ChatGPT and the $3 Trillion Company
It’s a(nother) new era for Nvidia.
We thought we’d closed the Acquired book on Nvidia back in April 2022. The story was all wrapped up: Jensen & crew had set out on an amazing journey to accelerate the world’s computing workloads. Along the way they’d discovered a wondrous opportunity (machine learning powered social media feed recommendations). They forged incredible Power in the CUDA platform, and used it to triumph over seemingly insurmountable adversity — the stock market penalty-box.
But, it turned out that was only the precursor to an even wilder journey. Over the past 18 months Nvidia has weathered one of the steepest stock crashes in history ($500B+ market cap wiped away peak-to-trough!). And, it has of course also experienced an even more fantastical rise — becoming the platform that’s powering the emergence of perhaps a new form of intelligence itself… and in the process becoming a trillion-dollar company.
Today we tell another chapter in the amazing Nvidia saga: the dawn of the AI era. Tune in!
More on the episode
corrections
- H100s are not sold individually, but 8-at-a-time as a part of DGX/HGX servers. NVIDIA does not sell individual H100s, even to the hyperscalers.
- When discussing the write-down, we attributed it primarily to softening of demand for crypto mining hardware. However, the majority of the write-down actually came from the data center segment. It is astonishing that at the same time ChatGPT was about to create AI’s “iPhone moment”, NVIDIA thought they had over-ordered AI hardware capacity. History turns on a knife-point!
- We referred to RNNs as more “state of the art” than CNNs. This isn’t quite right. Both existed for a long time, but were just used for different tasks (vision vs. language).
- The attention mechanism actually predates the 2017 Google Transformer paper by a couple years.