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I thought that I should mention a book because it got talked a lot under Nvidia's "lucky success". The book is titled: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth
by nirui 3y ago
I thought that I should mention a book because it got talked a lot under Nvidia's "lucky success". The book is titled: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15524-1#toc https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15524-1#toc).
I don't really think Nvidia's luck is really just a luck. After all, they has the vision for CUDA, bet money on it, and succeeded. They CAN stop the effort at any point during the adventure, but they choose to continue. That's not luck, that's a vision.
BTW, the same book got picked up by some Chinese talk heads as an perfect demonstration showing the good side of capitalism, which I totally agreed. After all, if Nvidia was a Chinese company, they'll probably instead put their efforts into developing some massive-spying citizen-incriminating policewrongs-neverseening camera with funding provided by the government, thus almost guaranteed "success". I'm really glad that Nvidia is operating in a country where "making hardware so everyday people can use their computers to play games" is not something to be mocked at by it's (abusive)parents-acting government. Now, look who's paying smugglers for those A100 chips at double the price while crying? A well deserved fate on my book.
So again, "lucky success" maybe not just luck.
- pjmlp 3y agoYeah, the usual overnight success, 7 years in the making, kind of luck.
- fragmede 3y agoThere's a lot of hard work that goes into luck, but one aspect of the Nvidia story is of AMD's mismanagement. There's an alternate reality where OpenCL became the default instead of CUDA but that's not our reality.
- sledgehammers 3y agoI started reading that book (seems great!) and stumbled upon this: "And it’s hardly clear that computer scientists will succeed in creating a convincingly-human artificial intelligence any time soon." Made me smile. Took but 8 years, the book was published in 2015. :) (BTW. I'm super concerned about all the incredible amount of power nvidia has now and in the future. They get to decide the fate of the human race, I feel. And their incentive is just to make as much money as possible, while all negative externalities including the likes of extinction is left to the society to deal with. Sigh.)