AI Is Catapulting Nvidia Toward the $1 Trillion Club

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ai-is-catapulting-nvidia-toward-the-1-trillion-club-14f42380

by impish9208 • 3 years ago

207 243 3 years ago

wsj.com

impish9208• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/4XeAa

htrp• 3 years ago

Yet another example of how long term platform investment pays dividends.

And yet another reminder how far behind opencl/AMD is

WrtCdEvrydy• 3 years ago

I had a meme joke about how AI would come to be by making people mine for crypto but now we're seeing LLMs take the fore-front of AI and causing us to reach for more and more parameters.

It reminds me of when the YOLOv3 model came out and every single upgrade just gave us more and more features and capabilities (the v8 has auto segmentation).

AMD dropped the ball on this, just like Intel when Ryzen dropped, I just don't see a way for them to bring it around.

peepeepoopoo73• 3 years ago

I don't understand. Haven't graphics cards basically been obsolete for deep learning since the first TPUs arrived on the scene in ~2016? Lots of companies are offering TPU accelerators now, and it seems like the main thing Nvidia has going for it is momentum. But that doesn't explain this kind of valuation that's hundreds of times greater than their earnings. Personally, it seems a lot like Nvidia is to 2023 what Cisco was to 2000.

atonse2• 3 years ago

I am not an ML expert but as an observer, others have said that why nvidia got right from the beginning, was actually the software support. Stuff like CUDA and good drivers and supporting libraries from over a decade ago? All the libs and researchers and all just use those libs and write software towards it. And as a result it works best on nvidia cards.

peepeepoopoo73• 3 years ago

But their valuation is based on forward (future) earnings, using an already obsolete technology.

reesul• 3 years ago

As someone closer to this in the industry (embedded ML.. and trying to compete) I agree with the sentiment. Their software is good, I willingly admit. Porting a model to embedded is hard. With NVIDIA, you basically don’t have to port. This has paid dividends for them, pun not intended.

I don’t really see the Nvidia monopoly on ML training stopping anytime soon.

rfoo• 3 years ago

It is more expensive (in engineering cost) to port all the world's research (and your own one) to the TPU of your choice, than just paying NVIDIA.

villgax4• 3 years ago

Not one provider apart from GCP has TPUs, they don't have them available for consumers to buy & experiment with. No-one experiments multi-day stuff on the cloud without big pockets or company money especially not PhD students or hobbyists

peepeepoopoo73• 3 years ago

AWS has their own accelerators, and they're a much better value than their GPU instances.

popinman322• 3 years ago

1xH100 is faster than 8xA100 for a work-in-progress architecture I'm iterating on. Meanwhile the code doesn't work on TPUs right now because it hangs before initialization. (This is with PyTorch for what it's worth) All that to say Nvidia's hardware work and software evangelization has really paid off-- CUDA just works™ and performance continues to increase.

TPUs are good hardware, but TPUs are not available outside of GCP. There's not as much of an incentive for other companies to build software around TPUs like there is with CUDA. The same is likely true of chips like Cerebras' wafer scale accelerators as well.

Nvidia's won a stable lead on their competition that's probably not going to disappear for the next 2-5 years and could compound over that time.

nightski2• 3 years ago

It baffles me to this day that Google never made TPUs more widely available. Then again it is Google...

haldujai10• 3 years ago

This has been my experience as well with TPUs and A100s. I haven’t used H100s yet (OOM on 1) but I believe the training throughout benchmarks from Nvidia on transformer workloads is 2.5x from A100s.

The effort to make (PyTorch) code run on TPUs is not worth it and my lab would rather rent (discounted) Nvidia GPUs than use free TRC credits we have at the moment. Additionally, at least in Jan 2023 when I last tried this, PyTorch XLA had a significant reduction in throughput so to really take advantage you would probably need to convert to Jax/TF which are used internally at Google and better supported.

YetAnotherNick3• 3 years ago

For transformer, v4 chip has 70-100% compute capacity and 40% memory of A100 for pretty much the same price. The only benefit is better networking speed for TPU compared to GPU cluster, allowing very large models to scale better, where for GPU model need to fit in NVlink connected GPUs, which is 320 billion parameters for 8*80 GB A100.

pjc50• 3 years ago

People underestimate how meme-y both the stock market and the underlying customer market is. I don't think there's anything like the level of TPUs shipping as there are GPUs? If people end up with an "AI accelerator" in their PC, it would be quite likely to have NVIDIA branding.

dahart• 3 years ago

This quote from Wednesday’s TinyCorp article seems apropos:

“The current crop of AI chip companies failed. Many of them managed to tape out chips, some of those chips even worked. But not a single one wrote a decent framework to use those chips. They had similar performance/$ to NVIDIA, and way worse software. Of course they failed. Everyone just bought stuff from NVIDIA.”

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-...

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

For at least some applications, the details of the processor architecture are dominated by how much high-throughput RAM you can throw at the problem, and GPUs are by far the cheapest and most accessible way of cramming a bunch of high-throughput RAM into a computer. While it's not exactly a mainstream solution, some people have built AI rigs in 2022/2023 with used Vega cards because they're a cheap way to get HBM.

jandrese• 3 years ago

The thing that all of these hardware companies don't understand is that it is the software that keeps the boys in the yard. If you don't have something that works as well as CUDA then it doesn't matter how good your hardware is. The only company that seems to understand this is nVidia, and they are the ones eating everyone's lunch. The software side is hard, it is expensive, it takes loads of developer hours and real life years to get right, and it is necessary for success.

RobotToaster3• 3 years ago

I've been wondering the same. With crypto we saw the adoption of ASICs pretty quickly, you would think we would see the same with AI.

tombert7• 3 years ago

This is the only time in my entire life that I accurately predicted the stock market.

About two months ago, I bought three shares of Nvidia stock. I noticed that no one appears to be doing serious AI/ML research with AMD hardware, and I also noticed that Nvidia's stock hadn't spiked yet with the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

For once I was actually right about something in the stock market...About a dozen more accurate predictions and I'll finally make up the money I lost from cryptocurrency.

dpflan7• 3 years ago

AMD had a price jump on the same date range. Yes NVIDIA is higher but it was already so in absolute terms.

- NVIDIA: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2a...

- AMD: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMD:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2ah...

tombert7• 3 years ago

Yeah but I didn't buy AMD stock! Clearly I should have though.

cspada• 3 years ago

And NVDA added more than AMDs entire market cap on that day alone, including the gains AMD had.

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

The problem with gamba is that 99% of people quit right before making it big.

https://youtu.be/y28Diszaoo4

jakeinspace• 3 years ago

Still kicking myself for selling the ~20 shares I bought in high school for a mere 100% gain back when the price was $40.

esotericimpl• 3 years ago

I'm still holding ~600 shares of NVDA from a $1,200 investment back when I thought it was amazing that this company made cards that made Quake 2 look incredible.

300k Investment on $900 dollars.

tombert7• 3 years ago

Hey, a win is a win, and profit is profit!

edgyquant• 3 years ago

I bought 100 shares of AMD for 8$ and sold at 16$ thinking I was a genius

mikestew2• 3 years ago

You made a profit, no self-kicking allowed. Otherwise Old Man Mikestew is going to tell us stories about how he rode $STOCK all the way up, didn't sell, and rode it all the way back down to where he bought it, and then watched it dip below that. (Please note that "stories" is plural; slow learner, he is.)

Don't be like me: never, never, never, never feel bad about selling shares for a profit. Sell it, go one about your day (IOW, quit looking at $STOCK, you don't own it anymore), take the spouse/SO out for a nice dinner if you made some serious bank.

Which reminds me that now might be a good time to unload that NVDA I've been holding. I'm not completely unteachable.

binarysolo• 3 years ago

Just... don't. Enjoy the profits when you get 'em. :)

This forum is filled with people who sold all sorts of tech stocks way too early (or too late), and people nerding out over things and tossing them and them magically gaining tons of value over time - I'm thinking about all of my super early CCGs that I tossed when cleaning house, the 20 bitcoin I mined for fun way back in 2012 or whenever and then deleted from my laptop (that I then sold on eBay for $100), the 10k of AAPL I bought for like $5 and sold for $10, etc. etc.

Same with all the early job opps and what not too - but we're the sum of our life choices till now and that's OK. :)

pc862• 3 years ago

As others have intimated, you'll never go bankrupt by selling [for a profit] too early. I put $10k into bitcoin when it was $1500, and sold it when it hit $4k. Yeah, I can do the math at $60k and feel bad, but realistically if I had the mentality to hold it from $1500 to $60k I would have waited for it to hit $80k and I'd feel objectively worse today about those paper losses, albeit with a little bit more money in the bank.

At the end of the day doubling your money is exceedingly rare, especially on any single security, no sense feeling bad you didn't 10x it.

ksec5• 3 years ago

and I also noticed that Nvidia's stock hadn't spiked yet with the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

I think plenty have noticed, But cant get heads around investing in a company with 150x PE.

qeternity3• 3 years ago

This is because you're looking at trailing P/E instead of forward.

NVDA forward P/E is still eye watering, but it's much lower.

itsoktocry• 3 years ago

I also noticed that Nvidia's stock hadn't spiked yet with the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

The stock is was (and is) extremely expensive. Good luck to all buying this things at 30x sales. It doesn't make any sense.

tombert7• 3 years ago

I suppose I could sell now and be happy with my $350 profit...

beaned• 3 years ago

But how funny would it be if AI ends up pumping crypto by it being the money it can manage directly and instantly from your computer?

dmead• 3 years ago

This is what kept me from selling my shares when they were down.

the88doctor• 3 years ago

I hope you sold your Nvidia and locked in those profits.

kgwgk4• 3 years ago

About two months ago […] and I also noticed that Nvidia's stock hadn't spiked yet with the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

Two months ago the stock was 60% up since ChatGPT was released and 150% up since October’s low.

q1w22• 3 years ago

Correct. I bought 1000 shares in early Feb, and it's up over 82%.

You cannot look at the prior price to make a purchase decision. You have to look at the future projected revenues per share, and apply an industry standard multiple.

If you hesitate to buy a stock you like because you feel annoyed that you didn't buy it for cheaper the day/week/month before, you will nerf yourself.

rcme• 3 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what was your crypto hypothesis?

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

I’d also make a bet on the underdogs - for instance amd is only a devent software update away from snatching market share away from nvidia. I am surprised they are not hiring devs like crazy right now to beef up their ai gpu capability.

intelVISA• 3 years ago

Yep as soon as SD dropped I went bullish on NVDA.

What's funny is that we on HN know there's no magic inside these chips, a sufficiently smart foundry could easily cripple Nvidia overnight... yet where's the nearest VC fund for ASICs??

kramerger• 3 years ago

Did you say foundry? Nations (including US and Germany) have tried to out smart TSMC, and yet here we are.

If you meant outsmart nvidia, Google’s TPU is already more efficient but a GPU is much more than an efficient design .

bdcravens• 3 years ago

Of course, even after it's massive decline, it was still up big due to the crypto market. I think crypto shows how mountains can be moved and worlds terraformed via distributed processing power, and AI is just another set of problems to be solved. There's likely many applications that we haven't even dreamed up yet (likely in the biotech space)

villgax4• 3 years ago

I mean the 5yr licensed that come bundled with H100 just because you technically aren't supposed to use consumer class GPU in a data center... whoever came up with this is definitely following in the footsteps of Adobe's licensing shenanigans

oefrha• 3 years ago

It’s not like consumers are getting great deals. They’re milking the mid-range real hard, see recent 4070 and 4060 releases.

villgax4• 3 years ago

Even if the 4090 costs $1999 it's still cheaper than a $15000 H100 considering you get similar cuda cores & can buy enough to balance VRAM between the two

nixcraft• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, Nvidia Short Sellers Lose $2.3 Billion in One Day as Stock Soars https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-25/nvidia-sh...

dbcurtis• 3 years ago

Shorting into an irrational bull run is a great way to learn an expensive lesson on the difference in power between logic and emotion.

methodical• 3 years ago

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes

Particularly applicable here, couldn't resist myself.

mbesto3• 3 years ago

The super interesting thing about NVDA is that you can bet on:

- Crypto

- AI

- Gaming / Entertainment

- Self driving cars

- VR / Metaverse (whatever that is)

I'm very bullish on the company.

rapsey3• 3 years ago

Frankly gaming is still their only reliable base. Their AI lead is going to get competed away from every angle within 12-24 months. The AI boom is very much like the Crypto boom.

scottiebarnes• 3 years ago

What signals to you that other chip makers are capable of competing in learning and inference computation?

We know they'll be motivated, but can they actually compete is the question.

claytonjy• 3 years ago

Which hardware/software pairing do you see dethroning NVIDIA that quickly?

011000113• 3 years ago

Gaming revenue is down. Check their earnings release.

mbesto3• 3 years ago

The best part about this if you have that much conviction, you can buy 2025 puts and make a ton of money if you're right. Good luck!

boshalfoshal• 3 years ago

Gaming might be their worst business from a growth and narrative perspective. Wall street in general doesn't really care about gaming, just see how those companies are priced.

Enterprise compute has been and will continue to be NVidias bread and butter going forward, and they have been betting on this for the past decade. Whether enterprise compute will be for AI, studio graphics, simulation, FSD, etc. those are all more lucrative and imo more interesting from a growth perspective vs their gaming segment. b2b companies have much higher ceilings than b2c.

tester756• 3 years ago

Self driving cars?

Don't they have specialized chips?

mbesto3• 3 years ago

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/auto/

PS - you can literally go to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ and read the menu to see what they do...

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

NVDA is pretty hyped at this point. If you wanted to buy it, then fall of last year after it fell 60% was the time.

NVDA has a trailing twelve months (TTM) Price to earnings (P/E) ratio of 175x. Based on the latest quarter and forward guidance they have a forward-looking P/E ratio of 50x - So the market is already expecting (and has priced in) even higher expectations of growth than what the stock is already at.

NVDA is expected to at least double their already great growth (to get to P/E of 25x) according to the market. I have my doubts.

You can compare this to the historical averages of the S&P 500: https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

ksec5• 3 years ago

Based on the latest quarter and forward guidance they have a forward-looking P/E ratio of 50x

I may have missed the news. Where did they mention they are going to make 3.5X the profits in their forward guidance or forward looking P/E ?

Assuming consumer revenue stays roughly the same, ( crypto usage being the largest variable ). Data Center sector has to grown at least 6X in revenue.

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

They don't set the forward P/E - it's literally what the price of the stock the market bid up / actual earnings points to. The market is expecting them to double or triple their income in the coming quarters/years.

The TTM Price/Earnings ratio is even crazier as the market is expecting them to grow revenue 9x from what they made in the last year (to get back to a 20x P/E).

seydor2• 3 years ago

Please follow this advice people. We are all waiting for the dip

pc862• 3 years ago

When I spent time playing individual stocks I actually made decent money waiting for big spikes like this, hopping on the bandwagon intraday and just taking 1-2% in the hype train. It's part day trading part picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The few times I really got burned is getting greedy and holding overnight or over a weekend.

I'm really curious to see where NVDA stands on Tuesday morning.

endisneigh• 3 years ago

The stock price makes absolutely no sense, but the AI hype is real so I won't be shorting.

Just give you a crude metaphor - buying NVDA is like buying a $10 million dollar house to collect $10,000 in rent a year. The price to earnings is bonkers. This valuation only makes sense if somehow Nvidia is using alien technology that couldn't possible by reproduced in the next two decades by any other company.

dpflan7• 3 years ago

Agreed, the fundamentals are off and drunk on hype. Where else can investors put their money?

peab• 3 years ago

Goog, Meta? They are by far leading in AI research, and they've both developed their own chip. Apple is also going to come out ahead with their Neural chip - imagine chatGPT and stable diffusion becoming part of the iOS SDK

lostmsu2• 3 years ago

TSMC's P/E is under 20. Disclaimer: I hold

Tiktaalik• 3 years ago

Your last point is why it feels to me like the better investment right now is everyone and anyone else that will be working very hard to be at where NVDA is at right now. I suppose the obvious answer here is AMD, but surely there's other minor companies too that could see a huge amount of investment.

rapsey3• 3 years ago

Every tech giant is sprinting into this space. I highly doubt nVidia will still have a moat as big in 12 months.

bagacrap9• 3 years ago

Yes, well, everyone else already had that idea with AMD in the last month.

tikkun• 3 years ago

The Geohotz post has some good explanations for why this is happening.

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-...

CUDA works, ROCm doesn't work well. Very few people want to run stable diffusion inference, fine tune LLaMA, train a large foundation model on AMD cards.

OpenAI has put in some work on Triton, Modular is working on Mojo, and tiny corp is working on their alternative.

Until some of those alternatives work as well as CUDA, people will mostly choose to buy Nvidia cards.

The monopoly is under attack from multiple angles, but they'll be able to print some good cash in the (potentially long) meantime.

Oh, and still significant supply shortages at many cloud providers. And now Nvidia's making more moves to renting GPUs directly. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes them to be able to have their supply meet demand.

TheCaptain4815• 3 years ago

I'm surprised I didn't see this frontpage HN a few days ago, but a very interesting read.

Edit: Nevermind, found a huge thread from 2 days ago Lol.

coolspot• 3 years ago

Just use hckrnews.com , it shows frontpage posts from previous days.

sf4lifer• 3 years ago

Respect to Jensen, one of the OGs of the valley and a good dude. But LLMs (eventually) running on iphone hardware will crater this run

haldujai10• 3 years ago

Not sure how much inference on the edge will impact things unless you think we’ll hit “peak training” in the near future. I would safely wager that most H100 nodes will be used for training rather than inference.

madballster• 3 years ago

The result of this optimism in big cap tech companies is that many smaller cap shares in industries such as financial services, insurance or industrial distribution are trading for historically cheap valuations. It appears there is very little investor interest in them. I think it's a wonderful time to be a long-term investor.

bagacrap9• 3 years ago

Yeah, too bad I owned those before the ai hype sucked all the capital out of the room...

rybosworld• 3 years ago

I think this 20%+ stock move is mostly a combination of:

1) Heavy short option interest going into earnings

2) A large beat announced in after hours

Major market players can take advantage of large earnings surprises by manipulating a stock in after hours. It is possible to trigger very large movements with very little volume because most participants don't have access to after hours trading.

When the market opens the next day the "false" gains should typically be wiped out unless the move is large enough to force the closing of certain positions. In this case, it looks like there was a clamor to escape long puts and short calls.

dpflan7• 3 years ago

Yes, the affect of short positions during price jumps is not always discussed / hidden variable.

cma• 3 years ago

Probably more from 50% growth guidance they gave for next quarter and how much that beat expectations.

bagacrap9• 3 years ago

Skepticism is why momentum works in stocks. People tend to be afraid to buy, or even want to short, stocks that have just risen a lot. That's why it may take a while for a stock to rise to its true price after new information comes out.

The momentum behind NVDA as well as some other tech stocks right now (SMCI, META, NFLX) is frankly stunning. Nary a dip for 6 months. There is so much FOMO in the AI trade that I don't think it crashes back down to earth very soon. Still I'm way too scared to try to get in late.

And in this case the F in FOMO is real. Not just a feeling of missing out, but fear that all your other investments are going to zero as AI replaces entire industries, for example.

dpflan7• 3 years ago

This post from Fullstack Deeplearing analyzed cloud GPUs, seems pertinent to discussions here about NVIDIA, competitors, and determining true value of related AI/chip stocks: https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/cloud-gpus/

- HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36025099

lubesGordi• 3 years ago

Genuine question to all concerned about PE ratios. Why is PE not subject to 'new normals'? A lot of people seem to reject stocks because they're 'expensive' which to me seems like a relative term. There are a lot more retail investors out there now.

JumpinJack_Cash• 3 years ago

Because if all that is left of the stock market is offloading your hand to a bigger fool then it's way more fun to fly to Vegas and do it at the poker table.

At least you have to actually look in the eyes the guy you are screwing over.

You can't buy stuff because you think other people will also buy, that would mean that you are buying/selling opinions not companies.

barumrho• 3 years ago

It is helpful to think of it in terms of unit economics. If a company sells a product, it needs to eventually make profit on each unit. (cost < price per unit)

When it comes to owning a share, it eventually needs to make the investor money through dividends or price appreciation. The argument for high PE ratio is price appreciation (growth), but exponential growth is very hard to sustain, so PE ratio has to come down to a certain level in the long term. Also, there is always a risk of a company declining or even folding.

bagacrap9• 3 years ago

There are lots of factors that can influence PE but if your long term investing thesis is that retail traders will always love NVDA the most (and won't move on to the next hype train, as they did with TSLA and many others) that seems... unlikely?

If you can predict the next hype cycle or when exactly this one will end, you will make a zillion dollars.

If you are talking about entire markets rather than individual companies then p/e matters because the only examples we have of markets with extreme p/e ratios all ended in disaster.

You should still buy stocks for the long term regardless of PE ratios because you're right, it's not possible to predict what they'll do. Unfortunately when you buy at a high pe you can't anticipate as much return in the future, all else equal.

lifefeed• 3 years ago

The four commas club.

Going to have to buy a car whose doors open in a new way.

SkipperCat• 3 years ago

One thing that Nvidia has going for it is the stickiness of CUDA. Developers don't have a preference for GPUs, they have a preference for the programming stacks that are associated with them. Why is Google's Tenserflow not as popular?, probably because everyone has deep experience with CUDA and it would be a pain to migrate.

Microsoft Office rode the same type of paradigm to dominate the desktop app market.

oktwtf• 3 years ago

This has always been in the back of my mind anytime AMD has some new GPUs with nice features. Gamers will say this will be where AMD will win the war. But I fear the war is already won on the compute that counts, and right now that’s CUDA accel on NVIDIA.

AnthonyMouse4• 3 years ago

This has been the case for a while because AMD never had the resources to do software well. But their market cap is 10x what it was 5 years ago, so now they do. That still takes time, and having resources isn't a guarantee of competent execution, but it's a lot more likely now than it used to be.

On top of that, Intel is making a serious effort to get into this space and they have a better history of making usable libraries. OpenVINO is already pretty good. It's especially good at having implementations in both Python and not-Python, the latter of which is a huge advantage for open source development because it gets you out of Python dependency hell. There's a reason the thing that caught on is llama.cpp and not llama.py.

paulmd• 3 years ago

The only real remaining fronts in the war are consoles and smartphones, and NVIDIA just signed a deal to license GeForce IP to mediatek so that nut is being cracked as well, mediatek gives them mass-market access for CUDA tech, DLSS, and other stuff. Nintendo has essentially a mobile console platform and will be doing DLSS too on an Orin NX 8nm chip soon (very cheap) using that same smartphone-level DLSS (probably re-optimized for lower resolutions). Samsung 8nm is exactly Nintendo's kind of cheap, it'll happen.

The "NVIDIA they might leave graphics and just do AI in the future!" that people sometimes do is just such a batshit take because it's graphics that opens the door to all these platforms, and it's graphics that a lot of these accelerators center around. What good is DLSS without a graphics platform? Do you sign the Mediatek deal without a graphics platform? Do you give up workstation graphics and OptiX and raysampling and all these other raytracing techs they've spent billions developing, or do you just choose to do all the work of making Quadros and all this graphics tech but then not do gaming drivers and give up that gaming revenue and all the market access that comes with it? It's faux-intellectualism and ayymd wish-casting at its finest, it makes zero sense when you consider the leverage they get from this R&D spend across multiple fields.

CUDA is unshakeable precisely because NVIDIA is absolutely relentless in getting their foot in the door, then using that market access to build a better mousetrap with software that everyone else is constantly rushing to catch up to. Every segment has some pain points and NVIDIA figures out what they are and where the tech is going and builds something to address that. AMD's approach of trying to surgically tap high-margin segments before they have a platform worth caring about is fundamentally flawed, they're putting the cart before the horse, and that's why they keep spinning their wheels on GPGPU adoption for the last 15 years. And that's what people are clamoring for NVIDIA to do with this idea of "abandon graphics and just do AI" and it's completely batshit.

Intel gets it, at least. OneAPI is focused on being a viable product and they'll move on from there. ROCm is designed for supercomputers where people get paid to optimize for it - it's an embedded product, not a platform. Like you can't even use the binaries you compile on anything except one specific die (not even a generation, "this is binary is for Navi 21, you need the Navi 23 binary"). CUDA is an ecosystem that people reach for because there's tons of tools and libraries and support, and it works seamlessly and you can deliver an actual product that consumers can use. ROCm is something that your boss tells you you're going to be using because it's cheap, you are paying to engineer it from scratch, you'll be targeting your company's one specific hardware config, and it'll be inside a web service so it'll be invisible to end-users anyway. It's an embedded processor inside some other product, not a product itself. That's what you get from the "surgically tap high-margin segments" strategy.

But the Mediatek deal is big news. When we were discussing the ARM acquisition etc people totally scoffed that NVIDIA would ever license GeForce IP. And when that fell through, they went ahead and did it anyway. Because platform access matters, it's the foot in the door. The ARM deal was never about screwing licensees or selling more tegras, that would instantly destroy the value of their $40b acquisition. It was 100% always about getting GeForce as the base-tier graphics IP for ARM and getting that market access to crack one of the few remaining segments where CUDA acceleration (and other NVIDIA technologies) aren't absolutely dominant.

And graphics is the keystone of all of it. Market access, software, acceleration, all of it falls apart without the graphics. They'd just be ROCm 2.0 and nobody wants that, not even AMD wants to be ROCm. AMD is finally starting to see it and move away from it, it would be wildly myopic for NVIDIA to do that and Jensen is not an idiot.

Not entirely a direct response to you but I've seen that sentiment a ton now that AI/enterprise revenue has passed graphics and it drives me nuts. Your comment about "what would it take to get Radeon ahead of CUDA mindshare" kinda nailed it, CUDA literally is winning so hard that people are fantasizing about "haha but what if NVIDIA got tired of winning and went outside to ride bikes and left AMD to exploit graphics in peace" and it's crazy to think that could ever be a corporate strategy. Why would they do that when Jensen has spent the last 25 years building this graphics empire? Complete wish-casting, “so dominant that people can’t even imagine the tech it would take to break their ubiquity” is exactly where Jensen wants to be, and if anything they are still actively pushing to be more ubiquitous. That's why their P/E are insane (probably overhyped even at that, but damn are they good).

If there is a business to be made doing only AI hardware and not a larger platform (and I don’t think there is, at that point you’re a commodity like dozens of other startups) it certainly looks nothing like the way nvidia is set up. These are all interlocking products and segments and software, you can’t cut any one of them away without gutting some other segment. And fundamentally the surgical revenue approach doesn’t work, AMD has continuously showed that for the last 15 years.

Being unwilling to catch a falling knife by cutting prices to the bone doesn’t mean they don’t want to be in graphics. The consumer GPU market is just unavoidably soft right now, almost irregardless of actual value (see: 4070 for $600 with a $100 GC at microcenter still falling flat). Even $500 for a 4070 is probably flirting with being unsustainably low (they need to fund R&D for the next gen out of these margins) but if a de-facto $500 price doesn’t spark people’s interests/produce an increase in sales they’re absolutely not going any lower than that this early in the cycle. They’ll focus on margin on the sales they can actually make, rather than chasing the guy who is holding out for 4070 to be $329. People don't realize it but obstinently refusing to buy at any price (even a good deal) is paradoxically creating an incentive to just ignore them and chase margins.

It doesn’t mean they don’t want to be in that market but they’re not going to cut their own throat, mis-calibrate consumer expectations, etc.

Just as AMD is finding out with the RX 7600 launch - if you over-cut on one generation, the next generation becomes a much harder sell. Which is the same lesson nvidia learned with the 1080 ti and 20-series. AMD is having their 20-series moment right now, they over-cut on the old stuff and the new stuff is struggling to match the value. And the expectations of future cuts is only going to dampen demand further, they’re Osborne Effect’ing themselves with price cuts everyone knows are coming. Nvidia smartened up - if the market is soft and the demand just isn’t there… make less gaming cards and shift to other markets in the meantime. Doesn’t mean they don’t want to be in graphics.

singhrac2• 3 years ago

Sorry, I have to point out: Tensorflow is not comparable to CUDA. Tensorflow is a (arguably) high level library that links against CUDA to run on NVIDIA GPUs, as does PyTorch (the main competitor).

Comparatively few people have “deep” experience with CUDA (basically Tensorflow/Pytorch maintainers, some of whom are NVIDIA employees, and some working in HPC/supercomputing).

CUDA is indeed sticky, but the reason is probably because CUDA is supported on basically every NVIDIA GPU, whereas AMD’s ROCm was until recently limited to CDNA (datacenter) cards, so you couldn’t run it on your local AMD card. Intel is trying the same strategy with oneAPI, but since no one has managed to see a Habana Gaudi card (let alone a Gaudi2), they’re totally out of the running for now.

Separately, CUDA comes with many necessary extensions like cuSparse, cuDNN, etc. Those exist in other frameworks but there’s no comparison readily available, so no one is going to buy an AMD CDNA card.

AMD and Intel need to publish a public accounting of their incompatibilities with PyTorch (no one cares about Tensorflow anymore), even if the benchmarks show that their cards are worse. If you don’t measure in the public no one will believe your vague claims about how much you’re investing into the AI boom. Certainly I would like to buy an Intel Arc A770 with 16GB of VRAM for $350, but I won’t, because no one will tell me that it works with llama.

somethoughts• 3 years ago

With respect to the incompatabilities with PyTorch and TensorFlow - given that the AMD and Intel GPU drivers are more likely to be open sourced - do you believe the open source community or a third party vendors will step in to close the gap for AMD/Intel?

It would seem a great startup idea with the intent to get acqui-hired by AMD or Intel to get into the details of these incompatibilities and/performance differences.

At worst it seems you could pivot into some sort of passive income AI benchmarking website/YT channel similar to the ones that exist for Gaming GPU benchmarks.

digitallyfree• 3 years ago

Theoretically the ARC should work with llama.cpp using OpenCL, but I haven't seen benchmarks or even a confirmation that it works.

jejeyyy77• 3 years ago

Tensorflow is optimized for TPU's which isn't really consumer-grade hardware.

joseph_grobbles• 3 years ago

Google's first TPU was developed a year after Tensorflow. And for that matter, Tensorflow works fine with CUDA, was originally entirely built for CUDA, and it's super weird the way it's being referenced in here.

Tensorflow lost out to Pytorch because the former is grossly complex for the same tasks, with a mountain of dependencies, as is the norm for Google projects. Using it was such a ridiculous pain compared to Pytorch.

And anyone can use a mythical TPU right now on the Google Cloud. It isn't magical, and is kind of junky compared to an H100, for instance. I mean...Google's recent AI supercomputer offerings are built around nvidia hardware.

CUDA keeps winning because everyone else has done a horrendous job competing. AMD, for instance, had the rather horrible ROCm, and then they decided that they would gate their APIs to only their "business" offerings while nvidia was happy letting it work on almost anything.

caeril2• 3 years ago

Unrelated question for the HN experts:

My sibling commenter is shadowbanned, but if you look into their comment history, there are occasionally comments that are not dead. How does this happen?

RobotToaster3• 3 years ago

Isn't the coral stick a TPU?

seydor2• 3 years ago

frameworks can be agnostic to the underlying library. What are formidable alternatives to cuda ?

traveler01• 3 years ago

So NVIDIA will be to AI what Adobe is to media production: An absolute cancer.

11thEarlOfMar2• 3 years ago

I'm getting very strong 1998 .COM vibes from AI.

Replace Internet with AI in the following quote from the New York Times, November 11, 1996[0]:

"For many people, AI could replace the functions of a broker, whose stock in trade is information, advice and execution of transactions, all of which may be cheap and easy to find on line. AI also is prompting some business executives to wonder whether they really need a high-priced Wall Street investment bank to find backers for their companies when they may now be able to reach so many potential investors directly over the Net. And ultimately, AI's ability to bring buyers and sellers together directly may change the very nature of American financial markets."

It's a cautionary tale. Obviously, the Internet did live up to the hype. Just after it wiped out millions of retail investors...

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/11/business/slow-transition-...

enos_feedler• 3 years ago

I did the same s/ai/internet thing yesterday when I asked Bard to give me analyst ratings for cisco stock before the dot-com crash:

"The highest analyst price target for Cisco stock before the dot-com crash was $125 per share. This target was set by Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget in April 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was beginning to burst. Blodget's target was based on his belief that Cisco was well-positioned to benefit from the continued growth of the Internet."

I was looking to compare with analyst targets set for NVDA yesterday. Analysts now are saying the exact thing about Nvidia being able to capture the continued growth of AI:

"JPMorgan set its price target to $500 Wednesday, double its previous estimate and among the highest out of the big banks. Analyst Harlan Sur said this is the “first massive wave of demand in generative AI,” with more gains to follow. He reiterated his overweight rating on the stock."

The ironic bit of course is that my own research here is powered by Bard which probably used an NVDA gpu to train it. But even those dot-com analyst calls were probably emailed around on equipment sold by Cisco.

If I were holding that stock right now, regardless of how right these analysts end up being over the next year or so. I would sell today

bsilvereagle• 3 years ago

The ironic bit of course is that my own research here is powered by Bard which probably used an NVDA gpu to train it

Google uses in-house TPUs for Bard.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/04/10/google-ai-supercomputer-s...

kenjackson3• 3 years ago

It is fairly different though in scope. NVidia clearly is making tons of money from AI. Probably after OpenAI they are the company most directly impacted by AI.

The .com boom of the late 90s was different. Companies who had very little to do with the internet were adding ".com" to their name. I was a penny stock trader and that was one of the fastest ways companies would increase value -- add ".com" and issue a press release about how they plan to be "internet enabled" or "create a web presence".

Today most companies aren't getting a bump by talking about AI. You don't see Spotify changing their name to Spotify.AI. Companies are dabbling in offering AI, e.g., SnapChat, but they aren't shifting their whole focus to AI.

Now there is an industry of small companies building on AI, and I think that's healthy. A handful will find something of value. Going back to the early .com days -- I remember companies doing video/movie streaming over the web and voice chats. None of those early companies, AFAIK, still exist. But the market for this technology is bigger than its ever been.

ztrww• 3 years ago

I would be comparing how someone like Intel did during dot.com instead of Pets.com etc. Of course it far from being the same and Intel did struggle in the early 00’s but they still ended up dominating their market which had significant growth in the 20 years after dot.com.

Did Intel ever ‘grow’ into their massively overvalued valuation? No.. their stock never even reached it’s September, 2000 peak yet.

There is a chance that AMD, Intel, maybe Google etc. catch up with Nvidia in a year or two and data center GPUs become a commodity (clearly the entry bar should be lower than what it was for x86 CPUs back in) and what happens then?

011000113• 3 years ago

You seem to misunderstand the dot com bubble. Sure, there were companies like Pets.com and companies adding an 'e' to the beginning of their names. But there were also companies like Cisco and Sun Microsystems. Companies making profits selling real goods needed by the growing internet. Go look up those companies and their stock charts. Also, if you think random companies aren't mentioning AI to boost their stock you haven't been paying much attention.

fulafel4• 3 years ago

Are there numbers available on current ML applications GPU sales volume, is it really a big share of NV revenue? Dedicated ML hardware like TPUs would seem to be the logical perf/$ competitor longer term, they're so far proprietary but so are NV sw and hw after all.

Obscurity4340• 3 years ago

SpotifAI

fennecfoxy3• 3 years ago

Exactly. In the current situation the "dotcom boom" would be any companies who are currently forcing themselves to use AI for the sake of using AI so that they can say "we use AI to [task that can be done without AI]".

Nvidia is different in that they're the ones selling the hardware, AI isn't going anywhere imo, the spike Nvidia is seeing atm may subside a little but I doubt it, as minor players give up, stronger players will still need more hardware anyway.

Tbh imagine being Nvidia: * Known for dominating in the gaming market, consumers buy plenty of Nvidia cards and always will do * Workstation cards have always been used for CAD/rendering digital media and always will be * Nvidia hardware used in plenty of supercomputers * Crypto craze hit and Nvidia sold a bajillion cards for that, I imagine 2nd-hand mining cards have impacted the consumer arm of their biz but probably not too much, I've seen people avoid buying crypto cards unless they're offered at a very low price * Nvidia has sold cards to people doing AI for a long time, but now the AI boom has started and they're making bank

Basically they've enjoyed the crypto boom and are now enjoying the AI boom, but even if AI boom declines to 0 (it won't) they can still fall back on their workstation/consumer hardware.

Reason I don't think the AI boom will end is that besides companies smashing AI in for no reason, actual applications of it are incredibly useful. I still remember friends being amazed that they could search their Google Photos by "dog" or "cat" (which as furries it's hilarious that it comes up with fursuiters).

caeril2• 3 years ago

As someone who has persistently laughed off the "it's different this time" idiocy from "revolutionary" technology, and as someone who has called 10 out of the last 4 bubbles, I would like to say that it really is different this time.

We're on the precipice of obviating 80% of white collar work, and 99% of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.

pixl972• 3 years ago

Massively decreasing pay, while not solving the asset inflation problem... this ain't going to go well at all.

Nesco• 3 years ago

Could you please detail why do you think Machine Learning will obviate jobs that are already useless?

tenpies• 3 years ago

I agree with you, especially on un-regulated white-collar work (e.g. no one with magic letters after their name is in danger just yet).

But give it a few years and I'm really curious how regulatory and licensing bodies react because they have almost always moved uniformly in whichever direction is necessary to suppress wages. There are few exceptions to this (e.g. physicians). The output benefits of worker + AI could potentially lead to some professional services becoming dirt cheap, while others become ludicrously expensive.

I'm also curious what this means for immigration. For the West, the primary justification to siphon the world's talent fundamentally vanishes. That's talent that potentially stays put and develops in non-Western countries. For countries where the entire country is a demographic ponzi using immigrants to prevent collapse, it's potentially an existential problem.

Macuyiko• 3 years ago

You're right, but I don't think so. From the moment that 80/99% realizes they're out of work, it's over. That's why you see idiot anti-AI spokespeople showing up, why Altman is invited to Bilderberg, why EU is making AI-laws. They're not against AI, as such, but please do not "awaken" the working class. Keep it for "trusted parties" or the military only. What I am curious about is how NVIDIA will position itself against that background.

Personally, I did really wish this would have been a new-era moment where society would take a step back and evaluate how we are organizing ourselves (and living, even), but I fear that AI comes too late for us, in the sense that we're so rusted and backwards now that we cannot accept it. Or any important change, in fact. It's pretty depressing.

011000113• 3 years ago

…2 years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in 2002 (source https://smeadcap.com/missives/the-mcnealy-problem/#:~:text=A....)

codethief• 3 years ago

Whether are not AI will follow the same destiny as the dot com bubble, doesn't really matter: In contrast to fancy AI startups, Nvidia is already making money (in fact it is highly profitable). They are basically adhering to the principle "During a goldrush, sell shovels."

kgwgk4• 3 years ago

‘At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?’— Scott McNealy, Business Week, 2002

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-03-31/a-talk-wi...

bluecalm• 3 years ago

I mean it's completely wrong though as you still have shares in the company after getting paid.

A very good rule of thumb is: if someone's mentions dividends when discussing valuation they are clueless. It doesn't always work (paying high dividends has implications ranging from clueless management to political pressure on the company) but it's a very good rule that the argument is nonsense.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

This ignores inflation and other factors in the macro environment. But ultimately, any argument that a stock is mispriced is definitionally wrong, because the price of a stock is what someone is willing to pay for it. It's a cliche but it's also an incontrovertible fact, even if people like to ignore it because it invalidates all their arguments.

belter2• 3 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/13qk0vw/nvi...

shrimpx2• 3 years ago

I don't think this is just another bubble about to burst. I mean, the bubble bears have been talking about the imminently bursting bubble since 2016. The past couple years are what that burst bubble looks like. Hype-driven companies going out of business, disappearing unicorns, pullback on VC, massive layoffs, bank implosions, tons of tech stocks pulled back by 70-90%, consequences on the likes of Theranos, SBF, etc.

The current AI wave is 95% hype (ultimately useless/broken crap invoking LLM APIs or AI art app du jour) but some of the companies are clearly useful (transcription, summarization, categorization, code generation, next-gen search engine, etc.) and will disrupt traditional services and scale large.

And AI infra companies (AI hardware, AI software on top of hardware, and generic AI model SaaS) will make tons of money as those app companies scale.

11thEarlOfMar2• 3 years ago

You are correct that the overall economic backdrop is quite different from the late 90s.

Nonetheless, the AI news cycle is continuous (like .COM was) and the attribution of NVDA's +25% romp to the prospects of AI grabs the attention of retail investors, who tuned in to see AVGO +20% and the likes of MSFT, TSLA, NFLX and GOOG add 5% in 2 days. The longer that goes on, the more we'll see investors looking for reasons that companies will benefit from AI and want to buy in, then, companies that don't have a strong AI story will need to get on the train and start buying all the AI startups that have materialized over the last couple of years. Then, we start seeting AI IPOs with increasingly sketchy histories. (sorry, .COM PTSD kicking in...)

All this could happen in a weak market. In fact, strong returns in AI during a weak overall market will simply call more attention to it.

fennecfoxy3• 3 years ago

What ElevenLabs is doing with synthesised voices is absolutely amazing. Not quite fully realistic yet, but they're the best I've ever heard.

In addition 2minute papers viewers have seen that AI generated media is coming fast, soon we'll go from Unity/Unreal having an AI "assistant" that can generate models "make a chair for two characters in the same style as this single person chair" to "based on the current information you know about this game world, generate a new zone for the player that includes x, y, z challenges, resources. Create models, textures, animations for all of this" etc. And this is only implications for making games, let along all the other stuff we could get it to do.

The video on automatic animations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAbLsRymXe4 and others) is super cool, once refined it's going to be possible to have a system that can: generate a character model, texture it, automatically animate it for that particular character (young, old, how many limbs) and adjust as needed "right foot becomes injured, so limp" generated voices and unique dialogue set within the realm of the overall game world. I think main plots will still be controlled by game makers, but interaction with rando npcs/side-quests could be totally organic.

ldng• 3 years ago

Nah, not there yet. Just in the "Blockchain" realm for now ;-)

machdiamonds• 3 years ago

I wonder if https://tenstorrent.com/ will be able to take some market share away

abdullin• 3 years ago

Not any time soon, I believe.

AI hardware is useless without software ecosystem (AMD and Intel could tell a story about that).

Latest marketing materials of Tenstorrent tell stories about great chips and licensing deals, but not a single word about the software side of the things.

Compare that to how much NVidia talks about software on its presentations.

peppermint_gum• 3 years ago

CUDA is a success because 1) it works on all NVIDIA GPUs made since 2006 2) it works on both Windows and Linux.

This may seem like a very low bar to clear, but AMD continues to struggle with it. I don't understand it. They act as if GPU compute was a fad not worth investing in.

throwaway4220• 3 years ago

Seriously, knowing very little about such low level stuff, why is this taking so long? George Hotz is starting a company on this premise

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Don't hate the neurons? hate the game.

EddieEngineers• 3 years ago

What are the companies supplying the components/materials to Nvidia and how are their stocks currently performing?

Ologn• 3 years ago

Not a direct answer, but Nvidia manufactures at TSMC. Yesterday morning Nvidia's stock jumped from its Wednesday evening earnings announcement, and TSM jumped from $90.14 to over $100 yesterday morning.

belter2• 3 years ago

NVIDIA PE ratio as of May 25, 2023 is 139.44. If you wanted to invest you are too late. Save your money.

dekhn2• 3 years ago

Good. nvidia deserves what they're getting, imho, because they started early and continued to invest in graphics and then GPUs, with support for both Windows and Linux.

pipes2• 3 years ago

Why are AMD GPUs not used in ai?

tadfisher• 3 years ago

CUDA. And tensor cores, but mostly CUDA.

pipes2• 3 years ago

Thanks

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

Am I the only one thinking that NVIDIA doesn't really have a moat here?

How many A100 or H100 cards are actually manufactured annually? A few hundred thousand, if that?

Suddenly, there's a big demand. Microsoft mentioned buying something like 25,000 of the H100 cards for GPT-4 and ongoing training. I'm certain they're not paying retail pricing, so that's a few hundred million in revenue for NVIDIA. They're probably the biggest single customer right now, except perhaps for Amazon.

NVIDIA's revenue in 2022 was $27 billion. The additional H100 cards they've sold this year is a fraction of that. Their retail prices have spiked and availability has dropped because supply is inelastic and there aren't any other suppliers with equivalent products... yet.

Fundamentally, a H100 is not that different to a desktop GPU! It's a little bigger, the math units have a different ALU balance, and they use high-bandwidth memory (HBM), but that's it. There's nothing else really special about them. Unlike a CPU, which is extremely complex, a GPU is a relatively simple unit repeated over 10K times. In some sense, it's a copy-paste exercise.

NVIDIA has a tiny moat, because AMD simply didn't bother to go after what was -- until now -- a relatively small market.

That market is going to be huge, but that invites competition! When tens or even hundreds of billions are on the table, you can bet your bottom dollar that AMD, Intel, Google, and even Facebook won't sit idly by and watch NVIDIA walk off with it.

So what moat does NVIDIA have?

CUDA is like assembly language. PyTorch can target other back-ends. Compilers can target other GPU instructions sets. Throw a billion dollars at this, and it suddenly becomes an eminently solvable problem. Just look at Apple's CPU transitions and Amazon rolling out ARM cloud servers.

A card with HBM memory? AMD did that first! They already have the tech.

A GPU + CPU hybrid with unified memory? Both Intel and Apple have either existing or upcoming products. Intel for example just abandoned[1] a HPC CPU design that was a combo of a GPU+CPU surrounded by HBM chips acting as a cache for terabytes of DDR5 memory -- ideal for training or running very large language models!

A GPU with a huge amount of 16-bit, 8-bit, or 4-bit ops/sec? Guess what: this is easier than getting high performance with 64-bit floats! You can literally brute force optimal circuit layouts for 4-bit ALUs. No need to be clever at all. All you need is the ability to manufacture "3nm" chips. TSMC does that, not NVIDIA. Intel and Samsung are catching up, rapidly.

Fundamentally, the programming interface 99% of AI researchers use are high-level languages like Python or maybe C++. Compilers exist. Even with CUDA, diverse instruction sets and capabilities exist.

So.. where's the moat!?

[1] Ooo, I bet they feel real stupid right now for throwing in the towel literally months before the LLM boom started taking off.

fulafel4• 3 years ago

CUDA lock in, and network effect, is the main part I think. Even though other vendors can build CUDA compatibility (like AMD did) the quality is likely to keep trailing NVidia. Plus the datacenter TPU market is not yet really formed, even though they get better perf/$ and better perf/watt.

On the other hand it's cool to see that programming language tech as the keystone but on the other hand it's frustrating and tragic that the whole software stack and dev exp landscape is so crap in GPU/TPU land and the bar is so low that you NV win with a hard to use proprietary C++ based language and preside over a fragmented landscape of divided and conquered competition. Makes you wish the Intel Larrabee etc open platform direction had won out.

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

CUDA lock in

The amount of software written for CUDA pales in comparison to the amount that has been written for Intel x86, yet two large companies migrated off it.

The lock-in with Intel was due to binary distribution (Windows software), and binary ABIs.

Everything to do with large language models is compiled from scratch, using high level languages.

The LLM codes themselves themselves are trivial things, easily replicated in a matter of hours on some other platforms. The hard part is gathering the training data and the compute.

The hard parts are not dependent on CUDA.

Look at it this way: Google developed Transformers and trained multiple LLMs using TPUs, not CUDA GPUs! The reason their LLMs are stupid is not because of the TPUs.

ecks4ndr0s• 3 years ago

TPUs are GPUs basically, so it makes sense. I wouldn't be too quick to call it though.

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