they "reach AGI", will they have a big party on a carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" banner?
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(Which for anyone familiar with your long comment history as a regular HN poster, is comically absurd to imply. You've been reliably adamant that AI will demolish this or that entire industry overnight for years at this point).
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When models get cheaper to run for OpenAI, they also get cheaper for everyone else. It gets commoditized. AI might be able to do more, but most people aren’t going to pay for a thing they could get for free. See the many models on Huggingface as examples of that. And as the number of things AI is “good enough” at increases, the list of things on the frontier that people will want to pay OpenAI for shrinks. Even if Op…
> get cheaper to run Irrelevant. The model is the moat > most companies don’t care about that. Wrong. They will use the model that gives them an edge. If they are using a PhD but their competitors are using Einstein, they will lose. > center a div For sure a common use case, but is bot what the CEO is concerned about with AI.
For some tasks that matters. But for a lot of tasks, "good enough but cheaper" will win out.
I'm sure there will be a market for whichever company has the best model, but just like most companies don't hire many PhD's, most companies won't feel a need for the highest end models either, above a certain level.
E.g. with the release of Sonnet 4.6, I switched a lot of my processes from Opus to Sonnet, because Sonnet 4.6 is good enough, and it means I can do more for less.
But I'm also experimenting with Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek, and others for a number of tasks, including fine-grained switching and interleaving. E.g. have a cheap but dumb model filter data or take over when a sub-task is simple enough, in order to have the smart model do less, for example.
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So what. In a highly competitive industry they can't keep selling inference unless they continually train better models. It's like saying my airline is profitable if you don't count the cost of buying new airplanes.
This is a completely new market and players are currently burning money in order to capture market share. The money will stop flowing in at some point, but until then, you can’t compare it to an industry like aviation which is extremely mature and heavily optimized.
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I don't know that OpenAI specifically is the weak link but this definitely adds to the argument that the entire sector is a wash with the same three or four companies passing around the same $50B over and over. OpenAI is just the link that seems most likely to break first.
I've subscribed to a few AI tools for the last 3 years now. I'm someone who almost never subscribes to anything. I'm sure that $50b has my money in there somewhere.
$730B pre-money for a company where each model is roughly 2x profitable on its own, but each next model costs 10x the last. The whole thing only works if scaling keeps delivering. Research (Sara Hooker et al.) is not encouraging on that front, compact models already outperform massive predecessors on downstream tasks while scaling laws only predict pre-training loss reliably. Wrote about both the per-model math and t…
Why are we so against, in principle, to the current pre-training scaling laws? Perhaps, we'll require new innovations at some point, but the momentum allows us to reach to newer heights that we've never climbed before.
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Great analogy. ;-) Doubt Jensen sees himself as a “dealer” but considering the vendor lock-in and margins, he pretty much is the Tony Montana of Ai Chips. It’s nuts that this type of financing is legal.
I don't see the problem as long as materially significant transactions by publicly traded companies are properly disclosed to investors. If someone loses money by buying NVDA then they have only themselves to blame.
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It is legal because Jensen isn't selling drugs, payday loans are legal too!
It’s legal because both sides have armies of lawyers and are voluntarily entering into contracts where each party gets consideration. How someone can compare the above situation to a person getting a payday loan to put a roof over their head or food on their plate is beyond me. The “it’s like ” is a tired trope.
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The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.
Cisco did this in 1999. That's how my smallish apartment building in Sweden ended up with a kick-ass Cisco 10 Gbps switch in its basement a year later - when these cost real money. I think the HOA still only pays like $10/month/apartment for an entry level that's now defined as 250/250 Mbit/s. Someone must have been unusually savvy with the contracts. https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y1999/m11/ci... Ci…