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Comment by 2sk21 | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia of today reminds me a lot of Cisco of thirty years ago. Back then when the Internet was starting to take off, Cisco was one of the few companies actually making any money from the Internet. The frenzy to buy Cisco was intense. Thirty years later, Cisco still exists but absolutely nobody is excited about them.

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> Thirty years later, Cisco still exists but absolutely nobody is excited about them.

What is the lesson you take from this, though?

To me, the lesson is that "Predicting the future is hard." No matter how well you're doing, you still need to make some sort of prediction of the future to stay on top.

If you get $2 billion and want to stay a billionaire, you can bury it underground and predict that inflation will be minimal, or you can invest it and predict that investments will be profitable. Either prediction could be wrong. (But they're not equally likely.)

In that same vein, even though Cisco was printing money, the world changed. The world will always change. It's not necessarily a failure that they couldn't predict and invent the next money printer.

For Nvidia to become like Cisco we need 2 things. 1. AI will become easy at all level with no big revolution and 2. Nvidia will not diversify and invest in the next big thing. I am not sure of 1 but certainly not 2. Maybe if the next big thing has nothing to do with computer hardware or AI.

My point is that while Cisco was an early winner, Amazon and Google started growing a few years later and were much larger winners in the end. I think there is a possibility that history may repeat with Nvidia -but I have no idea what new companies are going to rise in the AI era.

There's a world of difference between building networking equipment and GPUs though.

While Cisco was THE brand at the right moment, they didn't have any secret sauce.

Nvidia though (sadly), the industry has been playing catch-up with them forever.

Nvidia does admittedly have a lock on the market at the CUDA level but not necessarily at the Pytorch level.

Because now the competitors have caught up.

And this will happen to NVIDIA as well, but it might be a slower pace as NVIDIA tech is more expensive to develop than Cisco's

The question is how much of the gains from advances in AI the current leaders will be able to capture. I'm actually guessing more than in the Internet boom peaking in 2000 but I'm not actually sure. If the players remain static we might see more custom silicon designed by them the way Google does with its TPUs which is why I'm not putting too many eggs in the NVidia basket but also Broadcomm, TSMC, etc.

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