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Comment by highcountess | Hacker News Reader

Is it fair to assume that Nvidia actually has some legs to stand on even after this AI pop and as possible real competitors come to market? Are there real competitors to Nvidia?

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AMD is way behind. But one kind of competition that's going to more important in a year or two is that the huge companies (Meta, Google, Amazon) are working on their own AI chips, designed to run their workloads at lower cost (time and power) than they'd get from Nvidia. So data centers might wind up full of non-Nvidia chips, and Amazon may make them available to their customers. But they will probably be less flexible.

Here's what Meta says they are doing: https://ai.meta.com/blog/next-generation-meta-training-infer...

Is AMD behind hyperscaler in-house efforts? Outside of Google I don't think so.

In many cases they are doing their own designs (done by engineers they hired away from the various electronics companies) and having either TSMC or Intel fab the chips for them. They can design specifically for their workloads to get better price/performance than they can buy from AMD or Nvidia.

Maybe, maybe not - but are they on more solid footing than Intel? Undoubtedly.

It will not be unprofitable company, but I think key understanding is that current profits and revenue levels are unlikely to hold to infinity. So there is very little risk of bankruptcy.

AMD, Groq in the future, TMSC?

Edit: I will add Apple.

Groq has already been around for 8 years, and they have just over one ten-thousandth the revenue of Nvidia. They're also hemorrhaging money, their annual spend is 30x their revenue. Probably they'll get acquired into someone else in a few years. *Especially* since we're discussing the scenario of the AI bubble popping, Groq would implode.

The other two, sure.

Already 8 years and being non profitable is forgivable for a hardware startup creating something new, especially a new silicon.

Depends why they are losing money. But losing money alone is not bad. This ain't an ice cream truck.

Agree groq implodes if demand for intellegent automation tanks (i.e. bubble burst), or competitors disrupt the disruptor. Another Z is all you need paper means my old laptop is running models fast or something means groq is not something you need.

They can probably pivot.

BTW OpenAI is 9 years old and they are a SaaS/PaaS running on Azure.

> Another Z is all you need paper means my old laptop is running models fast or something means groq is not something you need.

I’m having trouble parsing that sentence. Is it missing some punctuation?

They're referencing papers like "Attention is all you need", where such papers have usually made AI models significantly faster/better. Better/faster models means great models running well on old hardware, obviating the need for specialized hardware.

More punctuation would look like:

> Another "Z is all you need" paper means my old laptop is running models fast or something, [therefore] means groq is not something you need.

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