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Comment by jbc1 | Hacker News Reader

I honestly dont. I'm trying to think of what principle they could have meant with "This situation isn’t exactly a poster child for X" where X is any economic principle and coming up empty.

Best I've got is "central planning". One firm being able to handily out perform others despite them also being both motivated and well capitalised lends itself pretty heavily towards markets being good, but I hardly think they were referring to "central planning" when they wrote "efficient market hypothesis".

If it's so obvious to you that you're dropping ellipsis, care to clue us in?

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My impression was that they used "Efficient Market Hypothesis" to mean "the theory that free-market competition rapidly drives down prices and breaks up monopolies on its own".

That theory is still valid, the issue is that the competition can't or won't even try to make a better product or a cheaper one. The rule only applies if there exist competing products in the first place.

If there was any, the prices would go down as we have seen a billion times.

So, why’s that not happening, and what’s it imply for the rest of the theoretical framework?

It’s not happening because 10,000 people who have more intimate knowledge of the business than you or I ever will have made decisions to best suit their current conditions. This isn’t an exception to the rule, you’re just looking at a small timeframe and a remarkably performant company. Why is it so bad for a company to be successful when they have provided so much back to society in the form of R&D? Besides, if I’m doing ML my boss has paid for the card anyway so the price doesn’t concern me.

This is the point.

This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut. However not only is that not happening, nobody is even trying.

Making the “theory” pretty worthless if it’s not even applicable in cases that would naturally produce this market entrant.

The reality is that private equity does not actually want to compete with large global brands.

> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut.

Is it? A competitor can enter the market and undercut by producing a cheaper and otherwise undifferentiated commodity-type product. Nvidia's focus is adding moats that prevent competing on pure specs such as CUDA, design, and so on.

Nvidia started working on CUDA back in the mid-2000s. Nobody else cared about GPU compute back then.

I didn't know CUDA was in development for that long, thanks! I'm curious if there were serious attempts to create something similar over the years and how far they managed to progress. I've never used OpenCL but from looking at it from afar its adoption always seemed limited.

Irrespectively though I don't see how a competitor can replicate the context and tacit knowledge associated building something like CUDA for close to 20 years without putting in a similar amount of time.

The first version of CUDA was released in 2007 so I would not be surprised if they started working on it in the 90s. These things take time.

Nvidia also made sure that CUDA runs on gaming GPUs and supports Windows. This is why its tools are so good. You don't need to buy a datacenter GPU, no need to mess with Linux. Just buy any gaming GPU, install CUDA SDK and you're good to go.

AMD wasn't like that. Their alternative - ROCM didn't even work on gaming GPUs. Their datacenter GPUs didn't even support Windows. Basically the opposite approach of NVIDIA. Now AMD is rushing to add Windows and consumer GPU support to ROCM, but it's a bit too little too late.

> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut.

They already are undercutting.

Some business that are really into hyper-scaling are already pouring man-hours into making those "undercut" alternative products work. Specifically because sometimes you can't affort Nvidia at that scale. Or they have a large enough scale that they can make it work with suboptimal tech.

It's just that for most business the man-hours required to make "undercut" products work still aren't cheap enough to win in cost-benefit.

> However not only is that not happening, nobody is even trying.

A lot of companies are trying. It's just that nvidia is really good and significantly ahead.

> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut.

Do you have any idea how much R&D it takes to make a GPU, let alone something that could possibly compete with NVIDIA?

This is not something a dozen people in a large garage are going to do.

> However not only is that not happening, nobody is even trying.

AMD has been trying to compete for years. If you're a gamer that doesn't care about getting the top performance and just wants to optimize price/performance, their offerings aren't bad.

> The reality is that private equity does not actually want to compete with large global brands.

Because the barrier of entry into the GPU market is probably at least a couple billion dollars.

> the barrier of entry into the GPU market is probably at least a couple billion dollars.

There are $BN Private Equity deals done everyday, there's plenty of money to fund a competitor.

No, I think people are just scared and don't care about the existence of monopolies.

> the theory that free-market competition rapidly drives down prices and breaks up monopolies on its own

You mean a theory that no economic school actually believes? Not even Austrians would sign that.

Not endorsing that theory, just offering my best guess at what the person probably meant when they used "Efficient Market Theory" in their comment, based on the context.

You sound very confused. That’s economics 101 just about everywhere. The friction is generally termed “barriers to entry” if that helps reorient you.

Well, patents are certainly a good way to create monopolies, which wouldn't exist in an actually free market with no patents. In addition, there's interventions in place which don't allow certain tech exports to China, for example. Not sure how much better the situation would be without these.

I think the principle is called perfect market or perfect competition, but it's only a theoretical concept. However, it's certainly possible that the market is less perfect than it could be due to interventions and regulations.

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