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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

It's the classic shovels in a gold rush model. I just wonder what happened to the shovel makers after the gold rush petered out...

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Much of the sf area old money comes from folks selling tools into the gold rush, for example Folgers started serving coffee to miners, Levi’s selling jeans, Wells Fargo.

Seller did great. They have a university named after them just a few miles off of Nvidia HQ.

If you don't know who (like I didn't) it was Leland Stanford.

The university is named for the seller's late son, not himself.

Since the son (Leland Stanford Jr) was named after the seller, I guess you could still say it was named after him...

The same thing that Nvidia did after graphics cards and then crypto mining became less profitable - diversified.

Nvidia has really managed to capitalize very well on multiple "Compute that does nothing important" trends. From 3D games to crypto mining, now to AI. Jensen Huang seems to have a crystal ball that can predict what people will waste compute on in the next 5 years.

Is he really predicting, or are the areas where GPUs are becoming useful increasing in number?

What exactly is 'something important' if those things don't meet your metric?

I think you really have cause-and-effect backwards.

First off, 3D games existed before NVIDIA. NVIDIA wasn't even first to market for making dedicated 3D acceleration hardware.

CUDA existed before Bitcoin and was used for physics and chemistry simulations when it first came out.

> "Compute that does nothing important"

Entertainment is important, so to just toss 3D games aside is asinine. I'll agree that crypto-mining is completely worthless. As far AI, certainly there's a lot of hype around it right now, and we're probably gonna see a lot of AI startups go belly-up in the next couple years, but it's definitely not a fad and isn't going away.

Being highly dismissive doesn't make you cool or edgy, just so you know.

I mean, I'm a 3D gamer myself and I'm happy we have GPUs. Just being realistic about their importance. I am fully aware I'm burning kilowatts of energy so that the leaves in Red Dead Redemption 2 look beautiful.

Nvidia had the foresight to realize GPU's could be used for more than just graphics and put a lot of effort into CUDA.

Beyond that, there was no crystal ball, rather a useful physical product and software tools to make it accessible beyond a highly specialized set of users (I am not saying CUDA or anything is that accessible, but it makes GPU's useful to more than just game devs).

Have you ever worn Levis jeans? He did okay.

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