Nvidia is sub-par in terms of leadership compared to other competitors. They didn't anticipate the crypto hype, they didn't anticipate the AI hype, they just were there doing the thing they can: delivering raw GPU power.
And this is the only thing their leadership did right in my eyes: they hired the talent² to provide raw GPU power, which they did. This accidentally turned out to be the thing behind crypto, and, after crypto faded, also the thing behind AI. They didn't anticipate any of that, and their competitors didn't either.
If their luck runs out, which isn't a given¹, we'll see what their leadership can in fact do. I don't think it will be much.
> This accidentally turned out to be the thing behind crypto, and, after crypto faded, also the thing behind AI. They didn't anticipate any of that, and their competitors didn't either.
Huh? They released cuDNN in 2014, a full decade ago, and started shipping tensor accelerator hardware with the Volta architecture in 2017. That was all well before the current hype wave, they saw it coming a mile away.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486882