this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
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."
My fucking god.
"Buying a lottery ticket, and designing the best GPUs, totally the same thing, amiriteguys?"
In the sense that it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time, yes. Exactly the same thing. Opportunities aren't equal - they disproportionately effect those who happen to be positioned to take advantage of them. If I'm giving away a free car right now to whoever comes by, and you're not nearby, you're shit out of luck. If AI didn't HAPPEN to use massively multi-threaded computing, Nvidia would still be artificial scarcity-ing themselves to price gouging CoD players. The fact you don't see it for whatever reason doesn't make it wrong. NOBODY at Nvidia was there 5 years ago saying "Man, when this new technology hits we're going to be rolling in it." They stumbled into it by luck. They don't get credit for forseeing some future use case. They got lucky. That luck got them first mover advantage. Intel had that too. Look how well it's doing for them. Nvidia's position over AMD in this space can be due to any number of factors... production capacity, driver flexibility, faster functioning on a particular vector operation, power efficiency... hell, even the relationship between the CEO of THEIR company and OpenAI. Maybe they just had their salespeople call first. Their market dominance likely has absolutely NOTHING to do with their GPU's having better graphics performance, and to the extent they are, it's by chance - they did NOT predict generative AI, and their graphics cards just HAPPEN to be better situated for SOME reason.
This is the part that's flawed. They have actively targeted neural network applications with hardware and driver support since 2012.
Yes, they got lucky in that generative AI turned out to be massively popular, and required massively parallel computing capabilities, but luck is one part opportunity and one part preparedness. The reason they were able to capitalize is because they had the best graphics cards on the market and then specifically targeted AI applications.
His engineers built it, he didn't do anything there