Comment by dbbk
9 hours ago
If you were going to invest in any AI company literally the only one I would trust to still exist in 10 years would be Google
9 hours ago
If you were going to invest in any AI company literally the only one I would trust to still exist in 10 years would be Google
Yep. Two simple boring bets on AI: NVIDIA and Google.
I still think NVIDIA is a bad bet--where is their moat in the long term? Doesn't the sort of work NVIDIA engineers do look vulnerable to AI-assisted automation? NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
Their moat is cuda and cuda libraries and everything built on top.
When a new architecture drops, it's always PyTorch running on CUDA, other PyTorch backends are best effort, even if they reach feature parity, many industry power users went closer to the metal to squeeze performance and that stuff is too specific to Nvidia stuff.
if there is something that will beat Nvidia, it won't be something reaching feature parity with slightly better economics (like AMD, also Nvidia could just reduce their margins), it needs to be a novel approach worth rewriting the codebase for (maybe Cerebras, maybe a new player).
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The most reasonable story you can tell for a nVidia moat is their know-how in designing datacenter-scale hardware and getting it fabbed and deployed. That's inherently hard to replicate. CUDA itself can be replicated in theory (it's basically just a compute API) but that turns out not to be worth it since the nVidia ecosystem really is higher quality for the cost.
AMD should have been ideally placed to compete with them, and haven't.
> NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
The spec is the value. And the patents.
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I dont think that holds since the core cuda toolkit is proprietary
You are probably too late for both. But if you buy the AGI line, then yeah, those are the ones to go to.
Im more into buying Shovels. NVIDIA is arguably one of them, and I already have some.
But I recently added POET, CBRS and similar. I think whatever happens, "shovel sellers" will be the main winners in this bubble.
They will exist, but at what valuation? Can NVIDIA really continue to raise?
Google is a lot more recession proof than NVIDIA is my intuition here
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Prices for both companies are already very forward looking, and assume best case scenario of insane growth for at least a decade while assuming no risk or competition.
But tech is also one of the fields that is more prone to disruption.
Nvidia is consistently one product away from it's competitors to eat highly into their margins.
Google may have a stronger moat. No company in Italy I'm aware of is using anything but copilot or Gemini/notebooklm (talking legal, insurance, etc, not tech) because they are natural extension to the cloud and Microsoft 365 existing plans.
Recency bias seem to push investors to ignore those risks and plenty reason like you: they use recent hindsight to project future growth.
I think that NVIDIA is quite risky. I still don't understand what is their moat. There is nothing in their hardware to make them irreplaceable.
A lot of people don't get it. Nvidia won because they embraced standards, in a time when alternatives like OpenCL were outright sabotaged by AMD, Intel and Apple.
While Khronos struggles to get their vendors on the same page, Nvidia doesn't. CUDA GPUs ship with clearly-defined support windows, Compute Capabilities, hardware documentation, PTX support, datacenter drivers, Linux/UNIX support, portable libraries, synergistic desktop products and capable edge SOCs. All of them walk in lockstep and typically dominate performance-per-watt comparisons against similar products. It's a lineup that's hard to surmount.
You can bet against Nvidia, but you'd better put your money on a fast horse. None of the big OEMs are taking CUDA seriously, and the bet against industry-wide cooperation is paying dividends that will be hard to justify competing with.
There isn’t in time what will happen is that they will be designed around be it the Chinese or someone else, see Intel another company that will also be designed around will be ASML its just a matter of time.
I have a suspicion that when China will roll out their NVIDIA capable chips - and that is a question of when, not if - NVIDIA stock will plummet as it is heavily overvalued atm.
> and that is a question of when, not if
Well yes. People have said this since at least 2012, and we're still waiting for a CUDA-killer in 2026.
Chinese fabs can't import cutting-edge silicon, and they can't manufacture EUVL at scale either. I have no reservations concerning China's ability to innovate, but the blockers are enormous and have succeeded in preventing China from accessing the true HPC market for over a decade now.
Exactly. I remember the beginnings of ChatGPT, OpenAI looked like the future and Google had Bard, which was not very good. It looked like Google was soon to become irrelevant. Fast forward to today and they have a lot of great products in this space powered by their own custom AI chips.