I really hope this is the beginning of a massive correction on AI hype.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI, not thinking AI has less value.
Or from the sounds of it, doing things more efficiently.
Fewer cycles required, less hardware required.
Maybe this was an inevitability, if you cut off access to the fast hardware, you create a natural advantage for more efficient systems.
That's generally how tech goes though. You throw hardware at the problem until it works, and then you optimize it to run on laptops and eventually phones. Usually hardware improvements and software optimizations meet somewhere in the middle.
Look at photo and video editing, you used to need a workstation for that, and now you can get most of it on your phone. Surely AI is destined to follow the same path, with local models getting more and more robust until eventually the beefy cloud services are no longer required.
The problem for American tech companies is that they didn't even try to move to stage 2.
OpenAI is hemorrhaging money even on their most expensive subscription and their entire business plan was to hemorrhage money even faster to the point they would use entire power stations to power their data centers. Their plan makes about as much sense as digging your self out of a hole by trying to dig to the other side of the globe.
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China really has nothing to do with it, it could have been anyone. It's a reaction to realizing that GPT4-equivalent AI models are dramatically cheaper to train than previously thought.
It being China is a noteable detail because it really drives the nail in the coffin for NVIDIA, since China has been fenced off from having access to NVIDIA's most expensive AI GPUs that were thought to be required to pull this off.
It also makes the USA gov look extremely foolish to have made major foreign policy and relationship sacrifices in order to try to delay China by a few years, when it's January and China has already caught up, those sacrifices did not pay off, in fact they backfired and have benefited China and will allow them to accelerate while hurting USA tech/AI companies
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It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI
I don't think this is the primary reason behind Nvidia's drop. Because as long as they got a massive technological lead it doesn't matter as much to them who has the best model, as long as these companies use their GPUs to train them.
The real change is that the compute resources (which is Nvidia's product) needed to create a great model suddenly fell of a cliff. Whereas until now the name of the game was that more is better and scale is everything.
China vs the West (or upstart vs big players) matters to those who are investing in creating those models. So for example Meta, who presumably spends a ton of money on high paying engineers and data centers, and somehow got upstaged by someone else with a fraction of their resources.
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It's coming, Pelosi sold her shares like a month ago.
It's going to crash, if not for the reasons she sold for, as more and more people hear she sold, they're going to sell because they'll assume she has insider knowledge due to her office.
Which is why politicians (and spouses) shouldn't be able to directly invest into individual companies.
Even if they aren't doing anything wrong, people will follow them and do what they do. Only a truly ignorant person would believe it doesn't have an effect on other people.
It's coming, Pelosi sold her shares like a month ago.
Yeah but only cause she was really disappointed with the 5000 series lineup. Can you blame her for wanting real rasterization improvements?
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Good. That shit is way overvalued.
There is no way that Nvidia are worth 3 times as much as TSMC, the company that makes all their shit and more besides.
I'm sure some of my market tracker funds will lose value, and they should, because they should never have been worth this much to start with.
It’s because Nvidia is an American company and also because they make final stage products. American companies right now are all overinflated and almost none of the stocks are worth what they’re at because of foreign trading influence.
As much as people whine about inflation here, the US didn’t get hit as bad as many other countries and we recovered quickly which means that there is a lot of incentive for other countries to invest here. They pick our top movers, they invest in those. What you’re seeing is people bandwagoning onto certain stocks because the consistent gains create more consistent gains for them.
The other part is that yes, companies who make products at the end stage tend to be worth a lot more than people trading more fundamental resources or parts. This is true of almost every industry except oil.
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Shovel vendors scrambling for solid ground as prospectors start to understand geology.
...that is, this isn't yet the end of the AI bubble. It's just the end of overvaluing hardware because efficiency increased on the software side, there's still a whole software-side bubble to contend with.
there's still a whole software-side bubble to contend with
They're ultimately linked together in some ways (not all). OpenAI has already been losing money on every GPT subscription that they charge a premium for because they had the best product, now that premium must evaporate because there are equivalent AI products on the market that are much cheaper. This will shake things up on the software side too. They probably need more hype to stay afloat
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Okay seriously this technology still baffles me. Like its cool but why invest so much in an unknown like AIs future ? We could invest in people and education and end up with really smart people. For the cost of an education we could end up with smart people who contribute to the economy and society. Instead we are dumping billions into this shit.
Because rulling class got high on the promise that they could finally eliminate workers as a cost and be independent from us.
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For the cost of an education we could end up with smart people who contribute to the economy and society. Instead we are dumping billions into this shit.
Those are different "we"s.
Tech/Wall St constantly needs something to hype in order to bring in “investor” money. The “new technology-> product development -> product -> IPO” pipeline is now “straight to pump-and-dump” (for example, see Crypto currency).
The excitement of the previous hype train (self-driving cars) is no longer bringing in starry-eyed “investors” willing to quickly part ways with OPM. “AI” made a big splash and Tech/Wall St is going to milk it for all they can lest they fall into the same bad economy as that one company that didn’t jam the letters “AI” into their investor summary.
Tech has laid off a lot of employees, which means they are aware there is nothing else exciting in the near horizon. They also know they have to flog “AI” like crazy before people figure out there’s no “there” there.
That “investors” scattered like frightened birds at the mere mention of a cheaper version means that they also know this is a bubble. Everyone wants the quick money. More importantly they don’t want to be the suckers left holding the bag.
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It's easier to sell people on the idea of a new technology or system that doesn't have any historical precedent. All you have to do is list the potential upsides.
Something like a school or a workplace training programme, those are known quantities. There's a whole bunch of historical and currently-existing projects anyone can look at to gauge the cost. Your pitch has to be somewhat realistic compared to those, or it's gonna sound really suspect.
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I think this prompted investors to ask "where's the ROI?".
Current AI investment hype isn't based on anything tangible. At least the amount of investment isn't, it is absurd to think that trillion dollars that was put in the space already, even before that Softbanks deal is going to be returned. The models still hallucinate as it is inherent to the architecture, we are nowhere near replacing the workers but we got chatbots that "when they work sometimes, then they are kind of good?" and mediocre off-putting pictures. Is there any value? Sure, it's not NFTs. But the correction might be brutal.
Interestingly enough, DeepSeek's model is released just before Q4 earning's call season, so we will see if it has a compounding effect with another statement from big players that they burned massive amount of compute and USD only to get milquetoast improvements and get owned by a small Chinese startup that allegedly can do all that for 5 mil.
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My understanding is that DeepSeek still used Nvidia just older models and way more efficiently, which was remarkable. I hope to tinker with the opensource stuff at least with a little Twitch chat bot for my streams I was already planning to do with OpenAI. Will be even more remarkable if I can run this locally.
However this is embarassing to the western companies working on AI and especially with the $500B announcement of Stargate as it proves we don't need as high end of an infrastructure to achieve the same results.
500b of trust me Bros... To shake down US taxpayer for subsidies
Read between the lines folks
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I'm so happy this happened. This is really a power move from China. The US was really riding the whole AI bubble. By "just" releasing a powerful open-source AI model they've fucked the not so open US AI companies. I'm not sure if this was planned from China or whether this is was really just a small company doing this because they wanted to, but either way this really damages the western economy. And its given western consumers a free alternative. A few million dollars invested (if we are to believe the cost figures) for a major disruption.
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Bizarre story. China building better LLMs and LLMs being cheaper to train does not mean that nVidia will sell less GPUs when people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump can't shut up about how important "AI" is.
I'm all for the collapse of the AI bubble, though. It's cool and all that all the bankers know IT terms now, but the massive influx of money towards LLMs and the datacenters that run them has not been healthy to the industry or the broader economy.
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Hm even with DeepSeek being more efficient, wouldn't that just mean the rich corps throw the same amount of hardware at it to achieve a better result?
In the end I'm not convinced this would even reduce hardware demand. It's funny that this of all things deflates part of the bubble.
Hm even with DeepSeek being more efficient, wouldn’t that just mean the rich corps throw the same amount of hardware at it to achieve a better result?
Only up to the point where the AI models yield value (which is already heavily speculative). If nothing else, DeepSeek makes Altman's plan for $1T in new data-centers look like overkill.
The revelation that you can get 100x gains by optimizing your code rather than throwing endless compute at your model means the value of graphics cards goes down relative to the value of PhD-tier developers. Why burn through a hundred warehouses full of cards to do what a university mathematics department can deliver in half the time?
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Okay, cool...
So, how much longer before Nvidia stops slapping a "$500-600 RTX XX70" label on a $300 RTX XX60 product with each new generation?
The thinly-veiled 75-100% price increases aren't fun for those of us not constantly-touching-themselves over AI.
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It still rely on nvidia hardware why would it trigger a sell-off? Also why all media are picking up this news? I smell something fishy here...
The way I understood it, it's much more efficient so it should require less hardware.
Nvidia will sell that hardware, an obscene amount of it, and line will go up. But it will go up slower than nvidia expected because anything other than infinite and always accelerating growth means you're not good at business.
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I should really start looking into shorting stocks. I was looking at the news and Nvidia's stock and thought "huh, the stock hasn't reacted to these news at all yet, I should probably short this".
And then proceeded to do fuck all.
I guess this is why some people are rich and others are like me.
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What the fuck are markets when you can automate making money on them???
Ive been WTF about the stock market for a long time but now it's obviously a scam.
The stock market is nothing more than a barometer for the relative peace of mind of rich people.
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Great, a stock sale.
Was watching bbc news interview some American guy about this and wow they were really pushing that it's no big deal and deepseek is way behind and a bit of a joke. Made claims they weren't under cyber attack they just couldn't handle having traffic etc.
Kinda making me root for China honestly.
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Nice. Fuck you Nvidia.
Well, you still need the right kind of hardware to run it, and my money has been on AMD to deliver the solutions for that. Nvidia has gone full-blown stupid on the shit they are selling, and AMD is all about cost and power efficiency, plus they saw the writing on the wall for Nvidia a long time ago and started down the path for FPGA, which I think will ultimately be the same choice for running this stuff.
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