[EarthIsHome]

The ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, and other hyped usecases have been the driving force for Nvidia: it injected huge sums of money into their R&D, which also stimulated the economy as developers ran to build build build in order to keep up with the demand for datacenters, which in turn required more infrastructure building to satiate the thirst and power needs of datacenters, etc. Before, ChatGPT, I recall the hype was blockchain, crypto, and NFTs; and maybe before that, it was "big data."

As the LLM, generative AI, etc. bubble begins to deflate due to investors and companies finding it hard to make profits from those AI usecases, Nvidia needs to pivot. This article indicates that Nvidia is hedging on robotics as the next driving force that will continue to sustain the massive interest in their products. Personally, I don't see how robotics can maintain that same driving force for their products, and investors will find it hard to squeeze profit out of it, and they'll be back to searching for another hype. It's like Nvidia is trying to create a market to justify their products and continued development, similar to what Meta has tried, to spectacular failure, with the Metaverse for their virtual products.

After the frenzy that sustained these compute products transitioned from big data, to crypto, and now, to AI, I'm curious what the next jump will be; I don't think the "physical AI" space of robotics can sustain Nvidia in the way that they're hoping.

[infecto]

The part that is hard for me to parse is there is hype but there is also a significant amount of value being extracted by using LLMs and other products coming from this new wave. Everytime I read opinions like yours it’s hard to make sense of it because there is value in the tooling that exists. It cannot be applied to everything and anything but it does exist.

[gmays]

Comparing AI to crypto doesn't really work due to the utility of AI. If you believe that there haven't been meaningful use cases from the recent generative AI surge, then you might be out of touch.

On the investment side, it's hard to say that since ROIC is still generally up and to the right. As long as that continues, so will investment.

Then biggest gap I see is expected if you look at past trends like mobile and the internet: In the first wave of new tech there's a lot of trying to do the old things in the new way, which often fails or gives incremental improvements at best.

This is why the 'new' companies seem to be doing the best. I've been shocked at so many new AI startups generating millions in revenue so quickly (billions with OpenAI, but that's a special case). It's because they're not shackled to past products, business models, etc.

However, there are plenty of enterprise companies trying to integrate AI into existing workflows and failing miserably. Just like when they tried to retrofit factories with electricity. It's not just plug and play in most cases, you need new workflows, etc. That will take years and there will be plenty more failures.

The level of investment is staggering though, and might we see a crash at some point? Maybe, but likely not for a while since there's still so much white space. The hardest thing with new technologies like this is not to confuse the limits of our imagination with the limits of reality (and that goes both ways).