Nvidia Passes Apple to Become the World's Most Valuable Company - Powered by Demand for AI Chips (nbcnews.com) 22
"Nvidia dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable company on Friday..." reports Reuters, "powered by insatiable demand for its specialized artificial intelligence chips."
Nvidia's stock market value briefly touched $3.53 trillion, slightly above Apple's $3.52 trillion, LSEG data showed... In June, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company before it was overtaken by Microsoft and Apple. The tech trio's market capitalizations have been neck-and-neck for several months. [Friday] Microsoft's market value stood at $3.18 trillion, with its stock up 0.8%...
Nvidia's shares hit a record high on Tuesday, building on a rally from last week when TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit driven by soaring demand for chips used in AI.
The article points out that by the end of the day Friday, Nvidia's valuation had dropped to $3.47 trillion, while Apple had risen to $3.52 trillion...
Nvidia's shares hit a record high on Tuesday, building on a rally from last week when TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit driven by soaring demand for chips used in AI.
The article points out that by the end of the day Friday, Nvidia's valuation had dropped to $3.47 trillion, while Apple had risen to $3.52 trillion...
Let's be clear here (Score:5, Insightful)
It's similar to when PCs started replacing Junior accountants only on a much much larger scale and without new forms of work to replace and absorb the job losses.
Hell sometime in the next 5 to 10 years we are going to have to figure out what to do with 7 million taxi and Uber drivers. Those waymos are all over Phoenix and San Francisco and they work. The only thing holding them back right now is getting enough miles and enough legal precedence that they can sort out The liability.
Basically it's an industrial revolution going on. Folks who yell Luddite every time this is brought up don't know the actual history of the two industrial revolutions. There was massive technological unemployment for decades following them until new tech, and a whole lot of dead people in two world wars, brought us back to some semblance of full employment. It also helped that we basically blew all of Europe to Kingdom come and it had to be rebuilt generating a ton of jobs...
The point is we are not equipped as a species to deal with what's coming. Too many centuries of, if you don't work you don't eat and we are suddenly going to have tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people who we just don't need to work.
What do you do when you've got 30 or 40 million people that you just don't have a use for? Traditionally some loudmouth comes along and gives them firearms and points them in the direction of whoever still has a job and money
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AI requires an avatar (robot, delivery drone, or car) to start "replacing" humans. Right now the world is about 100 to 150 years from a robot that can meaningfully replace humans for most tasks. When we start seeing (non-gimmick) human-less farms, deliveries, restaurants, or factories that's when we can start worrying from a policy standpoint. Right now, robots are really dumb and will remain so for, like I said, 100+ years. How many lights-out factories exist?
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AI requires an avatar (robot, delivery drone, or car) to start "replacing" humans.
Most 1st world jobs do not require any physical manipulation of reality.
I get paid to move electrons, not atoms.
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Most 1st world jobs do not require any physical manipulation of reality.
Bizarre claim. Haven't you ever heard of blue collar jobs? This is one of those statement that its hard to tell if someone's serious or not.
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There are just absolute tons of jobs where people do zero traditional "work". They are only manipulating data on computer systems. My job is almost that, except there is a bunch of paperwork too. However, since I started working remotely, most of that is done for me by the clerical department. And frankly, most of it could be done by machines, which can stuff envelopes. The humans are more reliable than those machines though, and they perform some other knowledge-related functions as well.
However, software
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Predicting the future is largely ridiculous, like your 100 - 150 years. When we look back in time and claim someone predicted this or that would happen, we ignore all the other someones who claimed something different. It is just cherry picking.
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They became Power-Point jockies, talking about synergy and growth acceleration strategies.
Re: Let's be clear here (Score:2)
I agree.. the current hypervaluation of Nvidia is akin to the tool-sellers in the guld rushes of the past; they were the ones that made it big, not the people working away in the hills and riverbeds of the US West.
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Nvidia is the greatest company- (Score:4, Funny)
Distracted investors means (Score:1)
...great time to snap up Apple stock.
How can this be maintained? (Score:3)
I'm not sure where we are on this cycle. Sometimes I think something is going to collapse, but then it just stays around or even grows for some unknown reason. AI is still a thing, but we have many people offering the same tools for the job, and supply is starting to outpace demand. When funding in the AI sector starts drying up, I'm expecting to see a lot of patent wars and people trying to claim a lot of things AI-based, similar to how the smartphone industry had all the patent litigation for years, then after that, the market shakes out into a few providers. Likely OpenAI will survive, maybe Microsoft, perhaps 1-2 more, but once there is a point where growing LLMs gives diminishing returns, all the market push for GPU and matrix multiplication hardware is going to contract, likely sharply. Especially when newer LLMs have fewer sources of info as people close their gates to AI, both in access to their sites, as well as via access to IP. Maybe something can be set up so LLMs can feed to each other without causing the model to collapse [techtarget.com].
Apple also is going to have an important week coming this week. Not as big as a new iPhone, but new Mac announcements, and even though it isn't radical as Apple Silicon, new Macs with features that people look for are going to be a positive income bump. The M1/M2 Macs are starting to lose their warranties, and businesses generally don't want to be on hardware that doesn't have a service plan.
As for Nvidia, there will be always a market for GPUs. It may not be as big when the AI bubble or the crypto bubbles were going full steam, but they definitely have a niche.
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Have a theory this is a manifestation of wealth inequality (which is also a manifestation of inflation beyond money printer go brrrr, but that's a different idea).
So it works like this- every general thing of general value has already been snatched up, so if you are sitting on a mountain of money you need something to invest in. It doesn't even matter what it is, as long as you've covered every bet on the roulette wheel (and crowded out anyone else from making a bet), something will pay off.
So AI, crypto; i