Nvidia to Acquire Run:AI
blogs.nvidia.com
blogs.nvidia.com
Basically Nvidia coming out with managed AI services on DGX cloud
From 2023: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-dgx-cloud...
"NVIDIA is partnering with leading cloud service providers to host DGX Cloud infrastructure, starting with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Its OCI Supercluster provides a purpose-built RDMA network, bare-metal compute and high-performance local and block storage that can scale to superclusters of over 32,000 GPUs.
Microsoft Azure is expected to begin hosting DGX Cloud next quarter, and the service will soon expand to Google Cloud and more."
If they wanted to acquire an ML chip company, sure, but I/P/SaaS value adds will probably sail through.
It's amazing that a company known for video game graphics cards is now a $2 trillion company. Nvidia's market cap ( over 2 trillion ) is the 2nd biggest of the FAANG+. It's bigger than Google. It's bigger than Amazon. Only Apple has a bigger market cap. And most of nvidia's market cap gains has been in the past year. It's unique for being the only predominantly hardware company of the group.
But even if we set that aside you’ll get access to your data over a network connection because these are expensive nodes running batch jobs with finite disk space, not personal workstations.
Generally yes, but you can do (PCI) pass-through of GPUs to VMs and containers and such, so it is not strictly necessary.
It's pretty difficult to come up with examples of acquisitions or mergers that resulted in something positive for the market and society at large.
As for M&A being universally bad, I’m not sure where to start with that? I don’t think there’s a single notable company in existence that hasn’t made successful acquisitions. The economic benefits of Shell have surely been greater since they moved on from the seashell importing business. Apple created much value with their purchase of failing NeXT.
So nvidia can rest assured that nobody will touch them, or at least impede their progress significantly.
For such a small country, they keep churning out tons of successful companies that get acquired by larger American and European counterparts.
I’m suspecting high levels of education plus a culture that encourages entrepreneurship and risk-taking, but there might be more to the story..
Another is network effect. The same way that Silicon Valley has a lot of very successful startups. Once you have a few in a region, it creates a knock on effect.
It inspires people to follow suite. It means there’s more money being pushed around in that area. It means there’s more people looking at developments in that area. Often someone may be lower down in one successful startup and then leave to make their own with the experience of how to do it.
There is something to be said about spending 18-21 in the military, there is pretty much 0 partying during college (that is done during military vacations + the gap year between military and college). By the time you've finished your Bachelors degree you're 25-26 and ready to settle down. You hit your full time job life 6-8 years after high school. Its a very different mindset
I look at the 22 year olds moving to NYC after college for their first job, and there is such a huge difference in what they're looking for in their day to day lives. Their job is probably the last thing they are about
When it comes to deals, there is also, frankly, a large Jewish funding/investing community. The hard part of getting deals is who you know.
There are obviously many more countries that make the average American or European tech worker seem lazy, but for some of them working a 60-80 hour week is about showing you're working rather than doing important work
From my experience its not strictly the hours put in per week driving Israeli startups, but actually delivering what customers are asking for. I've been in many calls where the executives promised a complex feature that hasn't even been planned yet be delivered very soon, and somehow the team is able to complete it with careful planning and prioritizing (and putting in the hours)
The executives dont shy away from the grind either, im now on the other side (US corporate) and Israeli startup CEO/CTOs are basically available for every concern I have 24/7, even when I dont expect them to answer they do
I have also experienced this. Given Israel is the opposite side of the world from California, mainly I expect if I ask a question in the afternoon there will be an answer ready in the morning. But surprisingly often, they answer immediately.
The harder problem is actually that the work week is Sun-Fri instead of Mon-Sun, which means there's days when people just aren't working. This is also sometimes a good thing though - Israelis will have put in a full day of work while everyone else was out for the weekend.
Probably by a pretty large margin, too.
Weizmann institute of science is the envy of the world in terms of their research output, and widely used as a model for new research institutes to aspire to.
When they finish, a huge network of Unit 8200 alumni who are already rich have a shared experience with these kids, and are ready to invest in any idea these kids have. They have a tight-knit group of incredibly smart colleagues as well, from their time in the military.
This is of course greatly exaggerated. I know plenty of Israeli startups that never had 8200 grads in them, mine included. I actually think that the role of a specific army unit in creating the environment that fosters these startups is really hyped. It's much more of a cultural thing than some random army unit.
Israel spends 5.3% of their GDP on military. That's more than almost any other country in the world and they have spent a lot for many decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
Israelis perpetually do.
I sincerely hope this is bait, because the answer is obvious.
(I am genuinely asking)
Hitler saw the Jews as an existential threat, not as objectively inferior to "Aryans". In fact, this is why he hated them so much above anyone else; he thought that they were the only "Race" that had the potential to out-compete his "Aryans".
We're veering terribly off topic, but I'm pretty sure this is not historically true.
Success in startup space is more about motivation in terms of pushing harder than others, and support system that gives you a higher chance to make correct decisions.
Not necessarily genius-level but being smart I'm sure helps. You might not need it, in the sense that there certainly are counter-examples, but yeah, on the big numbers it's pretty obvious that it's an advantage.
This isn't "indisputable," it's nonsense.
And, even if you take the popular position that objectively extraordinary Jewish achievements are all due to education- see for example here: [1] - the bottom line doesn't change- there are more higher achievers in the Jewish population.
Nitpick: note that I'm not attributing anything to you, that would surely be racist. Every individual is different and needs to be judged on his or her own merits. Also, the Mein Kampf guy is the other one :)
[1] https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/why-are-there-so-many-jewish...
And the argument could be made that this is nothing to do with genes but instead a response to handicaps placed on our people since time immemorial by those who want us to fail.
This is interesting, because it's precisely such handicaps that could explain a genetic component to Jewish performance. And the Ashkenazi in particular.
If a population is banned, for hundreds of years, from owning land and working as farmers, that creates a very significant selection pressure for finding other ways to survive. Those not able to do so either died off or converted to Christianity.
And it just happened to be that most other livelihoods available to them required more mental capacity than farming.
Also, as you say, this is at the population level. It's perfectly possible for Jews to have average or below intelligence. It's simply a lot more likely for an Ashkenazi Jew to have an IQ of 160 than for other Europeans (or other Jewish groups).
My personal opinion is huge talent density, a just-get-it-done attitude, strong network effects from military service and a small number of universities, and a lot of startup experience across the board - if you're an entrepreneur in Tel Aviv, it's relatively easy to find people who've done it before multiple times, and they'll give you good advice.
Another part of it is definitely the benefits from having a strong high-trust culture that gives them access to social networks and a priority to provide for the group as a whole not just their own personal interests.
I would not be surprised if Israel has a significantly larger percentage of people with IQ>140 than any other nation.
however i wouldn't get too caught up with extrapolations, they are usually wrong (see population bomb)
Of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2023,[1] at least 214 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. For comparison, 65.4% of Nobel prize winners were either Christians or had a Christian background. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
But if you consider it this way: The Nobel price was given mostly to white people (including Jews) until about 1970. That's a factor of 10 already.
Then you consider that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of about 115 vs other Europeans somewhere south of 100 on average.
If the standard deviation is a constant 15, a population with a mean of 100 has about 0.4% of the population with an IQ >140. Increase the mean to 115, and that grows to about 5%. That's another factor of 10. And the gap widens as the threshold increases.
This seems to fit the 110x almost perfectly.
Disclaimer: I have no Jewish ancestry that I'm aware of.
Edit: Also, to my knowledge, the Nobel committee has NOT been dominated by Jews.
Most Nobel Laureates in the sciences are highly intelligent, so they exist on that tail.
Basically, if you sample from the top 13% from a normal distribution with (mean, std)=(100,15) you get fewer with 140+ than if you sample from one with (mean, std)=(115,15), and the higher the intelligence, the bigger the difference will be.
This follows from the squaring of the exponential term in the standard distribution.
While it's possible that the shape or standard deviations for various population doesn't match my assumptions, but if they do, the observed number of Nobel prizes given to Jews is very close to what one would expect.
If one person consistently runs 0.1s faster than everyone else, they can win 100x the races of the next best person without being 100x better.
Nobel prizes, like running races, are winner take all. The person in 100th place doesn't get any points proportional to how good their proposal is.
Same effect was seen in USA during the space race.
At some point USA just “gave up” and ceded all control to private corporations which don’t give a shit about the people and only care about the bottom line
It's this plus being a small country. The entire population of Israel is roughly the same as the Bay Area, so everyone is 2-3 degrees away from each other. This makes it easier to raise capital and build a startup.
The success of Checkpoint and PANW kickstarted the scene.
If you surround yourself by friends who all do that one thing and are all driven to be good at that thing, you will be motivated to do the same thing and get good at it, and motivate other people in turn.
Silicon Valley used to be like this.
There's also the small matter of $200bn in US military assistance since 1973, which involved significant knowledge transfer across many different scientific and engineering domains.
1. Foreign Jewish VCs pumped money into it, gave the founders plenty of autonomy.
2. The internal network of the founders to other successful Jews was gigantic. Even if they're unimpressive themselves.
Essentially easy access to capital + domestic and international network that can facilitate success. It's a nationalized version of YC.