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More interesting take on Nvidia's position than I've come across before. One thing to be noted is 1) Nvidia is already making moves in robotics so even if their

More interesting take on Nvidia's position than I've come across before. One thing to be noted is 1) Nvidia is already making moves in robotics so even if their position in AI (moreso llms) diminished, they certainly have another big avenue arguably harder to just get into (although I'm not sure what efforts Google is doing for the tpu in robotics). Another point is Nvidia is still the main player in the west, that is, China certainly can and will create their own full stack without reliance on US companies. That puts Europe and other countries in an interesting, do you buy Nvidia because it's the only option or for security. That's to say I believe Nvidia's position relied on many different things being true at the same time, and we're moving towards an environment where those things are certainly being contested at (roughly) the same time.

wongarsu 2mo ago
Even in the west, Nvidia's dominance is bound to weaken. There is a notable uptick of articles on HN about people running large models on AMD hardware. And while I don't know official sales figures, I know we have trouble getting our AMD system delivered AMD's software story is still a lot worse than Nvidia's. But patching up vllm to run one or two models you care about on AMD hardware is a much easier proposition than using them in most other fields of AI.
- moralestapia 2mo ago
  nVidia will fail right after reaching an 8 trillion valuation and supplying 80% of the world's hardware! Trust me guys, it's over!
  - doctorwho42 2mo ago
    I think this is a great example of the disconnect people have in these types of conversations. You can both become a company that supplies 80% of the world with your type of product, and then still have your stock go down in value. All it takes is over evaluation by the stock market. Then a course correction from unsustained growth on growth (second order). So even if you continually replace YoY 80% of the world's hardware on a rotating business, but you don't increase market share or increase demand (aka growth)... Your business looks stagnant to the stock market, and there isn't really anything you can do about it. The best you can do is track inflation +/- 2%. And that's why a lot of older established companies were dividend stocks. You don't expect to growth anymore, but that's not where the value is anymore... The value is in the reliable sales that will happen after infinitum because your company controls a majority share of the business... And that's ok! Unfortunately, silicon valley has created a philosophy of 'you gotta expand into new fields or your on the decline' - aka neo-monopolization
  - acdha 2mo ago
    Nobody is saying they’re outright failing, but that they’re not going to be printing money the way they have been recently. Think about Intel circa 2010: most of their competitors like POWER or MIPS were marginalized, they owned the desktop and server markets with a bit of competition from AMD well contained, and their biggest desktop competitor (Apple) had just switched. A lot of analyst predictions … did not match what happened next. The same was true of Cisco a decade earlier. Both companies are still there but they don’t set the terms in their market segments. I’m not predicting Nvidia will MBA themselves to death in the near future but I think there’s a tendency to overstate how profitable companies will stay. The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed. The current administration is definitely corrupt enough that you could imagine an anti-competitive deal of some sort but I don’t think there’s a way for even that to change matters because key competitors are well-connected American companies willing to play that game, too.
    - coredog64 2mo ago
      > The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed. Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos
      - bigyabai 2mo ago
        But people have been saying this about CUDA for twenty years, and we are not any closer to a replacement GPGPU paradigm today. The root comment in this thread was about Nvidia hedging their bet on lost AI market share. They recognize that a reduced pace in training and inference competition will undercut their business, but CUDA isn't a one-trick pony for LLMs alone. TPUs are - you can't even reuse the same architecture for training and inference, they're separate ASICs unlike CUDA cores/ALUs. Veterans of crypto mining will tell you that the ASICs lost in the end, as Nvidia was evolving their hardware faster than the ASIC manufacturers could iterate. When the crypto acceleration landscape diversified away from ETH/BTC into altcoins, Nvidia was still there making money hand-over-fist from mining hardware. I guess you could argue that robotics, world models or computer vision won't be a trillion-dollar market. But Nvidia is positioned to be the first mover in all of these markets, and none of their competitors are even coming close to the integrated stack that they sell consumers.
- ekianjo 2mo ago
  amd is not putting nearly enough effort to improve their software its almost suspicious
  - officeplant 2mo ago
    They've struggled with software even in the ATi days. It's just normal AMD behavior. Drivers will always be half baked.
spwa4 2mo ago
Google has their robotics models, for example: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ Google is mostly the party behind the whole VLA principle.
godshatter 2mo ago
I'm just hoping that some day they can get back into the relatively small market of gaming gpus, even if for just nostalgia sake.

wongarsu 2mo ago

Even in the west, Nvidia's dominance is bound to weaken. There is a notable uptick of articles on HN about people running large models on AMD hardware. And while I don't know official sales figures, I know we have trouble getting our AMD system delivered AMD's software story is still a lot worse than Nvidia's. But patching up vllm to run one or two models you care about on AMD hardware is a much easier proposition than using them in most other fields of AI.

moralestapia 2mo ago
nVidia will fail right after reaching an 8 trillion valuation and supplying 80% of the world's hardware! Trust me guys, it's over!
- doctorwho42 2mo ago
  I think this is a great example of the disconnect people have in these types of conversations. You can both become a company that supplies 80% of the world with your type of product, and then still have your stock go down in value. All it takes is over evaluation by the stock market. Then a course correction from unsustained growth on growth (second order). So even if you continually replace YoY 80% of the world's hardware on a rotating business, but you don't increase market share or increase demand (aka growth)... Your business looks stagnant to the stock market, and there isn't really anything you can do about it. The best you can do is track inflation +/- 2%. And that's why a lot of older established companies were dividend stocks. You don't expect to growth anymore, but that's not where the value is anymore... The value is in the reliable sales that will happen after infinitum because your company controls a majority share of the business... And that's ok! Unfortunately, silicon valley has created a philosophy of 'you gotta expand into new fields or your on the decline' - aka neo-monopolization
- acdha 2mo ago
  Nobody is saying they’re outright failing, but that they’re not going to be printing money the way they have been recently. Think about Intel circa 2010: most of their competitors like POWER or MIPS were marginalized, they owned the desktop and server markets with a bit of competition from AMD well contained, and their biggest desktop competitor (Apple) had just switched. A lot of analyst predictions … did not match what happened next. The same was true of Cisco a decade earlier. Both companies are still there but they don’t set the terms in their market segments. I’m not predicting Nvidia will MBA themselves to death in the near future but I think there’s a tendency to overstate how profitable companies will stay. The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed. The current administration is definitely corrupt enough that you could imagine an anti-competitive deal of some sort but I don’t think there’s a way for even that to change matters because key competitors are well-connected American companies willing to play that game, too.
  - coredog64 2mo ago
    > The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed. Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos
    - bigyabai 2mo ago
      But people have been saying this about CUDA for twenty years, and we are not any closer to a replacement GPGPU paradigm today. The root comment in this thread was about Nvidia hedging their bet on lost AI market share. They recognize that a reduced pace in training and inference competition will undercut their business, but CUDA isn't a one-trick pony for LLMs alone. TPUs are - you can't even reuse the same architecture for training and inference, they're separate ASICs unlike CUDA cores/ALUs. Veterans of crypto mining will tell you that the ASICs lost in the end, as Nvidia was evolving their hardware faster than the ASIC manufacturers could iterate. When the crypto acceleration landscape diversified away from ETH/BTC into altcoins, Nvidia was still there making money hand-over-fist from mining hardware. I guess you could argue that robotics, world models or computer vision won't be a trillion-dollar market. But Nvidia is positioned to be the first mover in all of these markets, and none of their competitors are even coming close to the integrated stack that they sell consumers.
ekianjo 2mo ago
amd is not putting nearly enough effort to improve their software its almost suspicious
- officeplant 2mo ago
  They've struggled with software even in the ATi days. It's just normal AMD behavior. Drivers will always be half baked.

spwa4 2mo ago

Google has their robotics models, for example: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ Google is mostly the party behind the whole VLA principle.

godshatter 2mo ago

I'm just hoping that some day they can get back into the relatively small market of gaming gpus, even if for just nostalgia sake.