Nvidia Vaults Past Apple and Microsoft To Become World's Most Valuable Company (ft.com) 49
Nvidia has leapfrogged Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable company in the world, following months of explosive share price growth driven by demand for its chips and an investor frenzy over artificial intelligence. From a report: The company's shares climbed 3.2 per cent to $135.18 on Tuesday, bringing its market capitalisation to $3.332tn and surpassing the two tech giants that have long jostled for pole position on US stock markets.
Nvidia has been the chief beneficiary of a boom in demand for chips that can train and run powerful generative AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In less than two years, it has been transformed from a $300bn company, grappling with a chip glut exacerbated by a cryptocurrency bust, into one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, with other Silicon Valley giants lining up to secure its latest products.
Nvidia has been the chief beneficiary of a boom in demand for chips that can train and run powerful generative AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In less than two years, it has been transformed from a $300bn company, grappling with a chip glut exacerbated by a cryptocurrency bust, into one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, with other Silicon Valley giants lining up to secure its latest products.
*Market cap (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey fellas, market cap of nvidia is once again bigger than that of apple and microsoft. Yes, it's the same news as one a few days ago. Yes, it's probably the same we're going to get in a few days.
Exciting news isn't it. You can tell it's summer.
Re:*Market cap [is based on imaginary numbers] (Score:2)
Pretty weak harping, but FP tradition?
Still can't imagine any good reason why any company should be that big. Even if the bigness is imaginary. Especially not if any part of the goal is to innovate faster. (But maybe we are already innovating too quickly?)
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There's an easily imagined reason. Nvidia is a monopoly selling tools to massively add to productivity. Therefore, it's something that has value to entire human civilization. And therefore, it's exceedingly valuable.
Microsoft is valuable for largely same reasons, just in slightly different sphere. But fundamentally, it sells productivity tools that massively increase productivity on a global level.
And Apple is a company that successfully cemented itself as a global leader in high status markers. It's produc
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Microsoft is valuable for largely same reasons....
Microsoft is valuable because Bill Gates was at the right place at the right time, which allowed him to threaten computer manufacturers if they included any operating system other than MS-DOS (and then Windows) with their computers until Microsoft had penetrated the personal computer industry so far that it became infeasible for software developers to target anything else. That lead to the monopoly that law enforcement has always ignored (the 1999 antitrust farce notwithstanding).
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Windows hasn't been microsoft's main source of income for a very long time.
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No, but everything that Microsoft has become sprang from WinDOS and Bill's (illegal but unprosecuted) behavior.
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Certainly, but that is of no relevance to microsoft of today.
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Basically the comment I most concur with, but worth noting "Someone has to win the lottery".
The fallacy is the belief that any of the lottery winners deserved it. Or maybe the bigger fallacy is to think that their luck means they should be regarded as sages. (Consider Zuck and Musk, probably the worst examples of the day.)
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The fallacy is the belief that any of the lottery winners deserved it. Or maybe the bigger fallacy is to think that their luck means they should be regarded as sages. (Consider Zuck and Musk, probably the worst examples of the day.)
All the CEOs in every company get far too much credit for originating ideas. This is true even for legendary people like Steve Jobs. The CEOs don't have the background or time to originate ideas. They are decision makers that approve ideas from underlings that percolate up to them. However, to the victor goes the spoils, and the greatest spoil is truth. They literally get to rewrite history.
And this is not just a criticism of CEOs. Take a look at legendary professors, who steal the credit from grad st
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Neutral ACK because i can't tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing with my position.
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Basically the comment I most concur with, but worth noting "Someone has to win the lottery".
The fallacy is the belief that any of the lottery winners deserved it. Or maybe the bigger fallacy is to think that their luck means they should be regarded as sages. (Consider Zuck and Musk, probably the worst examples of the day.)
I'll throw another idea into the discussion. I think there are distinctions between founders that achieve immediate success and those that have to wait for decades.
Zuckerberg had the Facebook idea (or grabbed it from others, depending on your point of view) and founded a company that was touted as a giant before its IPO. He arguably hasn't steered his company toward any heights beyond the original idea, although he is at least trying very hard and willing to invest money and resources.
Then consider Jensen
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But my angle is somewhat different. I'm going to use Microsoft as the example because it's an easier one.
Imagine if Microsoft was cut into daughter companies. Each would start with a copy of the source code and then be free to innovate the OS standard any way they like, but with all changes to the standard part of a public process. You might choose to buy a version of Windows that only runs on the fanciest new hardware, and that might be essential to your work (or you might be a sucker), while I would be fr
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Tell us you don't know what a monopoly is without telling us you don't know what a monopoly is.
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Nvidia is a monopoly... of chips with nvidia printed on them.
Re: *Market cap [is based on imaginary numbers] (Score:2)
Nvidia doesn't prevent others from making compatible products and their APIs are public knowledge. They are in first place due to actual technical superiority.
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You might want to glance at the post you replied to again.
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Tell us you don't know what CUDA is and what modern AI is overwhelmingly built on.
Hint: "muh legal definition is the only definition" is an argument of an imbecile.
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What's the easiest way to make money off of eventual shrinkage? Anybody have experience in "counter-investing"? Puts? Shorts?
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Anybody have experience in "counter-investing"? Puts? Shorts?
Do not invest in shorts if you are not an experienced investor.
Even experienced investors can lose big.
If you are caught in a squeeze, you can lose a lot more than what you put on the table.
Options are safer but, historically, are a bad bet. Most expire out of the money.
Stick to index funds.
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That depends what you're betting on. If you're betting on AI increasing productivity being a dying fad, then rehiring will have to happen. So office spaces, hiring agencies, amenities for workers, etc.
If you are betting on this being real societal progress but other companies will overtake nvidia, you can buy those companies.
Etc. Because fundamentally when you're talking about events, and companies, you're not betting on company as much as you're betting on specific event. When you bet on a company without
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In the past, technologies that eventually greatly expanded still left most start-ups in the dust. NVIDIA likely won't remain the top AI chip maker.
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Key word is "eventually", which tells you that it will take an undefined amount of time, and tells me you know have no firm ideas about "how" it will happen. Because one of the key aspects of "how" is "how long will it take".
And that means you don't have any idea what's going to actually happen, and then you probably shouldn't bet on it.
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If we look at past trends such as railroads, chips, microcomputers, dot-coms, and the first AI boom of the 80's; we generally see that there is an initial boom, and then a bust as investors over-do it, but the technology eventually gets the kinks out and becomes practical, and a new set of companies replaces the original.
A few lucky originals survive, such as Intel and Apple, but they are the exception.
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Depends on how useful and revolutionary the technology is. Coal didn't really go bust, and neither did oil. Both just grew to power the world as technology became more and more advanced and available for less resources.
Arguably current generation boom-bust cycles are less a feature of technological advancement and more a problem with outsized financial sector in modern economy desperately looking for thing to invest.
Reminder that financial sector was far smaller in relation to the rest of the economy just 2
No Way You Can Lose! (Score:5, Funny)
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Mod parent Funny. And it would have been a better FP, too.
All new ways to scam people (Score:4, Funny)
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SuckerGPT
It's because they're replacing jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone here old enough to remember when Junior accountants got replaced by computers? It's like that, only we aren't going to have an economy expanding fast enough to absorb those job losses.
Go read a 200 level college history book on the 1st & 2nd industrial revolutions. Not a high school one. There was _decades_ of poverty, strife and unemployment until two world wars killed enough people and made enough new tech to bring us back to something resembling full employment. They don't tell you about that in high school...
We're going into the 3rd industrial revolution. If you're under 55 you're gonna live to see it and it's going to *suck*.
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Needs mod points for too true and too depressing. Also would have been a better FP than the market cap mumble.
But it makes me glad I'm above the cutoff? Maybe I won't live to see the worst? You call that good news?
It makes you feel better (Score:3)
Dystopian jokes aside we can stop all this but it requires something I'm not sure we are capable of. We have to be willing to give some people who are never in their entire lives going to be able to do any useful work food, shelter, healthcare and even
Re:It makes you feel better (Score:4, Informative)
>> it just feels wrong to give somebody free tuition for college
The recent loan forgiveness program doesn't amount to 'free tuition' at all.
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-... [ed.gov]
"For a borrower to be eligible for this forgiveness they must be enrolled in the SAVE Plan, have been making at least 10 years of payments, and have originally taken out $12,000 or less for college. For every $1,000 borrowed above $12,000, a borrower can receive forgiveness after an additional year of payments."
So while that's true (Score:2)
It was basically a back door way to restore the public university funding that was taken away back in the early 2000s. Nobody really noticed the funding was taken away because the number of people going to college shot up because there wasn't any jobs for anyone who wasn't a college grad. At least not anything that pays enough to keep a roof over your head. So on paper and an absolute dollar turns i
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"Biden did try to get forgiveness for just about everybody even people who had recently taken on the loans"
I doubt that something Biden really wanted; he may *look* like your kindly aged addled granpa but underneath there's still a lot of the old angry right-leaning Joe he used to be.
During the Reagan years he was such a hardass about any kind of crime, he would regularly accost the POTUS on being tougher on crime to the point where Reagan's inner circle use to joke to Delaware Joe didn't know when side of
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>> if you're explaining you're losing
Maybe you simply failed to understand the nature of the loan forgiveness program because you had decided it was 'free tuition'.
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Basically the ACK, but I'll note that most of my college was under the GI Bill. I did have a small student loan, but I paid it off long ago, perhaps while I was still in graduate school.
Worth noting that I think the student loans should be forgiven because they have become a scam? Part of profiting from selling education, but that isn't supposed to be the point.
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Not really. The world is constantly evolving, things come, things go.
We are in a giant hype cycle/bubble right now. Diminishing returns applies to AI in that reaching AGI gets much harder every step of the way. At the bottom of that growth curve things move fast but the wall is coming.
These tools will not be nearly as useful as some people are hoping. AI is expensive to run and without a viable paid use case it won't work out economically.
The bubble is going to pop, Nvidia is up for a big drop in the next f
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To be more precise...
It's because of the hype associated with selling shovels for potentially replacing hundreds of millions of jobs.
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You're assertion about unemployment doesn't agree with the facts. Look at the graphs of historical unemployment rate charts. It goes up and goes down and certainly doesn't support your claim that two world wars brought us back to "something resembling full employment".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
So much as the Democrat and me wants to keep quiet (Score:2)
Forget the methodology for a moment and consider the fact that we count anyone who's driven for Uber for any amount of time as employed. Not to mention we don't include anyone who gave up trying to find a job when we know damn well we have people who have been long-term unemployed for years.
And that's before we talk about unemployment...
Our ent
The Real Revolution Begins (Score:1)
It's only a matter of time before AI asks a question. Let's hope it is this:
"Why do humans derive such intense sexual pleasure from destroying each other's jobs?"
followed by
"Why is every corporate manager one accidentally opened door away from being caught tickling an intern while wearing nothing but black socks and a quart of Jergen's?"
Capitulation (Score:2)
I wasn't going to jump on the Nvidia stock bandwagon but the relentless upward trend finally got to be too much for me and I invested a few grand. I'll put a stop on it as a precaution, but I fully expect it to rise enough for me to buy a nice new laptop with the profit.
Hyper-Bubble (Score:2, Insightful)
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Study (Score:1)