14 comments

  • pfannkuchen a day ago ago

    The article cites Nvidia as the most valuable company in the history of the world. This can’t possibly be true adjusted for inflation, right?

    • voxadam a day ago ago

      As I understand things, the Dutch East India Company would still be the most valuable company in history with a inflation adjusted value of more than US$10 trillion.

  • zerosizedweasle a day ago ago
  • downrightmike a day ago ago

    AMD just jumped in for $100b to OpenAI. Sadly, the core consumers are not retail consumers, but datacenters and if you can't squeeze the chips in DCs, retail can't pick up the slack. Failing is likely to happen, mega-datacenters can't be built where the US infrastructure made in the 1950's can't support it. This all feels like last ditch effort hopium that the bubble won't pop.

    • zerosizedweasle a day ago ago

      If you do a dot plot on the Nvidia earnings vs what was expected, it's too perfect. The expectations move around, but you could plot a perfectly straight line through it. Nothing, not China, not tariffs added any natural variations.

      • pfannkuchen a day ago ago

        This would be a fabulously dramatic plot twist. I’ve never considered this as a possibility before, but between Altman orchestrating some masterful play to bring the next transformative technology to market first for massive profit, and Altman orchestrating some masterful manipulation to scam everyone, the latter feels massively more plausible.

        Are all the people who are super duper worried about GenAI and safety in reality a planted foil? Men cowering in front of the fake paper tiger, so men further away say “this tiger is powerful, just look at how those men are cowering before it”.

        • DebtDeflation 20 hours ago ago

          Meanwhile, there seems to be a massive pivot underway at OpenAI away from AGI hype and model development overall and towards just becoming a product company that monetizes their current tech via mundane stuff like Instant Checkout.

        • tyleo 20 hours ago ago

          I think this is a malice vs stupidity thing.

          I think Altman—and most billionaires it’s in fashion to dislike r.n.—truly mean well. It seems closer to cult-like thinking. Most folks joining a cult are trying to improve their lives. They end up in a thought bubble though that often leads to worse decision making.

          I think AI is useful but I don’t think it’s the multi-trillion dollar cash geyser the some of these billionaires are hoping for.

      • dustbunny a day ago ago

        What does that imply?

        • zerosizedweasle a day ago ago

          Whenever a company is aligning their earnings and always beating them, you should ask questions. If you've ever read the book "Smartest guys in the Room" that's the biggest tell.

          • dustbunny a day ago ago

            I'm asking you to be explicit, ie: "I think Nvidia is cooking their books and committing fraud". That's what your saying right?

            • happymellon a day ago ago

              I think so.

              It's a market where line has to go up, so bad behaviour is demanded.

              Giving OpenAI $30 billion, so that they can spend $30 billion on GPUs, so that you can now report your own $30 billion as revenue is market manipulation and an attempt to get others to invest in this "$300 billion" market, so OpenAI can pay their bonuses and can give Nvidia their 40%.

              LLMs might be really good at converting your USB debugging script from Python to Go, and it might do a passable enough translation that you don't need to use Google translate but that's not a $300 billion market.

              • downrightmike 6 hours ago ago

                Amazon cooked their books into the negative for years and only recently went positive. All nvidia has to do it pay out the gov't ( like they already are) and things are fine.

            • zerosizedweasle a day ago ago

              There is a lot of suspicious behavior, and if the top analyst at Morgan Stanley is saying it - their chief investment officer - then I think there is at least some smoke. The suspicious behavior could be considered the flames.