[smallmancontrov]

I agree with you, but let me devil's advocate.

After 10 years of pretending to care about compute, AMD has filled the industry with burned-once experts who, when weighing nvidia against competitors, instinctively include "likely boondoggle" against every competitor's quote because they've seen it happen, possibly several times. Combine this with nvidia's deep experience and and huge rich-get-richer R&D budget keeping them always one or two architecture and software steps ahead, like it did in graphics, and their rich-get-richer TSMC budget buying them a step ahead in hardware, and you have a scenario where it continues makes sense to pay the green tax for the next generation or three. Red/blue/other rebels get zinged and join team "just pay the green tax." NV continues to dominate. Competitors go green with envy, as was fortold.

[htrp]

> burned-once experts

More like burned 2x / 3x / 4x of this time it's different people.

Looking at you Intel

[jerf]

It's true that nobody has beaten nVidia yet, and that is a valid data point I don't deny.

But (as a reply to some other repliers as well), AMD was also chasing them on the entire graphics stack as well as compute. That is trying to cross the moat. Even reimplementing CUDA as a whole is trying to cross a moat, even a smaller one.

But just implementing a chip that does AI, as it stands today, full stop, seems like it would be a lot easier. There's a lot of people doing it and I can't imagine they're all going to fail. I would consider by far the more likely scenario to be that the AI research community finds something other than neural nets to run on and thus the latest hotness becomes something other than a neural net and the chips become much less relevant or irrelevant.

And with the valuation of nVidia basically being based not on their graphics, or CUDA, but specifically just on this one feeding frenzy of LLM-based AI, it seems to me there's a lot of people with the motivation to produce a chip that can do this.