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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 A

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 3y 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?
- haldujai 3y ago
  > 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? Realistically, there is next to zero chance Intel (especially given the Arc catastrophe and foundry capabilities) or AMD (laundry list of reasons) catchup within 2 years. Safe bet Google's TPUv5 will be competitive with the H100, as the v4 was with the A100, but their offering clearly hasn't impacted market share thus far and there is no indication Google intends to make their chips available outside of GCP. With that said I also agree the current valuation seems too high, but I highly doubt there is a serious near-term competitor. I think it is more likely that current growth projections are too aggressive and demand will subside before they grow into their valuation, especially as the space evolves with open source foundation models and techniques come out (like LoRA/PEFT) that substantially reduce demand for the latest chips.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    > there is no indication Google intends to make their chips available outside of GCP. 1. You can buy mini versions of their chips through Coral (coral.ai). But yea, they’d never sell them externally as long as there exists a higher-margin advantage to selling software on top of them, and chips have supply constraints. 2. Google can sell VMs with the tensor chips attached, like GPUs. Most organizations with budgets that’d impact things will be using the cloud. If Apple/MSFT/AWS/Goog/Meta start serious building their own chips, NVidia could be left out of the top end.
    - haldujai 3y ago
      > Google can sell VMs with the tensor chips attached, like GPUs. They have already been doing this for quite a while now and even when offered free via TRC barely anyone uses TPUs. There is nothing to suggest that Google as an organization is shifting focus to be the HPC cloud provider for the world. As it stands TPU cloud access really seems ancillary to their own internal needs. > If Apple/MSFT/AWS/Goog/Meta start serious building their own chips, NVidia could be left out of the top end. That's a big "if", especially within two years, given that this chip design/manufacturing isn't really a core business interest for any of those companies (other than Google which has massive internal need and potentially Apple who have never indicated interest in being a cloud provider). They certainly could compete with Nvidia for the top-end, but it would be really hard and how much would the vertical integration actually benefit their bottom line? A 2048 GPU SuperPOD is what, like 30M? There's also the risk that the not-always-friendly DoJ gets anti-trusty if a cloud provider has a massive advantage and is locking the HW in their walled garden.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        > barely anyone uses TPUs What are you basing that on? I'm not aware of GCP having released any numbers on their usage.
        haldujai 3y ago
        Anecdotal data warning but for context my research is in medical informatics and I've quite extensively followed publications on transformers dating back to the early BERT variants (including non-medical). I'm making that statement as my experience (easily several hundreds of publications read or reviewed over 3 years) is that it is very uncommon to see TPU's mentioned or TRC acknowledged in any non-Google transformer paper (especially major publications) dating back to the early BERT family of models despite the fact that Google is very generous with research credits (they'll give out preemptible v3-32s and v3-64s for 14 days with little question, presumably upgraded now as I haven't asked for credits in a while). Fully acknowledge this isn't quality evidence to back my claim and I'm happy to be proven wrong but I'm very confident a literature review would support this as when I tried to use TPUs myself I couldn't find much. This doesn't account for industry use, there is probably a non-insignificant amount of enterprise customers still using AutoML (I can think of a few at least) which I believe uses the TPU cloud but I would be surprised if many use TPU nodes directly outside of Jax shops like cohere and anyone still using TF. PyTorch XLA has just breaks too much otherwise and when I last tried to use it in January of this year there was still quite a significant throughput reduction on TPUs. Additionally when using nodes there is a steeper learning curve on the ops side (VM, storage, Stackdriver logging) that make working with them harder than spinning up a A100x8 which is relatively cheap, cheaper than the GCP learning curve for sure.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >and what happens then? Most likely, all their prices go up... I mean, your first instinct is to say, "but how could all their prices so up, they'll steal value from each other", but that's not necessarily true. If AI starts solving useful problems, and especially if it starts requiring multi-modality to do so, I would expect the total GPU processing demand to increase by 10,000-100,000X that we have now. Now, you're going to say "What's going to pay for this massive influx of GPU power by corporations". And my reply would be "Corporations not having to pay for your health insurance any longer".
- kgwgk 3y ago
  > Did Intel ever ‘grow’ into their massively overvalued valuation? No.. their stock never even reached it’s September, 2000 peak yet. If you take dividends into account it did break even a few years ago, at least in nominal terms. Cisco and Sun Microsystems may be even better comparables though.
- x3sphere 3y ago
  I'm not sure AMD will catch up to Nvidia. Obviously there are a lot of traders betting on that right now, given that AMD has started to rally in response to Nvidia. However after all this time NV still commands like 80% share of the gaming GPU market despite AMD often (not always) releasing competitive cards. Gaming GPUs are already a commodity - why hasn't AMD caught up there? I mean, maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't see why the datacenter/GPGPU market won't end up the same way. Nvidia is notorious for trying to lock in users with proprietary tech too, though people don't seem to mind.
01100011 3y 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.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  Cisco peaked at $77.00 in March 2000. It's currently $50.00. In the interim there have been no splits. Intel peaked at $73.94 in September 2000. It's currently $28.99. In the interim there have been no splits. NVidia has split 5 times (cumulative 48x) since 2000. It closed 2000 around $2.92. It is currently $389.93. Totally gain 6400x. If you ignore the last 12 months, NVidia's last peak was $315 in 2021, for a total gain of 5178x. -ish.
  - startupsfail 3y ago
    Ask GPT-4, maybe it will say that this is not that unreasonable. Artificial intelligence is might be once-in-a-civilization-lifetime event.
    - luckman212 3y ago
      "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      I'm concerned that if AI really lives up to the hype that retail investors are thinking, it's more of a civilization ending event than some sort of ascension to heaven. Meanwhile the hedge funds and institutional investors are just trying to ride the momentum while it lasts, which could be for a while.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    I imagine we might be looking at different points in each company’s lifecycle? Nvidia was founded in the 90s. If we look at intel’s stock over the same range relative to the start of the company, what happens then? Feels like this comparison is not that relevant to the dot com bubble and whether AI is similar.
fulafel 3y ago
Are there numbers available on current ML applications GPU sales volume, is it really a big share of NV revenue? Dedicated ML hardware like TPUs would seem to be the logical perf/$ competitor longer term, they're so far proprietary but so are NV sw and hw after all.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  I got this quote from the BBC: "Figures show its [NVidia] AI business generated around $15bn (£12bn) in revenue last year, up about 40% from the previous year and overtaking gaming as its largest source of income" Oddly, in updates to the article they rewrote a lot of it, and that line is missing, but you can still see it if you search for it.
  - fulafel 3y ago
    Maybe someone temporarily mistook the main non gaming aka datacenter side for being all ml.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
SpotifAI
fennecfoxy 3y 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).

ztrww 3y 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?

haldujai 3y ago
> 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? Realistically, there is next to zero chance Intel (especially given the Arc catastrophe and foundry capabilities) or AMD (laundry list of reasons) catchup within 2 years. Safe bet Google's TPUv5 will be competitive with the H100, as the v4 was with the A100, but their offering clearly hasn't impacted market share thus far and there is no indication Google intends to make their chips available outside of GCP. With that said I also agree the current valuation seems too high, but I highly doubt there is a serious near-term competitor. I think it is more likely that current growth projections are too aggressive and demand will subside before they grow into their valuation, especially as the space evolves with open source foundation models and techniques come out (like LoRA/PEFT) that substantially reduce demand for the latest chips.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > there is no indication Google intends to make their chips available outside of GCP. 1. You can buy mini versions of their chips through Coral (coral.ai). But yea, they’d never sell them externally as long as there exists a higher-margin advantage to selling software on top of them, and chips have supply constraints. 2. Google can sell VMs with the tensor chips attached, like GPUs. Most organizations with budgets that’d impact things will be using the cloud. If Apple/MSFT/AWS/Goog/Meta start serious building their own chips, NVidia could be left out of the top end.
  - haldujai 3y ago
    > Google can sell VMs with the tensor chips attached, like GPUs. They have already been doing this for quite a while now and even when offered free via TRC barely anyone uses TPUs. There is nothing to suggest that Google as an organization is shifting focus to be the HPC cloud provider for the world. As it stands TPU cloud access really seems ancillary to their own internal needs. > If Apple/MSFT/AWS/Goog/Meta start serious building their own chips, NVidia could be left out of the top end. That's a big "if", especially within two years, given that this chip design/manufacturing isn't really a core business interest for any of those companies (other than Google which has massive internal need and potentially Apple who have never indicated interest in being a cloud provider). They certainly could compete with Nvidia for the top-end, but it would be really hard and how much would the vertical integration actually benefit their bottom line? A 2048 GPU SuperPOD is what, like 30M? There's also the risk that the not-always-friendly DoJ gets anti-trusty if a cloud provider has a massive advantage and is locking the HW in their walled garden.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      > barely anyone uses TPUs What are you basing that on? I'm not aware of GCP having released any numbers on their usage.
      - haldujai 3y ago
        Anecdotal data warning but for context my research is in medical informatics and I've quite extensively followed publications on transformers dating back to the early BERT variants (including non-medical). I'm making that statement as my experience (easily several hundreds of publications read or reviewed over 3 years) is that it is very uncommon to see TPU's mentioned or TRC acknowledged in any non-Google transformer paper (especially major publications) dating back to the early BERT family of models despite the fact that Google is very generous with research credits (they'll give out preemptible v3-32s and v3-64s for 14 days with little question, presumably upgraded now as I haven't asked for credits in a while). Fully acknowledge this isn't quality evidence to back my claim and I'm happy to be proven wrong but I'm very confident a literature review would support this as when I tried to use TPUs myself I couldn't find much. This doesn't account for industry use, there is probably a non-insignificant amount of enterprise customers still using AutoML (I can think of a few at least) which I believe uses the TPU cloud but I would be surprised if many use TPU nodes directly outside of Jax shops like cohere and anyone still using TF. PyTorch XLA has just breaks too much otherwise and when I last tried to use it in January of this year there was still quite a significant throughput reduction on TPUs. Additionally when using nodes there is a steeper learning curve on the ops side (VM, storage, Stackdriver logging) that make working with them harder than spinning up a A100x8 which is relatively cheap, cheaper than the GCP learning curve for sure.
pixl97 3y ago
>and what happens then? Most likely, all their prices go up... I mean, your first instinct is to say, "but how could all their prices so up, they'll steal value from each other", but that's not necessarily true. If AI starts solving useful problems, and especially if it starts requiring multi-modality to do so, I would expect the total GPU processing demand to increase by 10,000-100,000X that we have now. Now, you're going to say "What's going to pay for this massive influx of GPU power by corporations". And my reply would be "Corporations not having to pay for your health insurance any longer".
kgwgk 3y ago
> Did Intel ever ‘grow’ into their massively overvalued valuation? No.. their stock never even reached it’s September, 2000 peak yet. If you take dividends into account it did break even a few years ago, at least in nominal terms. Cisco and Sun Microsystems may be even better comparables though.
x3sphere 3y ago
I'm not sure AMD will catch up to Nvidia. Obviously there are a lot of traders betting on that right now, given that AMD has started to rally in response to Nvidia. However after all this time NV still commands like 80% share of the gaming GPU market despite AMD often (not always) releasing competitive cards. Gaming GPUs are already a commodity - why hasn't AMD caught up there? I mean, maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't see why the datacenter/GPGPU market won't end up the same way. Nvidia is notorious for trying to lock in users with proprietary tech too, though people don't seem to mind.

01100011 3y 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.

killjoywashere 3y ago
Cisco peaked at $77.00 in March 2000. It's currently $50.00. In the interim there have been no splits. Intel peaked at $73.94 in September 2000. It's currently $28.99. In the interim there have been no splits. NVidia has split 5 times (cumulative 48x) since 2000. It closed 2000 around $2.92. It is currently $389.93. Totally gain 6400x. If you ignore the last 12 months, NVidia's last peak was $315 in 2021, for a total gain of 5178x. -ish.
- startupsfail 3y ago
  Ask GPT-4, maybe it will say that this is not that unreasonable. Artificial intelligence is might be once-in-a-civilization-lifetime event.
  - luckman212 3y ago
    "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    I'm concerned that if AI really lives up to the hype that retail investors are thinking, it's more of a civilization ending event than some sort of ascension to heaven. Meanwhile the hedge funds and institutional investors are just trying to ride the momentum while it lasts, which could be for a while.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  I imagine we might be looking at different points in each company’s lifecycle? Nvidia was founded in the 90s. If we look at intel’s stock over the same range relative to the start of the company, what happens then? Feels like this comparison is not that relevant to the dot com bubble and whether AI is similar.

fulafel 3y 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.

kenjackson 3y ago
I got this quote from the BBC: "Figures show its [NVidia] AI business generated around $15bn (£12bn) in revenue last year, up about 40% from the previous year and overtaking gaming as its largest source of income" Oddly, in updates to the article they rewrote a lot of it, and that line is missing, but you can still see it if you search for it.
- fulafel 3y ago
  Maybe someone temporarily mistook the main non gaming aka datacenter side for being all ml.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

SpotifAI

fennecfoxy 3y 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).