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90% of the comments in this thread make it clear that knowing about technology does not in any way qualify someone to think correctly about markets and equity v
by eigenvalue 2y ago
90% of the comments in this thread make it clear that knowing about technology does not in any way qualify someone to think correctly about markets and equity valuations.
- cageface 2y agoYou could even say that overconfidence in abilities and knowledge outside of core expertise is the critical flaw of today's entire tech industry.
- sympil 2y agoAs a great example of this read Paul Graham’s essays that aren’t anout his core expertise.
- haliskerbas 2y agoBut every successful SV founder and or VC is not only a tech genius but also a geopolitical and socioeconomic expert! That’s why they make war companies, cozy up to politicians, and talk about how woke is ruining the world. /s
- roenxi 2y agoIn fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist. There are a range of people who make up interesting stories to a greater or lesser extent but all seem to be serially misinformed. Some things are too complicated to have expertise in. Indeed, while the existence of socioeconomic experts seems more likely we don't have any way of reliably identifying them. The people who actually end up making social or economic policy seem to be winging it by picking the policy that most benefits wealthy people and/or established asset owners. It is barely possible to blink twice without stumbling over a policy disaster.
- benzible 2y agoSo, you think the system is genuinely trying to identify expertise to achieve equitable outcomes, and just happening to fail at it? Rather than policy being shaped by personal networks and existing power structures that tend to benefit themselves?
- roenxi 2y agoI think the system has been carefully configured to benefit wealthy people and/or established asset owners. But the reason that there is no effective resistance to that is because identifying generalist socioeconomic experts is practically impossible.
- rl3 2y ago>In fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist. Except for, I don't know, the many thousands of people who work at various government agencies (diplomatic, intelligence) or even private sector policy circles whose job it is to literally be geopolitical experts in a given area.
- saithound 2y agoThere are thousands of gamblers whose job is to literally predict the tumbling random number generators in the slot machines they play, and will be rewarded with thousands of dollars if they do a good job. They are not experts. As said above, some things are too complicated to have expertise in. It's plausible that geopolitics may work the same way, with the ones who get lucky mistaken for actual experts.
- chmod775 2y agoAbsolute rubbish. There's lots of factual information here you can know and use to make informed "guesses" (if you will). People like Musk, who are often absolutely clueless about countries' political situations, their people, their makeup, their relationships and agreements with neighboring countries, as well as their history and geography, are obviously going to be terrible at predicting outcomes compared to someone who actually has deep knowledge of these things. Also we seem to be using the term "geopolitics" a bit loosely in this thread. Maybe we could inform ourselves what the term we are using even means before we discount that anyone could have expertise in it[1]. I don't think people here meant to narrow it down to just that. What we really seem to concern ourselves with here is international relations theory and political sciences in general. Now whether most politicians should also be considered experts in these areas is another matter. From my personal experience, I'd say most are not. People generally don't elect politicians for being experts - they elect politicians for representing their uninformed opinions. There seems to be only a weak overlap between being competent at the actual job and the ability to be elected into it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitics
- rhubarbtree 2y agoI think that’s unfair unless you give specific examples and clear evidence he’s wrong. I disagree with PG on economics and politics, but much of his writing on that is subjective.
- redcobra762 2y ago“Clear evidence he’s wrong” Good science is dead, isn’t it?
- rhubarbtree 2y agoI don't think that's a snark, but I don't understand.
- sympil 2y agoHe recently said that evil people can’t survive long as founders of tech companies because they need smart people to work for them and smart people can work anywhere. There are lots of other examples. Especially read his recent tweets/essays that aren’t about his area of expertise.
- marcosdumay 2y agoI'd argue that subject is one of his core competencies.
- rhubarbtree 2y agoDo you have a link to him saying that, please? I want to see the context and whether this was absolute. Was it "few evil founders can be successful?" We might also want to delve into what "evil" means here. Presumably he's talking about evil in the way that they treat their employees? As sibling says, that's his core expertise, so not quite relevant.
- sympil 2y agoLook it up yourself. Paul Graham does not have a core competency regarding what smart people are or are not willing to do. That would be sociology or psychology or economics. https://bsky.app/profile/isilanor.bsky.social/post/3ldx24kvcls2k https://bsky.app/profile/isilanor.bsky.social/post/3ldx24kvc...
- ponty_rick 2y agoWith the crowdstrike outage earlier last year it was incredible how many hidden security and kernel "experts" came out crawling from the woodwork, questioning why anything needs to run in the kernel and predicting the company's demise.
- milkshakes 2y agothe experts were correct. in 2024 there are now OS APIs that provide the same observability and control with much less risk involved.
- ta1243 2y agoAnd yet crowdstrike's stock price is still 28% up on where it was 12 month ago, 46% up on 6 months ago after their crash. Sibling is right, that type of product is nothing to do with actually preventing problems, its to do with outsourcing personal risk. Same as SAAS. Nobody got fired when office 365 was down for the second day in a year, but have a 5 minute outage on your on-prem kit after 5 years and there's nasty questions to answer.
- ponty_rick 2y agoPretty sure every vendor uses the kernel. There must be a reason behind none of them exclusively using the APIs.
- milkshakes 2y agoyeah, it's money.
- lmm 2y agoThey were correct that there is no need for it to run in the kernel. They were incorrect in thinking this would affect the company's future, because of course the sales of their product have nothing to do with its technical merit.
- spydum 2y ago
- flashman 2y agoI think it's entirely possible that one categorically can't think correctly about markets and equity valuations since they are vibes-based. Post hoc, sure, but not ahead of time.
- Rury 2y agoMost people don't care about the fundamentals of equity valuations is the crux of it. If they can make money via derivatives, who cares about the underlying valuations? I mean just look at GME for one example, it's been mostly a squeeze driven play between speculators. And then you have the massive dispersion trade that's been happening on the SP500 over the last year+. And when most people invest in index funds, and index funds are weighted mostly by market cap, value investing has been essentially dead for a while now.
- flashman 2y agoYeah, GME for instance shows you can only think about it correctly in retrospect (or perhaps with perfect knowledge of all players' intentions).
- suraci 2y agothe only correcr answer... current market is a 100x GME it's a game, deepseek is just an random event, which may or may not change the storyline not a single big AI company gain any profit from AI, but it doesn't prevent lines going up in fact, the price is only about how much companys spent but not about how much companys gained current buyers are not buying the AI vision talked here, they're buying the price, and will sell the price so if the lines keep going up, no bother, everyone are happy to let their money sit in hands of hedge funds or etfs
- talldayo 2y agoThat means the remaining 10% are similarly disillusioned by the impression Apple or AMD could "just write" a CUDA alternative and compete on their merits. You don't want either of those people spending their money on datacenter bets. 10 years ago people said OpenCL would break CUDA's moat, 5 years ago people said ASICs would beat CUDA, and now we're arguing that older Nvidia GPUs will make CUDA obsolete. I have spent the past decade reading delusional eulogies for Nvidia, and I still find people adamant they're doomed despite being unable to name a real CUDA alternative.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoDid ASICs beat CUDA out in crypto coin mining? Not the benchmark I really care about, but if things slow down in AI (they probably won’t) ASICs could probably take over some of it.
- nly 2y agoWell in the case of Bitcoin it's just one simple hash function. ASICs were inevitable.
- aurareturn 2y agoI think you’re wrong and Wallstreet got Deepseek’s impact wrong. You say DeepSeek should decrease Nvidia demand. Wallstreet agreed today. I say DeepSeek should increase Nvidia’s demand due to Jevon’s Paradox.
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y agoThe increase in efficiency is usually accompanied with the process of commoditization as stuff get cheaper to develop, which is very bad news for nvidia. If you dont need the super high end chips than Nvidia loses it's biggest moat and ability to monopolize the tech, CUDA isn't enough.
- aurareturn 2y agoAnthropic doesn’t train on Nvidia as far as I know. Google doesn’t either. I don’t see how DeepSeek changes things. By the way, DeepSeek trains on Nvidia.
- haliskerbas 2y agoWhat do the others train on?
- aurareturn 2y agoNvidia.
- blovescoffee 2y agoAnthropic on Amazon trainium chips
- saagarjha 2y agoAnd TPU, and normal GPUs. They like to have diversity in their stack.
- rsanek 2y ago
- boringg 2y ago100% Equity valuations for AI hardware future earnings changed dramatically in the last day. The belief that NVIDIA demand for their product is insatiable for the near future had been dented and the concern that energy is the biggest bottle neck might not be the case. Lots to figure out on this information but the playbook radically changed.
- wbsun 2y agoI don’t understand why this is not obvious to many people: tech and stock trading are totally two different things, why on earth a tech expert is expected to know trading at all? Imagining how ridiculous it would be if a computer science graduate will also automatically get a financial degree from college even though no financial class has been taken.
- vishnugupta 2y agoI’ve noticed this phenomenon among IT & tech VC crowd. They will launch pod cast, offer expert opinion and what not on just about every topic under the Sun, from cold fusion to COVID vaccine to Ukraine war. You wouldn’t see this in other folks, for example, a successful medical surgeon won’t offer much assertion about NVIDIA. And the general tendency among audience is to assume that expertise can be carried across domains.
- lazyasciiart 2y agoYou totally see this in other folks. Look at Ben Carson, and his magical surgery expertise on running the department of Housing and Urban Development.
- photonthug 2y agoSystems, it’s all about systems thinking. It is absolutely true that people in tech are often optimistic and/or delusional about the other expertise at their command. But it’s not like the basic assumption here is completely crazy. Being a surgeon might require thinking about a few interacting systems, but mostly the number and nature of those systems involved stay the same. Talented programmers without even formal training in CS will eat and digest a dozen brand new systems before breakfast, and model interactions mentally with some degree of fidelity before lunch. And then, any formal training in CS kind of makes general systems just another type of object. This is not the same as how a surgeon is going to look at a heart, or even the body as a whole. Not that this is the only way to acquire skills in systems thinking. But the other paths might require, IDK, a phd in history/geopolitics, or special studies or extensive work experience in physics or math. And not to rule out other kinds of science or engineering experts as systems thinkers, but a surprisingly large subset of them will specialize and so avoid it. By the numbers.. there are probably just more people in software/IT, therefore more of us to look stupid if/when we get stuff wrong. Obviously general systems expertise can’t automatically make you an expert on particle physics. But honestly it’s a good piece of background for lots of the wicked problems[1], and the wicked problems are what everyone always wants to talk about. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
- loeg 2y agoEvergreen. The same observation applies to any subject you know anything about that is discussed on HN.
- satvikpendem 2y ago"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
- snake_doc 2y agoThe other way is certainly also true. Your short piece is rational, but lacks insight into the inference and training dynamics of ML adoption unconstrained. The rate of ML progress is spectacularly compute constrained today. Every step in today’s scaling program is setup to de-risked the next scale up, because the opportunity cost of compute is so high. If the opportunity cost of compute is not so high, you can skip the 1B to 8B scale ups and grid search data mixes and hyperparameters. The market/concentration risk premium drove most of the volatility today. If it was truly value driven, then this should have happened 6 months ago when DeepSeek released V2 that had the vast majority of cost optimizations. Cloud data center CapEx is backstopped by their growth outlook driven by the technology, not by GPU manufacturers. Dollars will shift just as quickly (like how Meta literally teared down a half built data center in 2023 to restart it to meet new designs).
- optimiz3 2y agoEveryone can say things that sound smart. When it comes to markets the only thing that matters is if your portfolio was green or red.
- Jlagreen 2y agoMy entry into Nvidia is 2016, my portfolio has never been red since then.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoSince when gambling on a RNG output makes you smart?
- timeon 2y agoIt seems to me like both of you are saying same thing.
- snake_doc 2y agoNo, the only thing that matters is if the portfolio delivers returns in excess of your cost of capital. If your portfolio is green, you can still be a poor performer.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- maybesomaybenot 2y ago"knowing about technology" ... filter out the javascript programmers and that leaves about 15% of HN.
- biohcacker84 2y ago[flagged]
- rhubarbtree 2y agoI think that’s correct, but it would be a more useful comment if you gave a few examples and explained the correct thinking.
- eigenvalue 2y agolol I posted the 12,000 word article that caused the sell-off: https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1884712920543621148?s=46 https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1884712920543621148?s=46
- sek 2y agoThe crash is absolutely rational; the cascading effect highlights the missing moat for companies like OpenAI. Without a moat, no investor will provide these companies with the billions that fueled most of the demand. This demand was essential for NVIDIA to squeeze such companies with incredible profit margins. NVIDIA was overvalued before, and this correction is entirely justified. The larger impact of DeepSeek is more challenging to grasp. While companies like Google and Meta could benefit in the long term from this development, they still overpaid for an excessive number of GPUs. The rise in their stock prices was assumed to be driven by the moat they were expected to develop themselves. I was always skeptical of those valuations. LLM inference was highly likely to become commoditized in the future anyway.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoIt has been clear for a while that one of two things is true. 1) AI stuff isn't really worth trillions, in which case Nvidia is overvalued. 2) AI stuff is really worth trillions, in which case there will be no moat, because you can cross any moat for that amount of money, e.g. you could recreate CUDA from scratch for far less than a trillion dollars and in fact Nvidia didn't spend anywhere near that much to create it to begin with. Someone else, or many someones, will spend the money to cross the moat and get their share. So Nvidia is overvalued on the fundamentals. But is it overvalued on the hype cycle? Lots of people riding the bubble because number goes up until it doesn't, and you can lose money (opportunity cost) by selling too early just like you can lose money by selling too late. Then events like this make some people skittish that they're going to sell too late, and number doesn't go up that day.
- bo1024 2y agoI think the analysis of (2) is too simplistic because it ignores network effects. A community of developers and users around a specific toolset (e.g. CUDA) is hard to just "buy". Imagine trying to build a better programming language than python -- you could do it for a trillion dollars, but good luck getting the world to use it. For a real example, see Meta and Threads, or any other Twitter competitor.
- simonebrunozzi 2y agoThanks. Given that you clearly belong to the top 10%, what's your take on the market?
- mnky9800n 2y agoI feel like nvidia is still a good buy haha.
- pdabbadabba 2y agoBecause your comment was posted 9 hours ago, I have no idea what view you think is wrong. Could you explain what the incorrect view is and — ideally — what’s wrong with it?
- Xunjin 2y agoLet's not forget, that also doesn't make you an expert in the history and society evolution, as we can all agree that a part of HN public still believe in “meritocracy” only and think that DEI programs are useless. An experienced person on how is challenging to implement this in the Tech world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658998