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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my time in FAANG, I also speak from inside knowledge of how deeply f’ed these companies are - making your own arm chip or network adapter isn’t the same thing as taking on high end designers at their own game)

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It's interesting that you would name drop Cisco. They exploded in market valuation in 1999/2000, having a near-monopoly on infrastructure that was in high demand due to the Web boom. Nvidia similarly profited from the Crypto/AI boom, but I wonder whether that is bound to end similarly.

All things end, and Nvidia will probably decay at some point. But they’ve had a long and strong run.

Have you worked at a large (say 500+ employee) company that you would say isn't "deeply f'ed"?

I once read a fascinating corporate history of Xerox, and that company became deeply, deeply f'ed up in ways that are of their time but do have strong parallels to the issues I understand that FAANG, particularly Google, have.

Could you please share any links or pointers for that? Sounds interesting.

One of them was called Xerox: American Samurai, and dates from 1986 (I read it when I was a teenager in the early 1990s, I think). There was another one from the early 1990s, I believe.

This book lauded Xerox's success at reforming its corporate culture, regaining a strong position in the photocopier market and even spent a chapter detailing their success in getting into electronic typewriters!

With the benefit of hindsight the company didn't survive its core product losing all relevance any better than Kodak did, but that was still some way in the future (if foreseeable by the 1980s).

That said, much of the material about a hugely bloated organisation, with a sclerotic bureaucracy and lots of cushy middle managers assembled through a previous period of explosive growth, turning out poor-quality product, sounds very reminiscent of some of what we now hear about the current big tech companies.

The title reflects another American obsession at the time - the idea that the US was "losing" to Japan.

> Have you worked at a large (say 500+ employee) company that you would say isn't "deeply f'ed"?

Perhaps Google until around 2010? Or Goldman Sachs until the 1990s?

> Have you worked at a large (say 500+ employee) company that you would say isn't "deeply f'ed"?

You get a weird insider bias where all you see are bug reports and problems, so you get the impression the product is shit, even if 99% of customers love it.

>Given my time in FAANG, I also speak from inside knowledge of how deeply f’ed these companies are

Please tell us more of your expertise and deep insight, FAANG employee #1,908,680.

Google has developed their own chips. Apple has developed their own chips. It’s really not that hard if your pockets are deep enough or the bottom line checks out.

When Apple launches their AI offering this year, it’s not going to need NVIDIA.

Do you have any knowledge of what it runs on? I was pretty sure it was NVIDIA (accessed through cloud providers as a customer).

They have, over many years and not against a company at the top of their game and with considerable help. Apples move is an ARM chip, not an Apple chip. Googles chips are competitive in spaces like network infrastructure. TPUs are illustrative of their inability to provide a viable alternative.

Apple isn’t going to launch with an Nvidia killing alternative, I’ll bet you $1,908,680 it’s backed by Nvidia.

They will likely use their neutral chips for local models, but their data center stuff will be 100% Nvidia.

The interesting question isn't whose hardware they use for the launch, it's what the public-facing software API looks like. Apple isn't likely to directly expose CUDA. At which point they're free to swap out the hardware with whatever they want at any time.

Also, Apple has a longstanding dislike for Nvidia and even if they weren't going to design their own chips at launch, they could be using AMD.

TPU is a thing and well competitive already for a long time?..

Except they come tied to GCP and don’t offer as high precision training and inference. These are pretty major disadvantages.

TPUs are made primarily to satisfy Google's own needs (especially YouTube), not necessary what GCP customers need.

don't underestimate market forces.

Same could have been told about Intel, but Apple anyway beat them in some ways and took away big market share

Intel isn’t top of their game and haven’t been for many many years.

Intel knows how to make software and libraries for their hardware, which is the thing people keep lamenting about AMD. Intel's current GPUs are mediocre but priced competitively for what they are, and Intel having more competitive hardware in the future is not implausible.

Which could lead to Intel realizing the opportunity they have. Create decent libraries that work across every vendor's GPUs. In the short term this helps AMD at the expense of Nvidia, which in itself helps Intel by preventing Nvidia from maintaining a moat. In the medium term Intel then has people using Intel's libraries to write code that will work on their future GPUs and then their problem is limited to producing competitive hardware.

AMD has taken more CPU market share from Intel than Apple.

But the weird thing about the "Nvidia will remain undefeated forever" theory is that it seems to assume they have some kind of permanent advantage.

Nvidia was well positioned to make an early investment in this because they had the right combination of existing technology and resources. Other companies would have had to invest more because they were starting from a different place (e.g. Microsoft), or didn't have the resources to invest at the time (AMD).

But now the market is proven and there are more than half a dozen 800 pound gorillas who all want a piece of it. It's like betting that Tesla will retain their 2022 market share in electric car market even as the market grows and everyone else gets in. Maybe some of the others will stumble, but all of them? Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook?

> It's like betting that Tesla will retain their 2022 market share in electric car market even as the market grows and everyone else gets in.

Yes. Especially once you take the Chinese electric car companies into account, that are already outselling Tesla.

And even a Tesla optimist would presumably admit that maintaining a third of the EV market would be a huge win for Tesla, as the EV market becomes "the car market" going forward. Maybe that won't happen, but it's at least within the realm of possibility -- maybe some of the existing carmakers stick the transition and some of them fail, but Tesla remains the biggest one, that's not impossible.

But maintaining the 80% they had a few years ago, much less 100%? That's not optimism, it's fantasizing.

Agreed.

Btw, I was talking about global electric car production. I don't know whether Tesla ever did 80% of global electric car sales?

~80% was the US number from 2020.

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