Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Maybe an attempted switching cost that was not fully realized. I think they probably thought and did (for a while) have process power in this six-month shipping cycle that none of their competitors can match for a while. But certainly the delta of NVIDIA's shipping cycles versus competitors compressed over time. Okay, playbook. I have one big one that we have not discussed. We sprinkle in lots of playbook themes, but there's one to me that I want to call out and draw through line to something that's happening with NVIDIA today. That is simulation. There's a thing that we're going to talk about a lot in the next episode, which is totally changing the world as we know it, which is things that we used to have to do physically we now do in simulation. An obvious example of this is, Boeing doesn't take every part and throw it into a wind tunnel. Maybe Boeing does, but the zillion new space startups certainly don't do that. They simulate the atmospheric effects on stuff. It happens way faster and it lowers your iteration time. Another one is drug discovery. You look at how fast we came up with Coronavirus vaccines. Simulation is an absolute miracle. Everything in our world is being compressed ten times, a hundred times faster, because we're able to simulate it rather than needing to do it in the real world. The interesting thing is a lot of that is actually powered by a lot of the machine learning advances that NVIDIA is doing in today's world with cool things that you can do on GPUs. But the reason I'm talking about it in this episode is that DNA comes from the fact that in order to survive when they had nine months left, the way that they saved themselves was with simulation. It became very clear to the company very early on, the benefits of being able to simulate something rather than having to do it in the real world. Similarly, a playbook theme I wanted to highlight that we have not talked about explicitly yet is just the power of democratizing tools for developers. Jensen really saw this back in his AMD days before going to LSI Logic. The ability for NVIDIA to use a software emulator to design their chips and then, of course, the massive, massive strides that the EDA industry has made since then. NVIDIA itself, we haven't really talked about it as much, but Jensen, Chris, and Curtis's original vision did come true. They created a new artistic platform for artists to tell their stories. Without this industry and all the hardware and software tools that went into creating it, you would have to be John Carmack to tell a story in this medium. There are very, very few John Carmacks out there in terms of being gifted enough developers, and surrounded by storytellers, too, and being a great storyteller himself to be an artist. NVIDIA talks about this now in their marketing materials to be Da Vinci and Einstein together in one person.…

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