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What is the deal with Nvidia and AI
10 points by paulpauper on March 7, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments
In over 16 years of investing, including the 2020-2021 meme stock frenzy, I have yet to see anything like the past year or so and especially the past 2 months. Just how relentless Nvidia is. And at the same time, Apple, Google ,and Tesla have fallen a lot, yet the indexes keep going up, thanks to Ai and chips. Who else feels like they left money on the table by missing out on Nvidia, selling too soon, or being invested in the wrong tech stocks like Apple, Google, or Tesla.

People say " market overextended, it will fall" or "bubble" yet it keeps going up literally every day for weeks on end. Even in the 90s and 2020 it was not like this. Is this like the Singularity actually happening or something. Is this truly a new paradigm.



It'll keep going until there are viable, competitive alternatives.

AMD/Intel/Qualcomm etc are making progress, but Nvidia/CUDA is still the only game in town for many tasks.

That's not a bubble, that's a legit license to print money.


It was exactly like that in the 90s and 2020-2021, or even worse. Nvidia is making a lot of money. Sure its valuation is completely unreasonable - it is a bubble. But the company is good.

In the 2020-2021, there were a lot of companies with little or no profit, that prices skyrocketed based on nothing in some cases, or on projections of current growth, which was from very low levels so very high in %, to a long period of time. Remember Peleton ? Zoom ? Or even Tesla ?


While some draw parallels between the current AI hype and the internet bubble, likening Nvidia to Cisco during that era, I think we might be witnessing the beginnings of a technological revolution akin to the Industrial Revolution itself. A key distinction from the internet boom is the existential angst surrounding potential job displacement that pervades the discourse today.

During the dot-com frenzy, fears of widespread unemployment due to technological disruption were relatively muted. The internet undoubtedly transformed many industries, but its impact was largely confined to optimizing existing processes and business models. In contrast, artificial intelligence has the potential to fundamentally augment or even replace human cognitive capabilities across various knowledge-intensive professions.


Your arguments are giving me a strong shills that I received during pandemic bullrun which later collapsed. I had asked questions which OP asked for stock such as Peloton, and bunch of others which all later crashed ... This was also during the IPO craze.

And how did people justify stocks that defied any logic to be rocketing, at least for Peloton, "this is the future, people will stop going to the gym, the future is at home gym only, WFH is here to stay and people will only WFH and gym at home".

With how Nvidia stock is rocketing, it will only take one bad earning or announcment from a company have brought in solution the "AI" has become cross platform. Boom, the stock will free fall for market correction.

For now, let's all dump into Nvda rally, but at the same time, hedge our bets with Apple, Google, AMD, Meta and maybe Qualcomm?


> ...but at the same time, hedge our bets with Apple, Google, AMD, Meta and maybe Qualcomm?

In other words, invest in index funds.


Agreed. Short term, NVDA.

Long term, VTI & VOO.


I mean, you could argue that the angst around job disruption is mostly due to the generative AI people being better at marketing; generally, it appears most intense amongst people who don’t actually know all that much about generative AI.


Most tech overhired during the pandemic. THAT was a bubble. Nvidia on the other hand just kept building GPUs, like they've been doing for decades. Then GPTs took off and people built them in CUDA.

They doesn't really seem like a bubble to me, but rather a moat they they've spent a long time building.

People are flocking there because it's the next big thing. For now.


> Who else feels like they left money on the table by missing out on Nvidia, selling too soon, or being invested in the wrong tech stocks like Apple, Google, or Tesla.

I don't feel like I've left money on the table when I've bet on red on roulette, but the ball fell on black. Our abilities to predict stock market moves are not much greater than abilities to predict the roulette.


The market can, of course, stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Arguably, this looks a bit like a bigger version of the dot-com bubble (bigger only makes sense; tech is just a much larger part of the economy now) though not, perhaps, like just before it burst; we’re not seeing the truly silly multiples just yet, mostly.


For starters where else are you going to put money right now besides the stock market?

The current gold rush is AI. Who is selling the pick axes? Who is going to set up the laundromats and general stores?

Basically, don’t become the actual gold miner lol.


fwiw government tbills give guaranteed returns due to the high interest rate, and are exempt from state taxes.

The popular saying is ti sell shovels, but who do you sell shovels to? If there were no good miners, there'd be no market for shovels.


tbf maybe my analogy is wrong but I see there are various players like nvidia and open ai (shovels), vector db and other "infra" type startups (laundromats), and everyone else who is building apps in this ecosystem (miners).

The miners keep coming and going because most of their apps either fall way short of actual enterprise value/expectations, or can be easily incorporated into the big players.

Who exactly benefited during the gold rushes of the 1850s? I think it was everyone else but the miners. Did some miners make a fortune? Sure, but what remains of their legacy today is the foundations laid by the shovel makers and laundromats that allowed california to blossom.


alright, lets pick apart the analogy. In a gold rush, sell shovels. The meaning of this is that there is business to be had selling shovels to the miners. Being a miner is a lottery ticket. Maybe the claim you made has gold, maybe it doesn't. It's unreliable. You might not make it big. But all of the miners need shovels and Levis, so during the gold rush, it's basically guaranteed that you'll be able to sell shovels, because every miner needs one.

So that is to say, to be a smart business, the company's product should be a tool that the miners need, instead of the tool, because it's seen as more of a sure thing. but this is the real world and there's no such thing as a sure thing. Hearst, Studebaker, Stanford were miners that struck gold. Where the analogy falls apart is that the gold is a bit harder to mine so there are a vast array of shovels with different attachments and gizmos, so you could build a shovel that only catches dirt and lets all the gold run out. To abuse the analogy. Not all shovels are equal, and so eg is AMD a good buy right now.

In this gold rush, Nvidia is the shovel, Supermicro is the handle, Micron is the stick, and TSMC is the atoms those things are made up of. Except for some reason, MU and TSM haven't popped the same way NVDA and SMCI have.


So where do we disagree? I said the lottery winners are the software companies mining using the shovels while wearing the Levi’s companies


> Basically, don’t become the actual gold miner lol.

I was responding to this bit. If nobody is mining and everyone is selling shovels, it's not going to work. We need people to be gold miners as well as selling shovels.


Why do we need anything? Ultimately we will find out in time if there is anything of actual value here. Right now we’re at the start of the roller coaster ride.

Obviously I hope to see some cool stuff. But I’m also realistic. We won’t know until we know. But we shouldn’t try to force anything imo. Unless you’re a VC who wants his returns.


There's too much cheap money around




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