I keep thinking about stocks that have 100xd, and most seemed like obscure names to me as a layman. But man, Nvidia was a household name to anyone that ever played any game. And still so many of us never bothered buying the stock
Incredible fumble for me personally as an investor
Unless you predicted AI and Crypto then it was just really good, not 100x. It 20x from 2005-2020 but ~500x from 2005-2025
And if you truly did predict that Nvidia would own those markets and those markets would be massive, you could have also bought Amazon, Google or heck even Bitcoin. Anything you touched in tech really would have made you a millionaire really.
Survivors bias though. It's hard to name all the companies that failed in the dot com bust, but even among the ones that made it through, because they're not around any more, they're harder to remember than the winners. But MCI, Palm, RIM, Nortel, Compaq, Pets.com, Webvan all failed and went to zero. There's an uncountable number of ICOs and NFTs that ended up nowhere. SVB isn't exactly an tech stock but they were strongly connected to it and they failed.
It is interesting to think about crypto as a stairstep that Nvidia used to get to its current position in AI. It wasn't games > ai, but games > crypto > ai.
Nvidia joined S&P500 in 2001 so if you've been doing passive index fund investing, you probably got a little bit of it in your funds. So there was some upside to it.
There's a titanic market with people wanting some uncensored local LLM/image/video generation model. This market extremely overlaps with gamers today, but will grow exponentially every year.
How big is that market you claim? Local LLM image generation already exists out off the box on latest Samsung flagship phones and it's mostly a Gimmick that gets old pretty quickly. Hardly comparable to gaming in terms of market size and profitablity.
Plus, YouTube and the Google images is already full of AI generated slop and people are already tired of it. "AI fatigue" amongst majority of general consumers is a documented thing. Gaming fatigues is not.
It is. You may know it as the "I prefer to play board games (and feel smugly superior about it) because they're ${more social, require imagination, $whatever}" crowd.
"The global gaming market size was valued at approximately USD 221.24 billion in 2024. It is forecasted to reach USD 424.23 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of around 6.50% during the forecast period (2025-2033)"
Farmville style games underwent similar explosive estimates of growth, up until they collapsed.
Much of the growth in gaming of late has come from exploitive dark patterns, and those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.
I think he implied AI generated porn. Perhaps also other kind of images that are at odds with morality and/or the law. I'm not sure but probably Samsung phones don't let you do that.
I'm sure a lot of people see "uncensored" and think "porn" but there's a lot of stuff that e.g. Dall-E won't let you do.
Suppose you're a content creator and you need an image of a real person or something copyrighted like a lot of sports logos for your latest YouTube video's thumbnail. That kind of thing.
I'm not getting into how good or bad that is; I'm just saying I think it's a pretty common use case.
AI porn is currently cringe, just like Eliza for conversations was cringe.
The cutting edge will advance, and convincing bespoke porn of people's crushes/coworkers/bosses/enemies/toddlers will become a thing. With all the mayhem that results.
It will always be cringe due to how so-called "AI" works. Since it's fundamentally just log-likelihood optimization under the hood, it will always be a statistically most average image. Which means it will always have that characteristic "plastic" and overdone look.
The current state of the art in AI image generation was unimaginable a few years back. The idea that it'll stay as-is for the next century seems... silly.
I think there are a lot of non-porn uses. I see a lot of YouTube thumbnails that seem AI generated, but feature copyrighted stuff.
(example: a thumbnail for a YT video about a video game, featuring AI-generated art based on that game. because copyright reasons, in my very limited experience Dall-E won't let you do that)
I agree that AI porn doesn't seem a real market driver. With 8 billion people on Earth I know it has its fans I guess, but people barely pay for porn in the first place so I reallllly dunno how many people are paying for AI porn either directly or indirectly.
It's unclear to me if AI generated video will ever really cross the "uncanny valley." Of course, people betting against AI have lost those bets again and again but I don't know.
> No. There's already too much porn on the internet, and AI porn is cringe and will get old very fast.
I needed an uncensored model in order to, guess what, make an AI draw my niece snowboarding down a waterfall. All the online services refuse on basis that the picture contains -- oh horrors -- a child.
Yeah, and there's that story about "private window" mode in browsers because you were shopping for birthday gifts that one time. You know what I mean though.
I really don't. Censored models are so censored they're practically useless for anything but landscapes. Half of them refuse to put humans in the pictures at all.
Sure, but those developers will create functionality that will require advanced GPUs and people will want that functionality. Eventually OS will expect it and it will became default everywhere. So, it is an important step that will push nvidia growing in the following years.
Incredible fumble for me personally as an investor