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An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPhone Moment
- bottlepalm 4y agoMan how lucky is Nvidia? crypto winds down just as AI is ramps up.
- jitl 4y agoThey nerfed hash rate on their cards multiple times
- selectodude 4y agoAnd drug manufacturers spend a lot of money to nerf their medications to make them harder to inject. Not all customers are good customers.
- greatpostman 4y agoI wouldn’t call it luck, just a great product that’s enabling societal change
- ralphc 4y agoNVidia got lucky, at least in the long term. They spent years perfecting SIMD to make spaceships blow up and, by coincidence, that's the same technology that enabled coin mining then deep learning.
- orangepanda 4y agoIs Nvidia taking advantage of the crypto/AI trends, or enabling them?
- danpalmer 4y agoThey have been investing in this for a long time, CUDA is 15 years old. That said, they have plenty of competition now and that's only going to increase. - Apple have got their own chips now for mobile AI applications for iPhones. - Google have got their own chips for Android and servers. - AMD are gaining on Intel in the server space, and have their own GPUs, being able to sell CPUs and GPUs that complement each other may be a good strategy, plus AMD have plenty of their own experience with OpenCL.
- bottlepalm 4y agoThey've been investing for a long time, but it's only blown up in the past year due to recent breakthroughs. Good timing for Nvidia.
- jonas21 4y agoIt's been blowing up since at least 2012-13 when deep convolutional neural nets started seeing massive success.
- bottlepalm 4y agoThat's not blowing up. What's happening right now is blowing up.
- jonas21 4y agoWhat's going on now is the continuation of a growth trend that started a decade ago.
- imwithstoopid 4y agoNvidia is in an excellent position - they have CUDA as you point out, and they are moving that into server room dominance in this application space Google has TPUs but have these even made a tiny dent in Nvidia's position? I assume anything Apple is cooking is using Nvidia in the server room already Intel seems completely absent from this market AMD seems content to limit its ambitions to punching Intel its Nvidia's game to lose at this point...I wonder when they start moving in the other direction and realize they have the power to introduce their own client platform (I secretly wish they would try to mainstream a linux laptop running on Nvidia ARM but obviously this is just a fantasy) if anything, I think Huang may not be ambitious enough!
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoNvidia is part of the reason why it happened and why it happened now, they didn't get lucky by any stretch of the imagination wrt to AI.
- ww520 4y agoIt's not just luck but good strategy. In the past 10 to 15 years, Nvidia has been leveraging its core GPU to go beyond gaming video card to expand into different peripheral areas where massive parallel computing is needed, such as super computing, cloud computing, animation farm, CAD, visualization, simulation, car, VR, AI, and Crypto. They have been able to catch/enable one wave or the other because it's part of their roadmap.
- tpmx 4y agoThey have been going pretty much everywhere with their CUDA runtime. LLMs was a random hit. At the same time, it doesn't seem like a great moat - I think AMD should be to able compete pretty well soon. I think TSMC/Samsung/ASML will capture quite a lot of the profit in the boom to come.
- Our_Benefactors 4y agoCUDA not a moat? It’s physical hardware combined with extensive software libraries. How much more of a moat could they have?
- tpmx 4y agoIn the end it's about who can do the most (probably low precision) FLOPS/$ - CUDA becomes less of a moat the more established the field becomes and the software settles. There's nothing magical about the low-level arithmetics that powers this. Nvidia will have a first-mover advantage, but AMD will be strongly motivated to win those customers, and they should be able to, eventually. Anyway, that's my gut instinct based on how these things tend to play out. Now let's hear from e.g. actual experts in the field? :)
- ketzo 4y agoThere's a winner-take-all dynamic at play, though. The better CUDA is, the more things get built on top of it. The more things get built on top of CUDA, the better the CUDA ecosystem of tooling, frameworks, etc. gets. The better the CUDA ecosystem is, the better CUDA is. GOTO 1. But you're right -- lots and lots of folks will be motivated to compete.
- squokko 4y agoI mean NVIDIA designed the hardware and software for massively parallel computation. That's not really luck.
- shubham-rawat5 4y agoNVIDIA's top management may have had a vision but in coming years the competition will be rising exponentially in the AI/ML space as AMD+XILINX, INTEL and some potential dedicated AI hardware startups could become a big threat to dominance of nvidia. nvidia has just a GPU and they fully control it from the architecture to the whole software ecosystem that been built around their GPUs but AMD has complete ground up control over all the components like x86 cpu, gpu, xilinx fpga and they could be big challenger to NV.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoAI (on GPUs) has been ramping up for more than the last 10 years, crypto was a fly by night thing in comparison.
- px43 4y agoGPU mining was only really a thing in the cryptocurrency space for a few years, maybe 2011-2013. Miners moved on to FPGAs for most things, and then ASICs shortly after. There were a few mildly GPU friendly cryptocurrencies, but the vast majority of GPU power used in the past decade has been for deep learning, which really took off in 2008, before Bitcoin was a thing.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoThe paper came out in 2009, then another breakthrough in 2010, but I don’t think it got to production until 2011 or so.
- px43 4y agoI find it funny that a global trillion dollar economy counts as being "wound down" to some people. The total economic value of the cryptocurrency space at the moment is just between the total economic value of Russia (1.06 trillion) and Switzerland (1.26 trillion). Yes, that's a lot lower than it was, but still a virtual global superpower. You're not wrong, it's just a fun sign of how far the cryptocurrency space has come.
- throwaway1777 4y agoThe relevant fact is that GPU mining is dead, not how big crypto is overall.
- sagarpatil 4y agoDon’t forget Covid where everyone and their grandmother was gaming. There was a 6 months waiting for RTX 3080. Although now that I think of it , some of it can be attributed to the disruption in supply chain.
- ttul 4y agoNever mind TSMC…
- tmsh 4y agoLots of great quotes like: "Inference will be the way software is operated in the future. Inference is simply a piece of software that was written by a computer instead of a piece of software that was written by a human and every computer will just run inference someday."
- ww520 4y agoYou can argue compilers have been doing that. And JIT was the next step to enable runtime rewriting of software. AI directed JIT or compilers probably will be next.
- abudabi123 4y agoSemiotics Lisp Machine Software 2.0⸻make it happen.
- cubefox 4y agoThe piece of software that was written by a computer (by an ML algorithm, to be precise) is called a "model". "Inference" is the execution of this software.
- rhtgrg 4y agoIsn't this proof that the CEO doesn't understand the tech? Or am I misunderstanding something?
- khazhoux 4y agoHe's simplifying for the press.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abudabi123 4y agoHe's the ceo messenger.
- 4y ago
- crop_rotation 4y agoNvidia seems in a really great position. They are to AI what Intel was to the PC (and unlike the PC era there is not a single Microsoft here who controls the entire ecosystem). CUDA still has no alternative. Yes Google has TPUs but outside of Google NVIDIA still dominates and enjoys the network effects (support in all kinds of libs and framework). They face the same problems that Intel faced, as in the market just wants the software and if the software works the same, the hardware is replaceable. It will be interesting to see how they adapt.
- TechnicolorByte 4y agoInteresting comparison with Intel in the PC market: > the market just wants the software and if the software works the same, the hardware is replaceable And likely to be true given how much competition is heating up in the AI hardware space. Granted, many of these competitors and startups especially have existed for years and haven’t made much of a dent. Even Google’s TPU doesn’t seem that much better than Nvidia’s stuff based on their limited MLPerf score releases. Maybe this “iPhone moment” for AI will change that and force competitors to finally put some real effort in it. As for Nvidia, looks like they are trying to adapt by selling their own enterprise software solutions such as Omniverse and their AI model customization stuff. Will be interesting to see if they can transform into more of a software solutions provider going forward.
- xiphias2 4y agoAMD would have been a natural competitor, but they seem to be slow to catch up. Also segmenting gaming GPUs from AI GPUs is just not the best idea: devs don't want to buy a gaming GPU and an AI GPU separately when they can just buy a stronger NVIDIA GPU that does both.
- Giorgi 4y agoWhy is this text though? Is there video?
- TechnicolorByte 4y agoLooks like there’s a paid podcast available. I’m sure there’s some TTS apps that could take in the text and make it consumable that way, though.
- visarga 4y agoNaturalReaders is a good one
- jaflo 4y agoWhat’s wrong with text?
- rubans 4y agoYou can't easily listen to text while doing something else like cooking or laundry. Text to speech is possible, but not amazing
- _qua 4y agoThis is a lot to read. It says there is a podcast link in the email but I don't see a link. Do you need to be a subscriber?
- lsy 4y agoOn Nvidia seemingly being in perfect position to ride successive hype cycles of technology: their product category is one of the few types of hardware with significant technical advancement in the last decade, making it only natural that people would seek to leverage that category of hardware with new software efforts. So less that they have been brilliant strategically and more that they have been brilliant technically and that has been creating the market so to speak. What is not clear is whether, as an industry, we are constrained by this technology into seeking solutions that can be massively parallelized. More simply, when every leap in compute is a massively parallel architecture, every problem seems like it needs to be solved by a massively parallel system. But I'm guessing before this cycle is over we start to see the limitations of that.
- davidwu 4y agoJensen Huang is awesome and in lots of ways underrated compared to a lot of his contemporaries. Per Wikipedia, he founded the company on his 30th birthday in February, 1993. That means he's spent more of his life running Nvidia than not. What a stellar run. The two Acquired episodes about Nvidia are fantastic and worth listening to: Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006): https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993-2006 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993... Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022): https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-learning-company-2006-2022 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-learning...