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I like to watch YouTube retrospectives on old failed tech companies - LGR has some good ones. When I think of AMD ignoring machine learning, I can't help imagi

I like to watch YouTube retrospectives on old failed tech companies - LGR has some good ones. When I think of AMD ignoring machine learning, I can't help imagine a future YouTuber's voiceover explaining how this caused their downfall. There's a tendency sometimes to think "they know what they're doing, they must have good reasons". And sometimes that's right, and sometimes that's wrong. Perhaps there's some great technical, legal, or economic reason I'm just not aware of. But when you actually look into these things, it's surprising how often the answer is indeed just shortsightedness. They could end up like BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Kodak. I guess it's not quite as severe, since they will still have a market in games and therefore may well continue to exist, but it will still be looked back on as a colossal mistake. Same with Toyota ignoring electric cars. I'm not an investor, but I still have stakes in the sense that Nvidia has no significant competition in the machine learning space, and that sucks. GPU prices are sky high and there's nobody else to turn to if there's something about Nvidia you just don't like or if they decide to screw us.

robertlagrant 2y ago
There's also just the idea of endeavour - Nvidia tried something, and it worked. Businesses (or rather their shareholders) take risks with their capital sometimes, and it doesn't always work. But in this case it did.
- robocat 2y ago
  And NVidea has a reputation for going all-in on certain market decisions. That is hard to compete against when the bet works.
_boffin_ 2y ago
If you haven’t heard of this book, you might like it. Dealers of lightening
hedora 2y ago
In fairness to AMD, they bet on crypto, and nvidia bet on AI. Crypto was the right short term bet. Also, ignoring is a strong word: I’m staring at a little << $1000, silent 53 watt mini-PC with an AMD SoC. It has an NPU comparable to an M1. In a few months, with the ryzen 9000 series, NPUs for devices of its class will bump from 16 tops to 50 tops. I’m pretty sure the linux taint bit is off, and everything just worked out of the box.
daedrdev 2y ago
Toyota is extremely strong in the hybrid car market, and with ravenous competition for electric cars and slowing demand Toyota may have made the right decision after all

robertlagrant 2y ago

There's also just the idea of endeavour - Nvidia tried something, and it worked. Businesses (or rather their shareholders) take risks with their capital sometimes, and it doesn't always work. But in this case it did.

robocat 2y ago
And NVidea has a reputation for going all-in on certain market decisions. That is hard to compete against when the bet works.

_boffin_ 2y ago

If you haven’t heard of this book, you might like it. Dealers of lightening

hedora 2y ago

In fairness to AMD, they bet on crypto, and nvidia bet on AI. Crypto was the right short term bet. Also, ignoring is a strong word: I’m staring at a little << $1000, silent 53 watt mini-PC with an AMD SoC. It has an NPU comparable to an M1. In a few months, with the ryzen 9000 series, NPUs for devices of its class will bump from 16 tops to 50 tops. I’m pretty sure the linux taint bit is off, and everything just worked out of the box.

daedrdev 2y ago

Toyota is extremely strong in the hybrid car market, and with ravenous competition for electric cars and slowing demand Toyota may have made the right decision after all