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Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

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Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#71

Post by gizajob »

N0b8ez wrote: post #58
gizajob wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough my bachelors thesis was “Wittgensteinian problems for Artificial General Intelligence” so I also have grounds for being bearish, even though I respect what is happening at the moment and have hope for the future.

Is the Wittgensteinian problem that the AGI wouldn't understand concepts like we do, or is the problem that it wouldn't be able to use them better than a human?

There’s a few different ways one can look at it if trying to take lessons and ideas from Wittgenstein. I didn’t do a brilliant job of the thesis to be honest… but I got a few things on an intuitive level from trying to grok a bunch of Wittgenstein that left me feeling like there was a serious problem in our attempts to build an AI.

One of them is that we only have language with which to build an AI - language and symbols. Yet these nevertheless capture absolutely nothing about what it is to perceive and understand, on a human level, so yeah. It’s kind of what Searle was getting at - symbolic outputs and translation based on rules doesn’t get you intelligence, even if it produces a system that looks as if it is intelligent.

There’s also that we have an intersubjective attunement to others that is pre-linguistic. Ultimately “meaning is use” which is a pithy take on later Wittgenstein- there’s nothing in language which means anything at all. So it’s not that it wouldn’t be able to use language or concepts better than we do, it’s that we change with the AI and don’t accept them - particularly as they start to become uncanny or unpredictable.

There really is something to sentience that we all know that cannot be reduced to language or machinery.

Our language about machinery, and intelligent machinery, is full of usage mistakes and categorical errors that we overlook, but which are more serious when analysed.

We are complete beings - my intelligence is part of a system, and it makes no sense to abstract it out of that system in order to nail it down.

“Pain” cannot be reduced down to or captured in language. Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.

So ideas kind of like that and more.

AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#72

Post by chucke1992 »

digging wrote: post #38
rwmj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's selling shovels in a gold rush, which is a solid plan.

I'm getting very weary of reading this analogy, especially when it's given no thought whatsoever. Did you know? Every gold rush in history has ended. If you have a shovel factory that burns millions of dollars a day to sell as many shovels as you can, and you're not prepared for people to give up on digging for gold, you're going to very suddenly start burning your profits.

The main threat to Nvidia is the fact that big clients might start producing their own chips (like Apple is doing and MSFT has started). And they will start offering them to their users who is now leveraging Nvidia's solutions.

And AMD and Intel might wake up from coma too.

Though Nvidia is trying to pivot towards more cloud and software solutions. Let's see.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#73

Post by gizajob »

N0b8ez wrote: post #56
dvt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? I'm actually quite bearish on AI on the very long term (and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense), but I do think AI will redefine how we interact with our computers/devices in the short-to-medium term. These days, everyone's too enamored with the generative aspect (which is,…

Are you thinking of Searle's Chinese Room or another famous thought experiment? Is your issue that an AGI wouldn't really "understand" concepts, despite being better at using them than a human? >and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense It's hard to imagine Socrates using this form of argument.

Yeah but Socrates mostly just spent all day convincing people they were stupid.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#74

Post by gizajob »

lucisferre wrote: post #35
gizajob wrote: post #5

Question for HNers: Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? And do you think all of Nvidia’s customers throwing money at data centres full of GPUs will cause the current generation of AIs (LLMs etc) to deliver greater and greater returns, sufficient to make Nvidia worth this current valuation and more? WalMart’s market cap is $540billion. Would…

I think this is a great question and one I keep mulling over. I've been evaluating paid AI products like Co-pilot to try to determine if there is enough general purpose value there to justify it's cost. At $360 a year, the productivity benefit doesn't need to be huge to justify the cost, lets say you would probably want to so $500-1,000/yr in expense reduction. I can say for certain that I have found roughly enough b…

Thanks for your answer. It’s useful to think about for sure. I’m just trying to ponder where we are at with it, and whether Nvidia is becoming overblown or whether we’ll need another quantum leap on the software side to get better AI or whether the current generation and approaches are going to keep giving bigger and bigger returns. As you point out, AI really is improving tooling, particularly in coding, and this is worth paying for.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#75

Post by gizajob »

bloopernova wrote: post #60
jandrese wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now AI is in the part of the hype cycle where we are in the first knee of the S curve and people are drawing straight lines from that to predict the future. I've seen so much ridiculous hype about AI becoming godlike super-geniuses before the decade is out that I have to wonder if any of these people have tried using AI for real work and not just flashy demos.

It's just like the hype about self driving vehicles. 5 years ago I had bought into the hype and thought that most long haul truck drivers would be out of work by now.

Funny that isn’t it. I wonder if Tesla throwing $4billion of Nvidia GPUs into a data centre will be enough to solve it “this time”.

Self-driving could easily become one of the pins that bursts Nvidias bubble if we don’t see spectacular improvements.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#76

Post by sifar »

lucisferre wrote: post #35
gizajob wrote: post #5

Question for HNers: Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? And do you think all of Nvidia’s customers throwing money at data centres full of GPUs will cause the current generation of AIs (LLMs etc) to deliver greater and greater returns, sufficient to make Nvidia worth this current valuation and more? WalMart’s market cap is $540billion. Would…

I think this is a great question and one I keep mulling over. I've been evaluating paid AI products like Co-pilot to try to determine if there is enough general purpose value there to justify it's cost. At $360 a year, the productivity benefit doesn't need to be huge to justify the cost, lets say you would probably want to so $500-1,000/yr in expense reduction. I can say for certain that I have found roughly enough b…

>> At $360 a year, the productivity benefit doesn't need to be huge to justify the cost, lets say you would probably want to so $500-1,000/yr in expense reduction.

You also have to factor in the cost of ai's failure modes. Though it might be difficult to put a number on it.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#77

Post by SirMaster »

apsec112 wrote: post #39
zarzavat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market cap is irrational and I submit as evidence Llama 3. AI won’t need huge amounts of computing resources. It will need moderate amounts of computing resources. The huge amount of computing resources seen today are the result of immature technology that uses resources inefficiently. As the technology improves, the capability-per-FLOP will increase and AI will move on-device.

AI has seen rapid efficiency improvements every year for the last decade, but the amount of computation used has gone up, not down. The improvements always go into making larger and more powerful models, not into just running the same models but at a lower cost per hour. https://epochai.org/blog/algorithmic-progress-in-language-mo...

But doesn't it feel like the larger models are seeing diminished returns compared to the smaller open models?

Feels like they will eventually converge unless some big breakthrough happens that only benefits the large models.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#78

Post by talldayo »

digging wrote: post #38
rwmj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's selling shovels in a gold rush, which is a solid plan.

I'm getting very weary of reading this analogy, especially when it's given no thought whatsoever. Did you know? Every gold rush in history has ended. If you have a shovel factory that burns millions of dollars a day to sell as many shovels as you can, and you're not prepared for people to give up on digging for gold, you're going to very suddenly start burning your profits.

I don't think many people, Nvidia shareholders included, expect this to last forever. But you make hay when the sun is shining; if VCs will pay hand-over-fist for AI-native products, then you better damn-well make sure they can buy the most expensive solutions. If they're looking for gold, you build them gaudy excavators to work in.

That being said, Nvidia is particularly well positioned to continue reaping the reward of serving the high-performance-compute market. CUDA is yet-unparalleled, and NPUs/TPUs are still struggling to make a case for themselves. If we get another cryptocurrency-style bum-rush on number crunching computers, I don't think anyone except Nvidia will be poised to immediately benefit. General-purpose GPU compute is in short supply on consumer systems, everyone wants the cloud and the cloud wants Nvidia.

Re: Nvidia hits $3T market cap on back of AI boom

#79

Post by diob »

gizajob wrote: post #5

Question for HNers: Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? And do you think all of Nvidia’s customers throwing money at data centres full of GPUs will cause the current generation of AIs (LLMs etc) to deliver greater and greater returns, sufficient to make Nvidia worth this current valuation and more? WalMart’s market cap is $540billion. Would…

I don't think we will ever achieve general AI with this. While current AI is impressive, it fundamentally relies on big data and algorithms. The main limitation of big data, which affects AI as well, is the quality of the data and the resulting outputs. Who is curating the data? Who is curating the outputs? It's not magic. Overcoming this barrier may be possible, but I believe it's an issue that isn't being adequately addressed.
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