237 points

Thank fucking god.

I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it…

But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they’re clowning on AI when in reality they’re just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.

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63 points

I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.

They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.

And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.

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24 points

They just design them.

It’s not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.

That being said I don’t think they were “just” lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.

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3 points

Yeah CUDA, made a lot of this possible.

Once crypto mining was too hard nvidia needed a market beyond image modeling and college machine learning experiments.

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15 points

They didn’t just “happen to be around”. They created the entire ecosystem around machine learning while AMD just twiddled their thumbs. There is a reason why no one is buying AMD cards to run AI workloads.

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11 points

One of the reasons being Nvidia forcing unethical vendor lock in through their licensing.

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2 points

I feel like for a long time, CUDA was a laser looking for a problem.
It’s just that the current (AI) problem might solve expensive employment issues.
It’s just that C-Suite/managers are pointing that laser at the creatives instead of the jobs whose task it is to accumulate easily digestible facts and produce a set of instructions. You know, like C-Suites and middle/upper managers do.
And NVidia have pushed CUDA so hard.

AMD have ROCM, an open source cuda equivalent for amd.
But it’s kinda like Linux Vs windows. NVidia CUDA is just so damn prevalent.
I guess it was first. Cuda has wider compatibility with Nvidia cards than rocm with AMD cards.
The only way AMD can win is to show a performance boost for a power reduction and cheaper hardware. So many people are entrenched in NVidia, the cost to switching to rocm/amd is a huge gamble

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1 point

Imo we should give credit where credit is due and I agree, not a genius, still my pick is a 4080 for a new gaming computer.

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-16 points

Go ahead and design a better pickaxe than them, we’ll wait…

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21 points
*

Go ahead and design a better pickaxe than them, we’ll wait…

Same argument:

“He didn’t earn his wealth. He just won the lottery.”

“If it’s so easy, YOU go ahead and win the lottery then.”

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59 points

As I job-hunt, every job listed over the past year has been “AI-drive [something]” and I’m really hoping that trend subsides.

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65 points

“This is an mid level position requiring at least 7 years experience developing LLMs.” -Every software engineer job out there.

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34 points

That was cloud 7 years ago and blockchain 4

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24 points

Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn’t have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.

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11 points

Yeah, I’m a data engineer and I get that there’s a lot of potential in analytics with AI, but you don’t need to hire a data engineer with LLM experience for aggregating payroll data.

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6 points

The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they bled that dry

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3 points

If that’s the reason, I wouldn’t even be mad, that’s recycling right there.

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-1 points
*

The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they bled that dry upgraded to proof-of-stake.

I don’t see a similar upgrade for “AI”.

And I’m not a fan of BTC but $50,000+ doesn’t seem very dry to me.

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3 points

No, it’s when people realized it’s a scam

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100 points

Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.

Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

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44 points

I’m sure he won’t mind. Worrying about that doesn’t sound like working.

I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I work seven days a week. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working, and when I’m working, I’m working. I sit through movies, but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about work.

- Huang on his 14 hour workdays

It is one way to live.

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50 points
*

That sounds like mental illness.

ETA: Replace “work” in that quote with practically any other activity/subject, whether outlandish or banal.

I sit through movies but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about baking cakes.

I sit through movies but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about traffic patterns.

I sit through movies but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about cannibalism.

I sit through movies but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about shitposting.

Obsessed with something? At best, you’re “quirky” (depending on what you’re obsessed with). Unless it’s money. Being obsessed with that is somehow virtuous.

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16 points

Valid argument for sure

It would be sad if therapists kept telling him that but he could never remember

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2 points

I don’t think you become the best tech CEO in the world by having a healthy approach to work. He is just wired differently, some people are just all about work.

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15 points

Some would not call that living

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13 points

Yeah ok sure buddy, but what do you DO actually?

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2 points

Psychosis doesn’t justify extreme privilege.

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1 point

People like that consider scrolling xitter work

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3 points

He knows what this hype is, so I don’t think he’d be upset. Still filthy rich when the bubble bursts, and that won’t be soon.

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86 points

My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.

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48 points

Meaning you unpress it, and computer gets 2x faster?

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29 points

Actually you pressed it and everything got 2x slower. Turbo was a stupid label for it.

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4 points

I could be misremembering but I seem to recall the digits on the front of my 486 case changing from 25 to 33 when I pressed the button. That was the only difference I noticed though. Was the beige bastard lying to me?

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2 points
*

That’s… the same thing.

Whops, I thought you were responding to the first child comment.

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12 points

I was thinking pressing it turns everything to shit, but that works too. I’d also accept, completely misunderstood by future generations.

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5 points

Well now I wanna hear more about the history of this mystical shit button

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77 points

I’ve noticed people have been talking less and less about AI lately, particularly online and in the media, and absolutely nobody has been talking about it in real life.

The novelty has well and truly worn off, and most people are sick of hearing about it.

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27 points

The hype is still percolating, at least among the people I work with and at the companies of people I know. Microsoft pushing Copilot everywhere makes it inescapable to some extent in many environments, there’s people out there who have somehow only vaguely heard of ChatGPT and are now encountering LLMs for the first time at work and starting the hype cycle fresh.

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18 points

It’s like 3D TVs, for a lot of consumer applications tbh

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10 points

Oh fuck that’s right, that was a thing.

Goddamn

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7 points

3D has been a thing every 15 years or so

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4 points

Yeah, now we are gonna get the reality of deep fakes; fun times.

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74 points
*

The stock market is not based on income. It’s based entirely on speculation.

Since then, shares of the maker the high-grade computer chips that AI laboratories use to power the development of their chatbots and other products have come down by more than 22%.

June 18th: $136 August 4th: $100 August 18th: $130 again now: $103 (still above 8/4)

It’s almost like hype generates volatility. I don’t think any of this is indicative of a “leaking” bubble. Just tech journalists conjuring up clicks.

Also bubbles don’t “leak”.

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20 points

Also bubbles don’t “leak”.

I mean, sometimes they kinda do? They either pop or slowly deflate, I’d say slow deflation could be argued to be caused by a leak.

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6 points

We taking about bubbles or are we talking about balloons? Maybe we should change to using the word balloon instead, since these economic ‘bubbles’ can also deflate slowly.

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6 points

Good point, not sure that economists are human enough to take sense into account, but I think we should try and make it a thing.

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2 points

I’ve never seen a bubble deflate, but I digress.

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1 point

You can do it easily with a balloon (add some tape then poke a hole). An economic bubble can work that way as well, basically demand slowly evaporates and the relevant companies steadily drop in value as they pivot to something else. I expect the housing bubble to work this way because new construction will eventually catch up, but building new buildings takes time.

The question is, how much money (tape) are the big tech companies willing to throw at it? There’s a lot of ways AI could be modified into niche markets even if mass adoption doesn’t materialize.

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12 points

The broader market did the same thing

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/

$560 to $510 to $560 to $540

So why did $NVDA have larger swings? It has to do with the concept called beta. High beta stocks go up faster when the market is up and go down lower when the market is done. Basically high variance risky investments.

Why did the market have these swings? Because of uncertainty about future interest rates. Interest rates not only matter vis-a-vis business loans but affect the interest-free rate for investors.

When investors invest into the stock market, they want to get back the risk free rate (how much they get from treasuries) + the risk premium (how much stocks outperform bonds long term)

If the risks of the stock market are the same, but the payoff of the treasuries changes, then you need a high return from stocks. To get a higher return you can only accept a lower price,

This is why stocks are down, NVDA is still making plenty of money in AI

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1 point
*

There’s more to it as well, such as:

  • investors coming back from vacation and selling off losses and whatnot
  • investors expecting reduced spending between summer and holidays; we’re past the “back to school” retail bump and into a slower retail economy
  • upcoming election, with polls shifting between Trump and Harris

September is pretty consistently more volatile than other months, and has net negative returns long-term. So it’s not just the Fed discussing rate cuts (that news was reported over the last couple months, so it should be factored in), but just normal sideways trading in September.

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1 point

We already knew about back to school sales, they happen every year and they are priced in. If there was a real stock market dump every year in September, everyone would short September, making a drop in August and covering in September, making September a positive month again

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4 points

Its all vibes and manipulation

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