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My issue with a lot of this thinking is that it's wrapped up in so many layers of hindsight bias. It's very easy to be right directionally, but have no clue on the timing and magnitude of the shift in the market you expect.
Nvidia had runaway 10x success because the unprecedented virality of ChatGPT, which OpenAI expected to be a boring research preview, drove a crazy compute demand supercycle.
There are many timelines where AI still ended up being a Big Deal, but where Altman decided not to release ChatGPT for safety reasons and hence LLM's didn't see unprecedented human and financial capital investment, and where the hyperscalers had time to build out TPU's, Trainium, Ascends, whatever, and hence Nvidia never ended up becoming a multi-trillion dollar company.
Congratulations on being abnormally successful - but if you're smart enough to have returns that good, surely you must realise that everyone else is just paying into some prop trader's next bonus.
Someone would've released this tech eventually though. It was more than just ChatGPT, there was character.ai reaching prominence in September 2022, Facebook was doing something similar for academics... People could've read some of gwern's posts about GPT-3 and seen the potential there. He was going on and on and on about how powerful this technology could be.
I admit I cannot predict timing. But just knowing that something will be big in the future at some point, that's worth something.
They wouldn't need trainium if they didn't want to train AI models, nor Ascends... And we can judge the strength of Nvidia's execution and their knowledge, that's fundamental analysis. We can say 'ok the people making these kinds of accelerators for 20 years know a thing or two about it, whereas latecomers are less likely to do well'?
Tech tends to concentrate as the barriers of entry can be quite high in hardware. There are only a few companies that make HBM. No matter who makes the GPU they'll still need HBM. So that's a good pick. Or ASML. Only they make the most modern chip fab tools. 147% in 5 years is pretty decent, more like 250-300% since the start of the AI boom in 2022/2023. The big chipmaker is a pretty obvious buy for something that runs on masses of chips...
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