David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. You’re teeing all of this up, and so far I’m thinking, this is the OpenAI and Microsoft episode? Like what does this have to do with Nvidia? And God, there’s a great Nvidia story here to be told. So let’s get to the Nvidia side of it. We just said these three things that we’ve painted the picture of on the first part of the episode here, that: (1) generative AI is possible, a thing, and it’s now getting traction, (2) it requires an unbelievably massive amount of GPU compute to train, and (3) it looks like the predominant way that companies are going to use that compute is going to be in the cloud. The combination of these three things is (I think) the most perfect example we’ve ever covered on this show of the old saying about luck being what happens when preparation meets opportunity for Nvidia here. Obviously, the opportunity is generative AI, but on the preparation front, Nvidia has literally just spent the past five years working insanely hard to build a new computing platform for the data center. A GPU-accelerated computing platform to, in their minds, replace the old CPU-led Intel dominated x86 architecture in the data center. For many years, they were getting some traction. The data center segment was growing for Nvidia, but people were like, okay, you want this to happen, but why is it going to happen? There are these little workloads here and there that will toss you Jensen, that we think can be accelerated by your cool GPUs. Then crazy things like crypto happen, and there are AI researchers in academic labs that are using it as supercomputers. But for the longest time, the data centers segment of Nvidia just wasn’t clear that organizations had enormous parts of their software stack that they were going to shift to GPUs. Like why? What’s driving this? And now we know what could be driving it. That is AI.…

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