this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah people have been saying something along those lines since 2016. I admit I had no idea it could get to where it is now, but people called it insane when Nvidia passed a $100 around that time (before the splits), and they called it doubly so when it passed $300 (still before the splits). Now they are at $125 but with a split of 1:10 this year, and in 2021 they had a split 1:4, meaning one stock prior to 2021 would be 40 stocks today. So that's equivalent to a stock worth $100 around 2016 is now 40 stocks worth $5000 total! That's 50x the value in 8 years.

Nvidia has been boosted over several times first by crypto, then by (traditional) datacenters, and now by AI:

I've been thinking this was a bit too much for about 5 years now, but the world constantly hungers for more computing power, and apparently Nvidia is the best company to deliver that.

My bet was on AMD, because I thought they'd catch up to Nvidia (apart from taking market share from Intel). While AMD was still a good bet, Nvidia would have been way better.

For 8 years betting against Nvidia has been the wrong bet. Maybe it's finally at the end of the fairy tale, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

oh sure, it's an excellent company as a long-term hold. This is still a bubble and I think the numbers will go down when it pops.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I agree this increase is insane and without parallel AFAIK. It seems to be too good to be true, and normally that means it actually is too good to be true.
It's also hard to believe that Nvidia will be allowed to stay ahead in a market with such profit potential.
But for 8 years they've not only kept their market advantage and profit margins. They've actually managed to increase both.
I thought Nvidia was crazy when they made chips that yielded only one per wafer, I thought AMD would beat them with more agile chips at a fraction the price.

So the question is when you call this a bubble, do you mean demand for compute will stop increasing as much as it is? Do you think AI will flop?

In some ways I think AI already flopped somewhat from the initial hype of ChatGPT. But I do not think that will stop the race among companies to implement AI to keep up or stay ahead og the competition. It seems like AI is like a weapons race, and I bet it will go on for at least 5 years. Then if it turns out not to be the advantage companies hoped for, it will obviously slow down.

But I think Nvidia has a few years of good running ahead of them yet.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I think this "AI" (a marketing term) bubble will flop per the article we linked in the post: this is a bubble fueled entirely by investors, mostly VC, throwing money into a fire of unprofitable businesses selling services at a loss that don't actually work.

I spoke to a pile of AI industry peons who think the VCs will get sick of setting money on fire by the end of this year. I woulda given it two years myself - there are hundreds of billions of dollars desperate for a home - but the number I was consistently hearing in March was "three quarters".

Maybe the Nvidia price will weather it. It took a hit when crypto crashed, though not a huge one.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

The next AI winter can't come too soon. They're spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The problem with betting on or against it is that you have to two factors to place your bet. What and when. You're right about the what, but can you time the top? I'm not betting on that either.