4 ms·
"When there is a gold rush, sell shovels"
by a2128 2y ago
"When there is a gold rush, sell shovels"
- amelius 2y agoThey started the gold rush.
- jiggawatts 2y agoI'm pretty sure OpenAI started it, they just used NVIDIA shovels to dig the first mines.
- throwaway48476 2y agoNvidia created CUDA and seeded the ML industry for a decade before chatgpt. They aren't given enough credit for their foresight and strategy. Most companies would have choked the community to death with greed before it ever took off. There is a reason why CUDA works on every NV gpu but ROCm support is spotty at best and only guaranteed on data center GPUs.
- jiggawatts 2y agoMy analogy still holds. NVIDIA just created good shovels that are useful in both the garden and in a gold mine. AMD and Intel insisted on selling only flimsy garden shovels.
- throwaway48476 2y agoAMD and intels shovels (hardware) are fine. The ecosystem is the problem. The fundamental difference is AMD/intel see it as an upsell whereas nvidia is willing to invest in long term organic growth. The problem is the C suite and the difference between companies run by founders and bean counters.
- jiggawatts 2y agoWe're actually in agreement, it's just that analogies are a blunt instrument. I'm saying that Intel and AMD made single-purpose GPUs useful only for graphics. Whether that's because of the software or hardware is immaterial. Effectively, it's one product in the same sense that an iPhone is one product to a consumer, but technically it's the iPhone device + iOS the software + Apple services such as iCloud, music, etc...
- throwaway48476 2y agoIt's not single purpose hardware or software. If you crawl over enough broken glass you can get anything to work on AMD/intel. The distinction is one of business strategy not technology.