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Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

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Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#801
post #781

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 crash is absolutely rational; the cascading effect highlights the missing moat for companies like OpenAI. Without a moat, no investor will provide these companies with the billions that fueled most of the demand. This demand was essential for NVIDIA to squeeze such companies with incredible profit margins. NVIDIA was overvalued before, and this correction is entirely justified. The larger impact of DeepSeek is mo…

It has been clear for a while that one of two things is true.

1) AI stuff isn't really worth trillions, in which case Nvidia is overvalued.

2) AI stuff is really worth trillions, in which case there will be no moat, because you can cross any moat for that amount of money, e.g. you could recreate CUDA from scratch for far less than a trillion dollars and in fact Nvidia didn't spend anywhere near that much to create it to begin with. Someone else, or many someones, will spend the money to cross the moat and get their share.

So Nvidia is overvalued on the fundamentals. But is it overvalued on the hype cycle? Lots of people riding the bubble because number goes up until it doesn't, and you can lose money (opportunity cost) by selling too early just like you can lose money by selling too late.

Then events like this make some people skittish that they're going to sell too late, and number doesn't go up that day.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you guess what the next step will be? He fixes the cable? But seriously, video encoding isn't AI. Video encoding is a well understood problem. We can't even make "AI" that doesn't hallucinate yet. We're not sure what architectures will be needed for progress in AI. I get that we're all drunk on our analogies in the vacuum of our ignorance but we need to have a bit of humility and awareness of where we're at.

Conversely, can you name one computing thing that used to be hard when it was first created that is still hard in the same way today after generations of software/hardware improvements?

3D graphics.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Someone commented somewhere above that deepseek avoided using CUDA. So it means you can achieve very good results without Nvidia's CUDA.

"They skipped CUDA and instead used PTX which is a lower level instruction set"

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#804
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because software devs are smart and make a lot of money - a natural next step is to try and use their smarts to do something with that money. Hence stocks.

>It's because software devs are smart and make a lot of money They just think they're smart BECAUSE they make a lot of money. Just because you can center divs for six figures a year at a F500 doesn't make you smart at everything.

I've never met a fellow software engineer who "centers divs" for 6 figures.

But then I work with engineers using FPGAs to trade in the markets with tick to trade times in double digit nanoseconds and processing streams of market data at ~10 million messages per second (80Gbps)

The truth is, a lot of P&L in trading these days is a technical feat of mathematics and engineering and not just one of fundamental analysis and punting on business plans

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#806

I dont' know what the surprise is here. the human brain consumes about 20 watts. literally a rounding error compared to what chatgpt uses. so we already know that there was plenty of room on the table to improve. incidentally, I love these kinds of market crashes. just moved a big chunk of my savings account into stocks last night :). Buy and hold. dont' sell during a dip lol

Why do you think the human brain and chatgpt are in any way related?

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#807
post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crash is absolutely rational; the cascading effect highlights the missing moat for companies like OpenAI. Without a moat, no investor will provide these companies with the billions that fueled most of the demand. This demand was essential for NVIDIA to squeeze such companies with incredible profit margins. NVIDIA was overvalued before, and this correction is entirely justified. The larger impact of DeepSeek is mo…

It has been clear for a while that one of two things is true. 1) AI stuff isn't really worth trillions, in which case Nvidia is overvalued. 2) AI stuff is really worth trillions, in which case there will be no moat, because you can cross any moat for that amount of money, e.g. you could recreate CUDA from scratch for far less than a trillion dollars and in fact Nvidia didn't spend anywhere near that much to create it…

I think the analysis of (2) is too simplistic because it ignores network effects. A community of developers and users around a specific toolset (e.g. CUDA) is hard to just "buy". Imagine trying to build a better programming language than python -- you could do it for a trillion dollars, but good luck getting the world to use it. For a real example, see Meta and Threads, or any other Twitter competitor.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#808

Greater efficiency of light bulbs has led to more light bulb use, not less. More efficient training of LLMs could just as likely lead to more chip use, not less.

Across 300 years of lighting technology decreases in cost consistently led to much larger increases in light use every time. Until about the past 50 years or so when increased light use started to fall behind the drop in costs.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger-Fouquet/publicati...

Cheaper models are good for industry. But the demand for better more reliable models is immense. The models won't stay cheaper.

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#809
post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that’s unfair unless you give specific examples and clear evidence he’s wrong. I disagree with PG on economics and politics, but much of his writing on that is subjective.

“Clear evidence he’s wrong”

Good science is dead, isn’t it?

Re: Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout

#810
post #625

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 don’t understand why this is not obvious to many people: tech and stock trading are totally two different things, why on earth a tech expert is expected to know trading at all? Imagining how ridiculous it would be if a computer science graduate will also automatically get a financial degree from college even though no financial class has been taken.

People developing statistical models that are excercising the financial market at scale are the quants. These people don't come from financial degree background.
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