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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

#91

Post by dvt »

FreakLegion wrote: post #88
dvt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you elaborate on why you believe AGI is nonsense? John Searle is much smarter than I am and he elaborated plenty on this in the 80s. (But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.) > Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see. This is true, though the workflow is extremely cumbersome. > People are d…

Searle's arguments aren't that broad. If you're thinking of the Chinese Room, the point there is simply that computation isn't understanding. It's not a claim that AGI is nonsense in principle , and in fact most of these older arguments are narrowly scoped to GOFAI. Of course nobody serious thinks LLMs have minds, either, but unless you believe in ghosts it's hard to make a case that human-like AGI shouldn't ultimate…

> unless you believe in ghosts it's hard to make a case that human-like AGI shouldn't ultimately be possible

The argument that any non-materialist position (panpsychism, substance dualism, monadism, etc.) must "believe in ghosts" is comically reductive. Metaphysics is a thing, you know. So is moral philosophy. I mean, heck, so is logic. In all these subfields, arguing that their respective first principles are purely materialist is an uphill battle. I get a feeling that post-2000s materialism is basically logical positivism 2.0 (and we know how that ended).

> It's not a claim that AGI is nonsense in principle

You're playing a semantic game here; but in any case, understanding is a function of intelligence, so (working backwards), you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, anyway.

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

#92

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

gizajob wrote: post #82
bradlys wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can go on longer than many of us can afford to keep shorting it.

Yeah but the growth happens over months - the shorting will be done in a couple of intense days.

Good luck timing it.

Shorting because it's dropping and then covering when it's going up how you end up losing money. By the time you see the short opportunity, or the opportunity to cover, it's too late.

It's just like buying because something is going up and selling when it starts going down. It's a recipe for buying high and selling low.

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

#93

Post by N0b8ez »

gizajob wrote: post #73
N0b8ez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tend to admire that Socrates used arguments in the process of that, unlike both of us right now.

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

#94

Post by nyxtom »

SirMaster wrote: post #77
apsec112 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Diffusion models still have plenty of room to grow (vision/video is orders of magnitude more expensive and larger) and we're only beginning to experiment with agent (AI -> AI Agent) workflow communication and automation.

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

#95

Post by DeRock »

justanotheratom wrote: post #4

There are claims that Nvidia will go bust like how Cisco did, but I think Jensen Huang knows what he is doing. https://x.com/all_in_tok/status/1796602545055342784

Terrible analysis.

He claims that Cisco lost all its value because their HW was commoditized. I mean in some ways, sure, but the fall in value was almost entirely driven by the DOTCOM bubble bursting.

There is also a claim that networking equipment is easy, "it's just moving data around". Moving data around is what a computer does. LLM's and GPU's are just moving data around.

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

#96

Post by paulmd »

jandrese wrote: post #36
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…

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.

> I've seen so much ridiculous hype about AI becoming godlike super-geniuses before the decade is out

I’ve actually seen literally none of that from proponents, like I’ve probably seen 100x as much strawmanning and uncharitable summary from opponents. Essentially nobody thinks we should hand the kingdom over to an unsupervised savior machine, like, can you show me a candidate from a major political party (doesn’t have to be US, but let’s say >10% electoral share) who supports such a platform? Or a ceo who supports moving leadership decisions for his company over to an AI?

As far as I can tell, that whole thing is a strawman cut whole-cloth from the imaginations of detractors. I’d be delighted to hear counterexamples of the sort I discussed but I frankly don’t think they really exist outside some feverish imaginations.

Everyone just got so busy pointing out that it’s not a good idea that they failed to notice that, in fact, nobody thinks it’s a good idea yet. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle because obviously there are lot of other people who agree that it is not, in fact, a good idea, so they feel very supported and emboldened to point it out constantly, such that they’ve forgotten that nobody argues that in the first place.

I’ll be the one to say it: it isn’t a good idea to grind down the mountains and fill in the oceans and pave over the entire earth’s surface to drive rocket-powered hypercars at unfathomable speeds. Was anyone serious actually proposing that? No, but really you’d have to be crazy to take that position, wouldn’t you? It would be super harmful if we let people just argue unhindered that we should do that. So really it’s a public service, right? Don’t let the crazies grab the wheel, vote against paving the earth.

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

#97

Post by paulmd »

zarzavat wrote: post #28
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…

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.

Really? What hardware was llama3 trained on?

now realize there’s 15 other models you haven’t heard of trained on the same brand’s hardware that didn’t work out / weren’t impressive enough to release.

you are literally describing Jevons paradox in action - the more efficient and practical you make the tech, the more of it we will consume. And sure, inference is easy, but training is still uniformly done on nvidia hardware, and the “software” is an incredibly non-trivial moat. AMD has been trying for literally 15 years and they’re on their third or fourth ground-up attempt to displace it… the most recent (ROCm) being over 5 years old at this point and still utterly non-competitive. Leave it to HN to imply that millions of person-hours of ecosystem building can basically be replicated in a long weekend.

(also, reminder that ollama3 has a 70b model too… and it’s a lot better than the 8b one still!)

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

#98

Post by N0b8ez »

gizajob wrote: post #71
N0b8ez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sym…

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

Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant.

>Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.

It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

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

#99

Post by latchkey »

purplerabbit wrote: post #55

Groq's chips are 10x faster and 100% US-sourced. Nvidia has existential threats afoot. I don't see our compute appetite going anywhere generally. But 90% of that will be for AI compute. Nvidia without that is, well... rekd. (I'm an ignorant fool just reflecting what I've seen. If someone has better perspective, please enlighten me.)

Groq no longer sells chips.

Compute appetite is infinite.

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

#100

Post by paulmd »

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.

Well, people don’t like the “other” analogy - the “iPhone gold rush” basically never ended.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/7800.jpeg

When you invent a whole new class of device, of which you have the best and market-leading implementation, often that class device isn’t going to stop being useful, and if you are good at your job then you often won’t have to relinquish having a large share of the resulting market.

There’s really a whole little epistemological bubble that’s forming here, with the people who insist that everyone else must only like it because they think it’s general AI, therefore there must be a collapse coming, because it’s impossible there’s any real value delivered, etc. And the alternative hypothesis is… you’re wrong and there’s something here, and people don’t particularly have blinders on about the potential anymore than you do, they just see the value where you don’t. It’s the same group of people who were butthurt about IP infringement and deepfakes and all the rest who are the most absolutely sure everyone else is an idiot who believes it’s general AI and it’s all a big bubble that’s going to come crashing down. It’s become an article of faith that’s stronger and more real than the fake sentiments it purports to oppose.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html?_r=0

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