[dave_sullivan]

> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the opportunity) and Nvidia was already investing heavily.

[TillE]

Ten years ago, Intel was the leader in chip fabrication technology. Things can change fast.

Intel has already been making good low-end GPUs (with lousy but rapidly-improving drivers). If they're smart, they'll keep at it.

[hatenberg]

Intel wasted the last decade because they elected a shareholder optimizing CEO who chose to prioritize shareholder payouts and attempts at controllig the ecosystem rather than pushing it forward over investments.

Now they're completely outclassed by TSMC and have to partner with UMC to compete.

[relativ575]

The point is that thing can change. Intel was king a decade ago. TSMC is on the summit at the moment. Intel can be back in a few years if their plan works out:

https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/

[HDThoreaun]

As compared to a hypothetical product that is better than whats available today. With literally a trillion dollars on the line I find it very difficult to believe no one will come and scoop this opportunity up. The real value in GPUs is the datacenter segment which largely didnt exist, certainly not in that state it is today before the LLM take off. Takes time to develop products but theyll arrive eventually.

[rezonant]

Well there's not really a trillion dollars on the line. This is a valuation, not revenue.

All this says is that AI and LLMs are extremely over hyped, and the market believes Nvidia's tech is the only viable supplier of the platform LLMs run on.

These are things we already knew, so it's not surprising the market is quadrupling what it thinks Nvidia is worth.

[HDThoreaun]

Yes there is a trillion dollars on the line here. Market cap is what matters to investors end of the day, everything else is just influencing it. Yes the market is saying Nvdia is the only supplier for AI and LLM hype, but its also saying they will continue to be the only supplier long term and that seems deeply flawed to me.

[rezonant]

While there's certainly a feedback cycle involved, market cap is decided by investors in the large. The stock price is just reflecting buys and sells of those investors. People believe AI has a lot of money and hype in it, and Nvidia supplies necessary equipment for AI, so they buy Nvidia. As a result the stock price goes up, and the market capitalization goes up accordingly.

As a thought experiment, imagine buying 50% of a company on the open market and then seeing the price go up accordingly as the market does, then saying it must be even more valuable than I thought! And buying the other half of the company at the higher price. You caused that "value" by buying.

No one investor has a trillion dollar opportunity, and no competitor does either. Making an assumption that a competitor will come along and zero out Nvidia because they have a better AI chip is not rational. For one the value of Nvidia isn't solely based on this, and by the time you've made your AI chip the market is going to have changed.

Considering how insanely inflated the public's expectations of what LLMs can do, despite the fact that they are only a mirage of intelligence, it would probably be foolhardy to build a new AI chip to replace them.

I suppose for AMD they could see their stock increased by such a margin if they could just produce a chip that convinced the market, but were they not already trying to do that?

[HenriTEL]

Yep, I remember 8 years ago Intel trying to sell us their CPU solutions for AI. It was hard to make things work and in the end performance were not there. We were comparing against consumer gpu like the GTX 1080.

[pas]

> Nvidia was already investing heavily

that sounds very interesting, can you link/share/describe some details on it? how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?

[throw0101b]

> how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?

CUDA 1.0 was released in 2007:

* https://insidehpc.com/2007/07/nvidia-releases-cuda-10/

* https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive

From SIGGRAPH 2007, "GPU computing with NVIDIA CUDA":

* https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1281500.1281647

"NVIDIA: The Era of the Personal Supercomputing":

* https://www.nvidia.com/content/events/siggraph_2007/supercom...

Before AI/ML was hot, and before even the Bitcoin paper was released. NVidia was investigating/experimenting/investing in the concept before there was any kind of 'killer app' for it.

[pjmlp]

And even better, NVidia understood not everyone wants to use plain old C for their GPGPU coding, and early on staring with CUDA 3.0 in 2010, introduced C++ support and PTX.

Later on they acquired PGI, which thanks to PTX, had C, C++ and Fortran compilers, thus adding Fortran into the mix.

Followed along by all the IDE, graphical debuggers tooling and library ecosystem.

Meanwhile Intel and AMD were doing who knows what at Khronos stuck in their "C is good enough" mentality, and barely released useful developer experiences.

[dave_sullivan]

My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.

[wslh]

Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing".

I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. A small thread here in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764

[dave_sullivan]

> I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first.

Here's an old tutorial video of the product: https://youtu.be/V2q9hVdi80w

We were doing cool things and on the cutting edge but ultimately couldn't make a business out of it and weren't talking to the right people.