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not luck, but the idea that they predicted the ML/AI renaissance 10-20 years out is laughable considering it was google that kicked it off because google had bi

not luck, but the idea that they predicted the ML/AI renaissance 10-20 years out is laughable considering it was google that kicked it off because google had big data and showed it could be done. They had their reasons for doing what they did and I'm sure they eventually realized they were well positioned for ML/AI, but there's no way they planned that out before ML/AI was a viable thing.

paulmd 3y ago
believe it or not they did predict it 10 years out, NVIDIA bet the farm on AI/ML after seeing AlexNet. This has been covered in other articles too. And sure, AlexNet was good but remember this is the maxwell days, tensor cores aren't even a thing yet, it was at minimum a very bold bet on the basis of "some image classifier model thing". Nobody else saw it as more than an academic toy (obviously, or they'd have jumped in too). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua... > Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me. > The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I said 10-20 years out because 10 years out, yes, it was starting to become obvious, but their journey started long before that. 10 years out is 2014.
  - relativ575 3y ago
    It wasn't obvious. Otherwise it wouldn't be a bet! Everyone and their dog would want to be deep in the game, like what's going on with LLM at the moment. Nvidia revenue and R&D budget has traditionally been, and still are, smaller compared to Intel. Likely to AMD as well.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      obvious might be too strong, but at that point the tea leaves were starting to take shape for those that were watching.

paulmd 3y ago

believe it or not they did predict it 10 years out, NVIDIA bet the farm on AI/ML after seeing AlexNet. This has been covered in other articles too. And sure, AlexNet was good but remember this is the maxwell days, tensor cores aren't even a thing yet, it was at minimum a very bold bet on the basis of "some image classifier model thing". Nobody else saw it as more than an academic toy (obviously, or they'd have jumped in too). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua... > Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me. > The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
I said 10-20 years out because 10 years out, yes, it was starting to become obvious, but their journey started long before that. 10 years out is 2014.
- relativ575 3y ago
  It wasn't obvious. Otherwise it wouldn't be a bet! Everyone and their dog would want to be deep in the game, like what's going on with LLM at the moment. Nvidia revenue and R&D budget has traditionally been, and still are, smaller compared to Intel. Likely to AMD as well.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    obvious might be too strong, but at that point the tea leaves were starting to take shape for those that were watching.