The improved efficiency of steam engines in the past did not reduce coal consumption; instead, it enabled people to accomplish more work with the same resource.
It should be. I think AMD has left a lot on the table with respect to competing in the space (probably to the point of executive negligence) and the new US laws will help create several new Chinese competitors. NVIDIA probably has a bit of time left as the market leader, but it's really due mostly to luck.
> NVIDIA probably has a bit of time left as the market leader, but it's really due mostly to luck.
Look, I think NVIDIA is overvalued and AI hype has poisoned markets/valuations quite a bit. But if I set that aside, I can't actually say NVIDIA is in the position they're in due to luck.
Jensen has seemingly been executing against a cohesive vision for a very long time. And focused early on on the software side of the business to make actually using the GPUs easier. The only luck is that LLMs became popular.. but I would say consistent execution at NVIDIA is why they are the most used solution today.
> I can't actually say NVIDIA is in the position they're in due to luck
They aren't, end of story.
Even though I'm not a scientist in the space, I studied at EPFL in 2013 and researchers in the ML space could write to Nvidia about their research with their university email and Nvidia would send top-tier hardware for free.
Nvidia has funded, invested and supported in the ML space when nobody was looking and it's only natural that the research labs ended up writing tools around its hardware.
I don't think their moat will hold forever, especially among big tech that has the resources to optimize around their use case but it's only natural they enjoy such a headstart.
I agree with all of your data points. NVIDIA was lucky that AMD didn't do any of that stuff and sat out of the professional GPU market when it actually had significant advantages it could have employed.
