Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#661

Post by YZF »

thw09j9m wrote: post #650

I think the big picture that many people are missing here is the motivation that all these AI/tech companies have for buying up so many GPU's in the first place: achieving AGI/ASI. And while some still try to portray a dedication/duty to AI Alignment, I think most have either secretly or more publicly moved away from it in the race to become the first to achieve it. And I think, given that inference time compute is s…

It doesn't feel like DeepSeek has a big enough breakthrough here. This is just one of many optimizations we're going to see over the next years. How close this brings us to "AGI" is a complete unknown.

The large investments were mainly for training larger foundation models, or at the very least hedging for that. It hasn't been that clear over the last 1+ years that simply increasing the number of parameters continues to lead to the same improvements we've seen before.

Markets do not necessarily have any prediction power here. People were spooked by DeepSeek getting ahead of the competition and by the costs they report. There is still a lot of work and some of it may still require brute force and more resources (this seems to be true for training the foundation models still).

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#662

Post by giantrobot »

fldskfjdslkfj wrote: post #618
aurareturn wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re wrong and Wallstreet got Deepseek’s impact wrong. You say DeepSeek should decrease Nvidia demand. Wallstreet agreed today. I say DeepSeek should increase Nvidia’s demand due to Jevon’s Paradox.

The increase in efficiency is usually accompanied with the process of commoditization as stuff get cheaper to develop, which is very bad news for nvidia. If you dont need the super high end chips than Nvidia loses it's biggest moat and ability to monopolize the tech, CUDA isn't enough.

> Nvidia loses it's biggest moat and ability to monopolize the tech, CUDA isn't enough

CUDA is plenty for right now. AMD can't/won't get their act together with GPU software and drivers. Intel isn't in much better of a position than AMD and has a host of other problems. It's also unlikely the "let's just glue a thousand ARM cores together" hardware will work as planned and still needs the software layer.

CUDA won't be an Nvidia moat forever but it's a decent moat for the next five years. If a company wants to build GPU compute resources it will be hard to go wrong buying Nvidia kit. At least from a platform point of view.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#663

Post by ponty_rick »

DAGdug wrote: post #659

All the references to Jevon’s paradox fail to account for three things: 1. There’s no good forecasting model to account for how aggregate demand moves as a function of efficiency gains in this space 2. Aggregate demand isn’t the same as Nvidia’s share of market, which could drop if alternative paradigms for training or inferencing gain traction 3. Forecasting time horizons matter for discounted cash flow/valuation ca…

Summarizing in Kevin Malone style - Nvidia good now. Later? No know.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#664

Post by culi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #459
culi wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but NVIDIA's amazing digging technique that could only be accomplished with NVIDIA shovels is now irrelevant. Meaning there are more people selling shovels for the gold rush

What about DeepSeek negates NVidia’s advantages over other GPU vendors?

You can train, or at least run, llms on intel and less powerful chips

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#665

Post by ponty_rick »

cageface wrote: post #590
eigenvalue wrote: post #567

90% of the comments in this thread make it clear that knowing about technology does not in any way qualify someone to think correctly about markets and equity valuations.

You could even say that overconfidence in abilities and knowledge outside of core expertise is the critical flaw of today's entire tech industry.

With the crowdstrike outage earlier last year it was incredible how many hidden security and kernel "experts" came out crawling from the woodwork, questioning why anything needs to run in the kernel and predicting the company's demise.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#666

Post by YZF »

yo-cuddles wrote: post #448
Sol- wrote: post #54

I find it interesting because the DeepSeek stuff, while very cool, doesn't seem invalidate that more compute wouldn't translate to even _higher_ capabilities? It's amazing what they did with a limited budget, but instead of the takeaway being "we don't need that much compute to achieve X", it could also be, "These new results show that we can achieve even 1000*X with our currently planned compute buildout" But perhap…

Probably not. If the price of Nvidia is dropping, it's because investors see a world where Nvidia hardware is less valuable, probably because it will be used less. You can't do the distill/magnify cycle like you do with alphago. LLM models have basically stalled in their base capabilities, pre training is basically over at this point, so the news arms race will be over marginal capability gains and (mostly) making th…

We don't know for example what a larger model can do with the new techniques DeepSeek is using for improving/refining it. It's possible the new models on their [own] failed to show progress but a combination of techniques will enable that barrier to be crossed.

We also don't know what the next discovery/breakthrough will be like. The reward for getting smarter AI is still huge and so the investment will likely remain huge for some time. If anything DeepSeek is showing us that there is still progress to be made.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#667

Post by avs733 »

ozten wrote: post #431

NVIDIA sells shovels to the gold rush. One miner (Liang Wenfeng), who has previously purchased at least 10,000 A100 shovels... has a "side project" where they figured out how to dig really well with a shovel and shared their secrets. The gold rush, wether real or a bubble is still there! NVIDA will still sell every shovel they can manufacture, as soon as it is available in inventory. Fortune 100 companies will still…

The thing with a gold rush is you often end up selling shovels after the gold has run out, but no one knows that until hindsight. There will probably be a couple scares that the gold has run out first to. And again the difference is only visible in hindsight.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#668

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #608
eigenvalue wrote: post #567

90% of the comments in this thread make it clear that knowing about technology does not in any way qualify someone to think correctly about markets and equity valuations.

I think you’re wrong and Wallstreet got Deepseek’s impact wrong. You say DeepSeek should decrease Nvidia demand. Wallstreet agreed today. I say DeepSeek should increase Nvidia’s demand due to Jevon’s Paradox.

Jevon's paradox ony applies under certain conditions. It remains to be seen if it will hold in this case.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#669

Post by snake_doc »

eigenvalue wrote: post #567

90% of the comments in this thread make it clear that knowing about technology does not in any way qualify someone to think correctly about markets and equity valuations.

The other way is certainly also true. Your short piece is rational, but lacks insight into the inference and training dynamics of ML adoption unconstrained.

The rate of ML progress is spectacularly compute constrained today. Every step in today’s scaling program is setup to de-risked the next scale up, because the opportunity cost of compute is so high. If the opportunity cost of compute is not so high, you can skip the 1B to 8B scale ups and grid search data mixes and hyperparameters.

The market/concentration risk premium drove most of the volatility today. If it was truly value driven, then this should have happened 6 months ago when DeepSeek released V2 that had the vast majority of cost optimizations.

Cloud data center CapEx is backstopped by their growth outlook driven by the technology, not by GPU manufacturers. Dollars will shift just as quickly (like how Meta literally teared down a half built data center in 2023 to restart it to meet new designs).

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#670

Post by haliskerbas »

sympil wrote: post #605
cageface wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could even say that overconfidence in abilities and knowledge outside of core expertise is the critical flaw of today's entire tech industry.

As a great example of this read Paul Graham’s essays that aren’t anout his core expertise.

But every successful SV founder and or VC is not only a tech genius but also a geopolitical and socioeconomic expert! That’s why they make war companies, cozy up to politicians, and talk about how woke is ruining the world. /s
Post reply on HN