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Nvidia falls 14% in premarket trading as China's DeepSeek triggers global tech sell-off (www.cnbc.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/53805638

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[–] 156 points 2 years ago (7 children)

It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI, not thinking AI has less value.

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  • [–] 72 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Or from the sounds of it, doing things more efficiently.
    Fewer cycles required, less hardware required.

    Maybe this was an inevitability, if you cut off access to the fast hardware, you create a natural advantage for more efficient systems.

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's generally how tech goes though. You throw hardware at the problem until it works, and then you optimize it to run on laptops and eventually phones. Usually hardware improvements and software optimizations meet somewhere in the middle.

    Look at photo and video editing, you used to need a workstation for that, and now you can get most of it on your phone. Surely AI is destined to follow the same path, with local models getting more and more robust until eventually the beefy cloud services are no longer required.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The problem for American tech companies is that they didn't even try to move to stage 2.

    OpenAI is hemorrhaging money even on their most expensive subscription and their entire business plan was to hemorrhage money even faster to the point they would use entire power stations to power their data centers. Their plan makes about as much sense as digging your self out of a hole by trying to dig to the other side of the globe.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago

    Hey, my friends and I would've made it to China if recess was a bit longer.

    Seriously though, the goal for something like OpenAI shouldn't be to sell products to end customers, but to license models to companies that sell "solutions." I see these direct to consumer devices similarly to how GPU manufacturers see reference cards or how Valve sees the Steam Deck: they're a proof of concept for others to follow.

    OpenAI should be looking to be more like ARM and less like Apple. If they do that, they might just grow into their valuation.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI

    I don't think this is the primary reason behind Nvidia's drop. Because as long as they got a massive technological lead it doesn't matter as much to them who has the best model, as long as these companies use their GPUs to train them.

    The real change is that the compute resources (which is Nvidia's product) needed to create a great model suddenly fell of a cliff. Whereas until now the name of the game was that more is better and scale is everything.

    China vs the West (or upstart vs big players) matters to those who are investing in creating those models. So for example Meta, who presumably spends a ton of money on high paying engineers and data centers, and somehow got upstaged by someone else with a fraction of their resources.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I really don't believe the technological lead is massive.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Looking at the market cap of Nvidia vs their competitors the market belives it is, considering they just lost more than AMD/Intel and the likes are worth combined and still are valued at $2.9 billion.

    And with technology i mean both the performance of their hardware and the software stack they've created, which is a big part of their dominance.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah. I don't believe market value is a great indicator in this case. In general, I would say that capital markets are rational at a macro level, but not micro. This is all speculation/gambling.

    My guess is that AMD and Intel are at most 1 year behind Nvidia when it comes to tech stack. "China", maybe 2 years, probably less.

    However, if you can make chips with 80% performance at 10% price, its a win. People can continue to tell themselves that big tech always will buy the latest and greatest whatever the cost. It does not make it true. I mean, it hasn't been true for a really long time. Google, Meta and Amazon already make their own chips. That's probably true for DeepSeek as well.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah. I don’t believe market value is a great indicator in this case. In general, I would say that capital markets are rational at a macro level, but not micro. This is all speculation/gambling.

    I have to concede that point to some degree, since i guess i hold similar views with Tesla's value vs the rest of the automotive Industry. But i still think that the basic hirarchy holds true with nvidia being significantly ahead of the pack.

    My guess is that AMD and Intel are at most 1 year behind Nvidia when it comes to tech stack. “China”, maybe 2 years, probably less.

    Imo you are too optimistic with those estimations, particularly with Intel and China, although i am not an expert in the field.

    As i see it AMD seems to have a quite decent product with their instinct cards in the server market on the hardware side, but they wish they'd have something even close to CUDA and its mindshare. Which would take years to replicate. Intel wish they were only a year behind Nvidia. And i'd like to comment on China, but tbh i have little to no knowledge of their state in GPU development. If they are "2 years, probably less" behind as you say, then they should have something like the rtx 4090, which was released end of 2022. But do they have something that even rivals the 2000 or 3000 series cards?

    However, if you can make chips with 80% performance at 10% price, its a win. People can continue to tell themselves that big tech always will buy the latest and greatest whatever the cost. It does not make it true.

    But the issue is they all make their chips at the same manufacturer, TSMC, even Intel in the case of their GPUs. So they can't really differentiate much on manufacturing costs and are also competing on the same limited supply. So no one can offer 80% of performance at 10% price, or even close to it. Additionally everything around the GPU (datacenters, rack space, power useage during operation etc.) also costs, so it is only part of the overall package cost and you also want to optimize for your limited space. As i understand it datacenter building and power delivery for them is actually another limiting factor right now for the hyperscalers.

    Google, Meta and Amazon already make their own chips. That’s probably true for DeepSeek as well.

    Google yes with their TPUs, but the others all use Nvidia or AMD chips to train. Amazon has their Graviton CPUs, which are quite competitive, but i don't think they have anything on the GPU side. DeepSeek is way to small and new for custom chips, they evolved out of a hedge fund and just use nvidia GPUs as more or less everyone else.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Thanks for high effort reply.

    The Chinese companies probably use SIMC over TSMC from now on. They were able to do low volume 7 nm last year. Also, Nvidia and "China" are not on the same spot on the tech s-curve. It will be much cheaper for China (and Intel/AMD) to catch up, than it will be for Nvidia to maintain the lead. Technological leaps and reverse engineering vs dimishing returns.

    Also, expect that the Chinese government throws insane amounts of capital at this sector right now. So unless Stargate becomes a thing (though I believe the Chinese invest much much more), there will not be fair competition (as if that has ever been a thing anywhere anytime). China also have many more tools, like optional command economy. The US has nothing but printing money and manipulating oligarchs on a broken market.

    I'm not sure about 80/10 exactly of course, but it is in that order of magnitude, if you're willing to not run newest fancy stuff. I believe the MI300X goes for approx 1/2 of the H100 nowadays and is MUCH better on paper. We don't know the real performance because of NDA (I believe). It used to be 1/4. If you look at VRAM per $, the ratio is about 1/10 for the 1/4 case. Of course, the price gap will shrink at the same rate as ROCm matures and customers feel its safe to use AMD hardware for training.

    So, my bet is max 2 years for "China". At least when it comes to high-end performance per dollar. Max 1 year for AMD and Intel (if Intel survive).

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    If we are talking the manufacturing side, rather than design/software i am very curious to see how SIMC develops. You are absolutely right that there is a big advantage for the second mover, since they can avoid dead ends and already know on an abstract level what is working. And diminishing returns also help make gaps be slightly less relevant.

    However i think we can't just apply the same timeline to them and say "they have 7nm now" and it took others x years to progress from there to 5nm or 3nm, because these steps include the major shift from DUV to EUV, which was in the making for a very long time. And that's a whole different beast compared to DUV, where they are also probably still relying on ASML machines for the smallest nodes (although i think producing those domestically is much more feasible). Eventually they'll get there, but i think this isn't trivial and will take more than 2 years for sure.

    On the design side vs Nvidia the hyperscalers like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu or maybe even a smaller newcomer might be able to create something competitive for their specific usecases (like the Google TPUs). But Nvidia isn't standing still either, so i think getting close to parity will be extremely hard there aswell.

    Of course, the price gap will shrink at the same rate as ROCm matures and customers feel its safe to use AMD hardware for training.

    Well to what degree ROCm matures and closes the gap is probably the question. Like i said, i agree that their hardware seems quite capable in many ways, although my knowledge here is quite limited. But AMD so far hasn't really shown that they can compete with Nvidia on the software side.

    As far as Intel goes, being slow in my reply helps my point. Just today Intel canceled their next-generation GPU Falcon Shore, making it an internal development step only. As much as i am rooting for them, it will need a major shift in culture and talent for them to right the ship. Gaudi 3 wasn't successful (i think they didn't even meet their target of $500mio sales) and now they probably don't have any release in 2025, assuming Jaguar Lake is 2026 since Falcon Shore was slated for end of this year. In my books that is the definition of being behind more than 1 year, considering they are not even close to parity right now.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    From what I understand, it's more that it takes a lot less money to train your own llms with the same powers with this one than to pay license to one of the expensive ones. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's about cheap Chinese AI

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I wouldn't be surprised if China spent more on AI development than the west did, sure here we spent tens of billions while China only invested a few million but that few million was actually spent on the development while out of the tens of billions all but 5$ was spent on bonuses and yachts.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Does it still need people spending huge amounts of time to train models?

    After doing neural networks, fuzzy logic, etc. in university, I really question the whole usability of what is called "AI" outside niche use cases.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Exactly. Galaxy brains on Wall Street realizing that nvidia's monopoly pricing power is coming to an end. This was inevitable - China has 4x as many workers as the US, trained in the best labs and best universities in the world, interns at the best companies, then, because of racism, sent back to China. Blocking sales of nvidia chips to China drives them to develop their own hardware, rather than getting them hooked on Western hardware. China's AI may not be as efficient or as good as the West right now, but it will be cheaper, and it will get better.

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