The Ledger, every show

“I personally would be surprised if in five years NVIDIA wasn't worth 10 trillion, but I can't predict the outcome.”

“Right now, people are making more money than they're spending. It's just very lumpy. As an aggregate. Plenty of people are gonna lose their shirts, but overall, less money is gonna go in than is gonna come out.”

“If Nvidia wanted to, they could build fifty million of those GPU die, Per year. But they're going to build about 5.5 million GPUs this year.”

“The cost to run the OSS model is about one-tenth that of the Chinese models.”

“Then Europe's economy is going to be a tourist economy. People are going to come here to see the quaint old buildings, and that's going to be it.”

“I believe that AI is going to cause massive labor shortages. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have enough people to fill all the jobs that are gonna be created.”

“Like, if you look at the last GTC, there was an announcement that the latest GPUs were 30 x faster than the previous generation. And when you look at how it was done, there was this curve that looked kind of like this, and then it Basically ended here, and the…”

“And our goal by the end of 20, 27 is to be providing at least half of the world's AI inference compute.”

“One of the concerns right now is about Malaysia or Singapore, that region over there being a place where people are deploying GPUs with the wink, wink, like we're not going to rent it to China, right? But that's a belief that a lot of people are doing that. Ot…”

“I can't speak for Sam Altman or OpenAI, but if I was in that position, I would be gearing up to open source my models in response. Because it's pretty clear you're gonna lose that, so you might as well try and win all the users and the love from open sourcing.”

“This model was supposedly trained on a smaller number of GPUs and a much, much tighter budget I think the way that it's been put is less than the salary of many of the executives at Meta, and that's not true. It's actually, there's an element of marketing invo…”

“Open AI Was effectively subsidizing accidentally the training of this model because they were using open AI, right? And, you know, rumors are that open AI may not be completely profitable yet in terms of every token in the API, like on the subscriptions maybe,…”

“The CCP is probably going to be taking the safeties off the weapons. They're going to be like, why are you making this model open source? Please direct your data towards us. Go win a bunch of customers this way, but now we want the data, right? And so they're …”

“This has just made it absolutely nakedly clear that the models are commoditized, right?”

“And I think that's going to happen. I think people will like you cannot lose.”

“And then you look at China, China practices R D T research development theft. It's just part of the culture. And it's not just against Western company. It's against each other too. The difference is if you're a Western company, then the government Steals from …”

“What I'm seeing is that code is becoming almost free. It's, it, the marginal cost is approaching zero.”

“Microsoft in one quarter deployed a bunch of GPUs, and then announced that they weren't going to make them available in Azure because they made more money using them themselves than renting them out.”

“Four hours later, it was in production. Not a single line of code was written by a human being. There was no debugging done by a human being. It was all prompting.”

“And when you look around the industry, you've got a bunch of people building chips, some of them are getting canceled, like Dojo recently got canceled.”

“I have no doubt that OpenAI will be able to build its own chips. I have no doubt that eventually, Anthropic will be building their own chips, that every hyperscaler will build their own chip.”

“The thing is, Nvidia effectively has a monopsony on HBM.”

“You have to write a check two years in advance to get GPUs. For us, you write us a check for a million LPUs, and the first of those LPUs starts showing up six months later.”

“NVIDIA still keeps selling chips.”

“They're going to build a 150 nuclear reactors. So they're going to have enough energy, even though their chips aren't as energy efficient.”

“So my expectation is that right now for the next two to three years, the United States has a clear advantage in that away game over China.”

“Norway has about an 80% utilization rate of wind. So, like, 80% of the time you can be generating energy. They have enough hydro that if you deployed an five x the wind power of the hydro, Norway itself could provide as much energy as the United States and cou…”

“He said they spend three times as much on the permitting in the United States than on the nuclear power plant.”

“NVIDIA's gonna sell every single GPU that they build.”

“And what that means is people will need to work less. And that's gonna lead you to number two, which is people are gonna opt out of the economy more. They're gonna work fewer hours, they're gonna work fewer days a week, and they're gonna work fewer years. They…”

“And coding is gonna become the same thing. For you to be in marketing, you're gonna have to be able to code. For you to be in customer service, you're gonna have to be code be able to code.”

“I want my margin to be as low as I possibly can make it while keeping my business stable, and I'm going to make my cash flow by increasing the volume.”

“My prediction is that in five years, NVIDIA will still have over 50% of the revenue. However, they will have a minority of the chips sold. They might have, you know, minority share. They might have 51% of the revenue, and they might have 10% of the chips sold.”

“We don't have the same supply chain constraints. We can build more compute than anyone else in the world. The most finite resource right now, compute, the thing that people are bidding up and paying these high margins for, we can produce nearly unlimited quant…”

“It is the compute. It is the data. It is the algorithms. It's all three of them.”

“There was an algorithmic improvement on that. And the algorithmic improvement, as I explained, you know, is this seemingly silly thing where they just wrote the answer in a box and then they knew what to look for rather than having to have a human being check …”

“You don't normally think of tech companies as having a cornered resource, but Nvidia has a cornered resource. They're a monopsony, the opposite of a monopoly, a single buyer for HBM, and the Interposer, the COOS.”

“I think if we were to deploy a lot of much lower cost inference chips what you would see is that same number of GPUs would be sold, but the demand for training would increase because the more inference you have, the more training you need, and vice versa.”

“More than five x lower. Just the memory alone in the latest GPUs costs more than our fully loaded CapEx per chip deployed.”

“So we use about a third of the energy per token. About over a three-year period, one-third of our cost is the OpEx, which is mostly energy and data center rent, and two-thirds is the CapEx, which means that since we're one-third of the energy, the cost to run …”

“That power will become a hard bottleneck in three to four years.”

“There's a 90 month lead time on generators right now”

“Most of these projects will never be developed.”

“But actually we have a very positive contribution margin right now. And so as far as we know, we're the only ones that are actually making money running these open source models”

“I can guarantee you that a huge amount of money will be incinerated. But I also bet that in total more money will be made than will be put in.”

“We have decided that we're not going to train our own models. We'll do a little fine tuning for specific cases or whatnot, but we don't want to compete.”

“They distilled the OpenAI model.”

“If they want to go out into the world and deploy chips like they did with Huawei and networking gear, that's going to be complicated because people aren't going to have the power around the world to run more expensive accelerators.”