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Investing billionS over the course of CUDA and its predecessors. The whole concept about wanting to use GPU for not just Graphics but High performance or Highly parallel computing started before 2000s. CUDA announced in 2007, and most of the work predate back to Cg in early 2000s. Even Intel who were already very late to the party made the decision to go invest and start Larrabee in 2005. And there was PS3 Cell, which started development in 2001.

And yet all these work and success from Nvidia was because of, if you read 90% of HN comments for the past 2 years; Luck.

They could have given up at any point in time for the past 20 years and simply not do anything CUDA or GPGPU related. Because who would want to do that when vast majority of those investment were not even bringing in much revenue. Like Intel decided to cancel Larrabee. They persevere and hit the Jackpot some 10-15 years later. But all of this was because of; Luck.

Yes. Luck plays a big part. They could have continue another 10 years and they may never find the Killer App for it. But to ignore all the investment and work for such a long time and pin it down to Luck was about as rude and as disrespectful it can be. Especially on a forum which was started by VC with the spirit of entrepreneurship.

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This is likely a testament to the need for large tech companies to choose core differentiated competencies, and consistently invest in those competencies over long periods of time. It's so tempting for the finance minded to take a large high margin business like NVidia and cut R&D spending to boost profits. Or alternately allow the R&D spend become lazy and ineffective - This happened to Intel, Boeing, and arguably Google.

That NVidia has maintained this push for the last 2 decades makes one wonder what other tricks they'll have up their sleeve.

So all of us making fun of Meta for spending billions on AR/VR will be wrong in 10 years? Sometimes the R&D pays off, sometimes it doesn't

Yes, minus the deadline. You would be crazy to not see the long term value of literally being able to enter virtual worlds, like a Star Trek holodeck.

Even something as simple as replacing TVs and monitors is a no-brainer. It's just a question of whether comfort and quality can be achieved.

I don't see that there is enough value there to motivate the investment.

For games, to the extent that VR works for them... sure, I could see that use case. But for, say, business meetings? Uh, no. Or to hang out with friends? Sure, maybe, but how would they monetize it well enough to make the investment worthwhile? To make it compelling enough that I would visit?

I'm not saying that the use cases don't exist. But either making compelling VR experiences has to be cheap[1] (which I don't see on the near horizon), or they have to add enough value that people will pay for them in some way. That strikes me as uncertain.

[1] If they get cheap, then sure, although then it will have the same problem CGI now has... there is so much of it that it has lost a lot of its magic. It's hard to be common and compelling.

>I don't see that there is enough value there to motivate the investment.

People were saying the same about home computers in the '70s and it was relatively true for that period if you didn't look into the future and only considered what home computers looked like back then: janky machines built from radio shack parts by nerdy enthusiast tinkerers with electronics knowledge. Only when they were presented with prebuilt and polished products with usable apps that didn't require technical knowledge, did people see the light that home computers are the future and will become mainstream for all consumers not just enthusiasts.

Nobody can know yet how mainstream VR will look like exactly and who will get to dominate the field and dictate the product direction (Apple, Valve, Meta, etc), but for sure it will happen in the future, even if for now it's just a tinkering toy for gamers and enthusiasts with money.

There is a major difference: VR can't work the way sci-fi enthusiasts envision it for fundamental physical reasons.

You can't have a pair of glasses that is simultaneously opaque enough to give you the illusion you are in another place AND breezy enough so that your eyes won't sweat. Air is just much bigger than light, so you can't block light but allow air to pass through. So a VR headset will always be sweaty on the face. AR will never be able to create realistic opaque backgrounds.

You also can't have a holo-deck-like experience with glasses. The only reason the holo deck captures our imaginations is because it had space, smells, sounds, touch. All of those things are impossible to achieve with physical devices of any kind, or at least very close to it. The only thing that may create a holo-deck like experience would be based on brain-computer interfaces, if those are even truly possible.

Finally, to get many of the claimed benefits, even if the headsets were good enough to deliver them, you also need complex recording software that actually handles all of this. You can't have a nice realistic image of all of your colleagues in a VR meeting unless they each have a 3D camera setup, and everyone has enough bandwidth to actually receive and send all of the 3D videos, and do so with latency similar to audio traffic.

These are at least three fundamental problems that make the whole VR/AR craze just certain to fail. Again.

>The only reason the holo deck captures our imaginations is because it had space, smells, sounds, touch.

You don't need the exact fictional holo deck device to have a VR product that sells. 150 years ago Sci-Fi writers imagined we'd have robots in our homes doing our chores, and we do have them today, except not humanoid robots doing the washing and vacuuming by hand for us like we originally imagined, but we have fixed function dedicated robots for each task: dish washing machine, clothes washing machine, Roomba robo-vac, etc. They're a rudimentary and limited far cry from the fantasy and capable humanoid robots in sci-fi novels, yet they're ubiquitous today and sold by the millions. Same will be with VR, it will be more limited than the holo deck but it will sell at the right price/feature combo.

>You can't have a nice realistic image of all of your colleagues in a VR meeting unless they each have a 3D camera setup, and everyone has enough bandwidth to actually receive and send all of the 3D videos, and do so with latency similar to audio traffic

People also fantasized about video telephony like in star trek and yet those challenge got overcome with the introduction of 3G and camera phones and has improved ever since. Tech will also improve for VR. The iPhone already has had a 3D camera since a while now.

>These are at least three fundamental problems that make the whole VR/AR craze just certain to fail. Again.

It will fail today, but it will succeed in the future, even if you're too dead set to not see it.

>but we have fixed function dedicated robots for each task: dish washing machine, clothes washing machine, Roomba robo-vac, etc

But we don't have a clothes folding machine, precisely because the task is infinitely harder, from a first principles view, than anything a futurist imagined. VR/AR is the same. It's not just scaling up computer power because it's a matter of not having the physical ability to manipulate reality, energy, and matter the way we need.

Science isn't magic. How do you do haptic feedback to hands? That's an essential part of any AR system that isn't just a gimmick, and yet it's basically impossible without clunky gloves. How do you prevent damage to the human eye over extended use like a 9-5 job? The human eye did not evolve to "look at" different things that are in actuality on a screen an inch from our eyes, it really upsets the brain and the muscles that control vision, which is why VR/AR can be so tiring on your eyes. That cannot be innovated away.

>How do you do haptic feedback to hands? That's an essential part of any AR system that isn't just a gimmick, and yet it's basically impossible without clunky gloves.

Who said VR would need gloves and haptic feedback to succeed? We're talking about virtual reality here, not simulated reality. For the latter better wait for Elon's neural link or whatver we'll get that plugs our brains into the Matrix and simulates reality.

People still use mice and keyboards to interact with UIs despite having the ability to use touchscreens. Just because one thing exists, doesn't automatically mean the other dies.

>How do you prevent damage to the human eye over extended use like a 9-5 job?

Who said you need to use a VR device from 9-5 for it to succeed? You don't stare at your phone screen or tablet for 8h/day, do you? And yet you most likely have one.

> The human eye did not evolve to "look at" different things that are in actuality on a screen an inch from our eyes

Have you seen what lenses can do with light? Like move the focal point of a picture much further away? They're pretty big tech in cameras, telescopes, binoculars, and .... oh, these optical things humans wear on their faces, a couple of cm from their eyes to fix their vision issues, their called glasses I think.

How about we use those lens thingies to move the focal point of a screen that's 2cm from your eyes to 2m from your eyes? I'm telling you dude, whoever invents this tech is gonna be big.

Replying here, but with conflicting thoughts reading this whole comment chain..

I really liked immersive VR I experienced in research lab settings like CAVE systems, over 20 years ago. I'm probably among the people most tolerant to artifacts like frame rate jitter and lag, and most easily able to still get an immersive pop out of it. But I'm not an early adopter. I don't see the value or place for this single-purpose equipment in my life, nor my budget.

When mobile phones were just phones, I saw them getting smaller and lighter. I even fantasized about them shrinking until it was just the ear bud. I was willing to hand-wave some sci-fi UX without a display nor buttons. But, I didn't (and still don't, really) appreciate how people would care to get wireless ear buds that are still slaved to a larger device. I'd still be satisfied with wired ear phones if they were available.

I also didn't imagine today's smartphone ecosystem, even though I saw all the PDAs and other pocket computing platforms and their general purpose potential. I didn't predict the social/marketing angle that was going to make any of this seem worthwhile to average consumers. Now, I benefit from these economies of scale making the tech affordable, but I barely need it. I still prefer going to a laptop or desktop for any "real" tasks. Ironically, a smartphone ir tablet makes me feel frustrated and "mute" without a keyboard.

I understood the idea of convergence and the general purpose device. I understood the mobile/always on value and was on the early side of wire-cutting to have only a mobile phone. But, I was surprised at how rapidly the smartphone ate up digital camera and personal video camera markets. I am still surprised at how much smartphones are eating into spaces like regular laptops and PCs. And now the entire concept of a phone seems to be disappearing, with traditional voice calls being less relevant as time goes on.

So I am a fence-sitter on some kind of N-dimensional fence. I admit that a lot of tech development might occur and I probably can't guess which ones get popular. Maybe there is some VR/AR angle that will finally catch on.

But on the more general topic, I also think that all these developments above had many other passionate developers and ventures working on slightly different angles that failed in the market. As a third-party observer of decades of tech, I do also think it's a lot of luck. It is survivorship bias to fixate on how NVIDIA or Apple or anybody had some perfect strategy to ride these big waves.

> You can't have a pair of glasses that is simultaneously opaque enough to give you the illusion you are in another place AND breezy enough so that your eyes won't sweat. Air is just much bigger than light, so you can't block light but allow air to pass through. So a VR headset will always be sweaty on the face. AR will never be able to create realistic opaque backgrounds.

You can have a fan that pull the air in or out of the inside of the glasses without any light ever coming in.

> Air is just much bigger than light, so you can't block light but allow air to pass through.

That seems easy to fix - small tubes/vents that don’t go straight through but hit a corner or big enough curve. Air can go around obstacle but light won’t.

> how would they monetize it well enough to make the investment worthwhile?

That’s the theme of this article. Nvidia invested heavily in GPUs even though the complete business model wasn’t always clear.

nVidia at least has a product to show for it. Meta has Horizon Worlds and what? I guess the Quest headsets are included? It’s hard to figure out what Meta spent all that money on.

> I guess the Quest headsets are included?

Yes, they've shipped tens of millions of headsets across the world.

> It’s hard to figure out what Meta spent all that money on.

R&D on every problem for XR. Their software side is mediocre, but what Reality Labs is working on for hardware is unparalleled by any other company, even Apple.

And offering that hardware for nearly one tenth the price of Apple. Oh, and actually shipping that hardware.

Yeah, I think so. The technology will become cheaper, better, more accessible, and they'll be well-poised to take advantage of it.

There is definitely both luck and uncertainty with regard to R&D. If you don't look, you won't find it, but looking is not a guarantee.

In the case of AR/VR, I think there are two issues that make payoffs uncertain: 1) the hardware would have to get much cheaper; when will that be? 2) What is the killer app that would motivate the (large) expeditures required to produce compelling virtual environments? Games is an obvious case, but games are a very different beast than online meeting rooms -- the whole action/reward cycle of games isn't likely to work for business meetings. It isn't really clear that VR adds enough value to be compelling for non-gaming apps.

But it could easily be true that we just haven't imagined the right use case. You won't find it if you don't look.

that will certainly pay off, hard to see it now though.

I feel there’s always such a thing as paying too much, and Meta has a bit of a moat problem because I don’t think much stops somebody like Google from making a direct competitor to Quest.

Still I think people REALLY underestimate this space. First gaming has an outrageous TAM and VR games are GOOD. Second AR has an even bigger market, and I’ve realized that it’s not just about giving us all a HUD to walk around with, it’s also going to about having an AI assistant get information in the environment around us with a camera.

Sometimes boosting profits and dividends is the right play if the company isn’t set up to innovate. Innovation isn’t for every company and it’s good that some boards focus on redistributing profits.

It does help to have billions to invest. AMD in the last 20 years was basically broke and they bet the farm on Zen. If they split their limited resources between Zen and CUDA they probably would have failed at both.

But their Zen bet has paid off and now they're playing catch up.

Intel, OTOH, I'm not sure what their excuse is.

IMHO, Intel lost a couple of years because the CEO had a consensual affair with a subordinate so they fired him and put the CFO in charge for a while and puttered around unable to fix the serious process manufacturing problems getting to 10nm they encountered which caused them to fall behind in manufacturing to TSMC. Finally, after a few years of little progress, Gelsinger was hired, and we'll see what he can do.

If the process worked out Brian wouldn’t get fired, probably. The affair was very convenient for the board.

Intel had grown accustomed to internal mediocrity and got too big to root it out; the fact that accounting runs the company instead of someone with a vision doesn’t help. Accounting doesn’t like risky bets and Intel needed some to work out instead of cancelling everything left and right.

It seems pretty possible to me that the reason Nvidia pulled off this bet is that Jensen still basically unilaterally controls what NV is working on, and Jensen is still fundamentally a nerd (in the best way).

>It does help to have billions to invest. AMD in the last 20 years was basically broke

You're making it sound like AMD being broke at that time was some unfortunate accident due to external events, and not the result of their own blunders.

Nvidia had billions due to great products and great business decisions on their part, and AMD was broke entirely due to it's own actions, by having average products on the CPU side and making bad business decisions at the time by spending way too much money acquiring ATI, and then selling off their golden goose, the Imageon mobile GPU division to Qualcomm for pennies right at the beginning of the smartphone revolution.

It's a miracle they managed to turn things around and not end up like SGI and 3dfx, bankrupt and having their carcass devoured by Intel and Nvidia.

While AMD did make mistakes, there were external factors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....

Maybe what happened to Intel is what happened to GE under Jack Welch. Edit: just saw the CFO put in charge reference in other comment. There's your answer: financialization of the company.

I think it is obviously true that they have worked hard and built great devices. That was evident even when they only sold products for gaming. But this is what most companies do, or try to do: take their core products and invest in making them better. CUDA was impressive but not shocking.

When people say it's luck, I think they are reacting to the reality that Nvidia couldn't know, when they were doing this investing, that there was a big AI market waiting to take off. They were doing good work, but they were also very, very lucky that circumstances granted them this opportunity. There is no shame in that -- few companies achieve great success without some opportunity manifesting.

But it's a mistake to pat yourself on the back too hard, either. Without the opportunity, they'd still be making gpus with some other applications.

As you note, the "luck" debate often bogs down into a false dichotomy of extremes when the reality is usually in-between and complicated. In my experience, most people (and companies) have the opportunity to encounter approximately similar amounts of "good" and "bad" luck, when averaged over the long run. However...

* This is gated by the ability to recognize those opportunities when they appear, willingness to act decisively to maximize the probability of positive outcomes and the preparedness to exploit such advantages. This tends to require mental preparedness, emotional maturity and a willingness to invest scarce resources and/or time - in advance - toward maintaining situational awareness and some excess reserve resources. Doing this is hard but these traits are learnable.

* Similarly, a portion of available conscious effort and scarce resources must be continuously expended toward being resilient to bad luck when it inevitably strikes. The net impact of misfortune can vary substantially depending on mitigation steps taken in advance. This requires accurate awareness of ambient risk factors and careful balancing of where you choose to place your limited 'air bags' and 'ounces of prevention.'

Most of these things are at least somewhat within your ability to influence, with the exception of initial conditions. At the "opening deal" of life some people are dealt better cards and some people are dealt worse cards. This is not fair, but it is what it is. The silver-lining is that, after the initial cards are dealt, it can still be a long game with many rounds. How you choose to play the cards you have in each of those rounds can lead to substantially different outcomes. Because it's a game like poker with randomness, hidden variables, subtle cues and second-order probabilities - it's easy to conclude it's almost all luck. This is unfortunate because not understanding the 'meta' of the game, or even knowing there is a meta, does make it mostly luck for some.

I think NVidia's 'good fortune' is the cumulative result of playing the meta-game effectively for a long-time and thus leading to them having the capability to maximize their outcomes when eventually finding themselves in a high-opportunity environment (aka "lucky").

Re: Intel, it's worth mentioning their Phi coprocessor board. They zig-ed when they should have zag-ed. The Phi essentially had thousands of i486 CPUs on it, but apparently that isn't as useful for ML because (apparently) it's all about the FLOPs, whereas the less-mathematical but more logical Phi cores could do (something?) better?

I just think it's an honorable mention because had things gone a little differently, perhaps Intel could have been king of the hill instead.

Intel didn't just miss by a little, they missed by a lot. Nvidia has more software engineers than hardware engineers. Building the software ecosystem is the thing that makes the whole thing work. Intel didn't just have the wrong product with Phi, they had a product with no ecosystem. It was impossible to develop for. None of Nvidia's competitors have a serious answer to the ecosystem problem. Its not clear that Intel has even ever understood this.

Intel has had more software engineers than hardware since forever. They know the ecosystem argument in and out - they made x86, they are the argument.

They lost the process lead and can’t figure it out for almost a decade now - we wouldn’t be having this discussion if their hardware worked out according to their plans.

> Nvidia has more software engineers than hardware engineers. Building the software ecosystem is the thing that makes the whole thing work.

One thing I never see people discuss in the context is that from the beginning NVidia drivers were closed source while Intel drivers were open source. If you don't see software as a competitive advantage that obviously limits the resources you can invest in it. Linus Torvalds said "Fuck you, NVidia" but who's fucked now?

> success from Nvidia was because of, if you read 90% of HN comments for the past 2 years; Luck.

Never once read a comment attributing Nvidia success to luck.

The only luck Nvidia has is the luck that AMD fell asleep at the wheel and couldn't get bothered to put more than 2 engineers on a CUDA competitor even when it was getting apparent that AI was worth billions (i.e. ~4-5 years ago).

An example is the top level comment immediately below this thread (on my screen at least): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721311

“No, Nvidia just found themselves in a lucky situation.”

which means they had reasons for doing what they did and found themselves well positioned for ML/AI but that those reasons were not specifically ML/AI.

You have to keep in mind that for a long time concurrency was thought of as the only way to keep getting increasing performance out of CPU's, what they invested in is massive concurrency and when ML/AI hit they were well-positioned for it due to their investments in massive concurrency.

> Never once read a comment attributing Nvidia success to luck.

The vast majority of the comments on this article prior to the one you were replying to were attributing it solely/largely to luck.

Yeah, I wouldn't call it just luck, but I refuse to accept that they saw AI coming and blowing up like that any more than anybody else. It worked out for them that they created cuda (btw how much of that was related to acquiring that company that made physX and the according accelerator card?) and decided to stick with it, improve on it, and supply developers with superb tools. But again, I don't think there ever specifically was AI in that planning. It seemed like a step-by-step thing, provide additional value eg to games with physics simulation that would give gamers a reason to buy Nvidia over ati (as if driver quality alone wasn't already a strong argument ;)).

The wise decision was to keep pushing cuda and not dropping the ball on it to cut costs in the short run, and realizing the potential of using it for scientific computation early on. Then one thing led to another. When AI came around, cuda was the only mature and serious framework for the job.

But it has nothing to do with AI, it was an investment in optimized hard for floating point calculations for completely unrelated applications to AI. Not that they don't deserve it. It's great hardware. But it would be a shame for them to tie their business to AI and then there is a huge bust from creditors who realize that LLMs don't really do anything.

The hand wringing about luck can be annoying. Bringing it up is mostly useful to empathize with other people and be humble. Hard work without luck rarely works out. But luck without hard work rarely works out either (unless you're insanely lucky). Never doing anything because "luck" will guarantee you're never lucky.

Use luck to be humble, use luck to empathize, use luck to build people up, but don't use luck to tear people down.

Yes many are very eager to blame the winner, usually without seeing the work that took them there, and even more relevant, the competition keeps doing a mess.

Precisely. And this isn't just about Nvidia either. It is every single topic on successful companies. These sort of discussion are common or the norm on 99.999999999% of internet. But we are on HN, the bar needs to be higher, a lot higher. And I cant accept this without some rebuttal.

At least judging from the upvote it does seems I have the backing from silent majority. All is not lost.

Well it’s just another variation of overnight success taking a decade or two of preparation and, honestly, quiet pain and suffering.

I remember talking to Jason Fried about this with 37 signals. A lot of people didn’t realize the grind that team had before things finally clicked.

It’s a common pattern to see people gloss over the insane lengths and foresite required to achieve overnight success. :)

Luck is spelled W.O.R.K.

This is the first time I saw a high school football coach comment on HN

not luck, but the idea that they predicted the ML/AI renaissance 10-20 years out is laughable considering it was google that kicked it off because google had big data and showed it could be done.

They had their reasons for doing what they did and I'm sure they eventually realized they were well positioned for ML/AI, but there's no way they planned that out before ML/AI was a viable thing.

believe it or not they did predict it 10 years out, NVIDIA bet the farm on AI/ML after seeing AlexNet. This has been covered in other articles too.

And sure, AlexNet was good but remember this is the maxwell days, tensor cores aren't even a thing yet, it was at minimum a very bold bet on the basis of "some image classifier model thing". Nobody else saw it as more than an academic toy (obviously, or they'd have jumped in too).

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua...

> Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me.

> The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”

I said 10-20 years out because 10 years out, yes, it was starting to become obvious, but their journey started long before that.

10 years out is 2014.

It wasn't obvious. Otherwise it wouldn't be a bet! Everyone and their dog would want to be deep in the game, like what's going on with LLM at the moment. Nvidia revenue and R&D budget has traditionally been, and still are, smaller compared to Intel. Likely to AMD as well.

obvious might be too strong, but at that point the tea leaves were starting to take shape for those that were watching.

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