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They bought them for the streaming service that came with it. Not for fake weights in headphones.

Streaming service?


Love this kind of behind the scenes -- thanks for sharing!

Personally, I think in a way you both ended up right. Content is king. But with the iPad (my favorite PDF viewer) as an important part of the Preview landscape now, I view the right side as where content should live.


I still love Opus but it's just too expensive / eats usage limits.

I've found that 5.3-Codex is mostly Opus quality but cheaper for daily use.

Curious to see if 5.4 will be worth somewhat higher costs, or if I'll stick to 5.3-Codex for the same reasons.


As long as both companies remain stable and viable, there's probably limited upside to pouring more money into them. If they fail, and bring down the AI ecosystem with them, that is very bad news for Nvidia. So they've been there nurturing their success and providing capital to backstop their exponential growth.

You can see Nvidia stepping in throughout the ecosystem with confidence boosting investments where needed. They haven't just supported Anthropic and OpenAI.

If OpenAI and Anthropic succeed, and get their business fly-wheels fully spinning, they don't necessarily need more capital from Huang. Ultimately the goal of Nvidia is to profit from their long-term success by selling them GPUs for a long, long time. The goal isn't to keep plowing money into them forever.


These days Nvidia has more money than it knows what to do with. They could certainly push $5b+ into each company annually and never miss it. They're tracking toward an astounding $200b in operating income (maybe over the next four quarters if the music doesn't suddenly stop).


They could buy back stock or, God forbid, pay good old dividends to investors instead of throwing money away.


Why would paying dividends not be like throwing money away for Nvidia, considering the alternative is to reinvest it into Nvidia's R&D, hiring & training, etc. Investors are already happily making money on NVDA stock appreciation, so what more would they gain from paying dividends?


because of the law of diminishing returns


More money?


> God forbid, pay good old dividends

As I understand it, stock buybacks are basically a better (tax advantaged) way to pay dividends


5 billion doesn't look like much when OpenAI just raised $110b though. And how sustainable is NVDA's immense profits if this bubble actually bursts?


It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”


> 5 billion doesn't look like much when OpenAI just raised $110b though.

Just about all of the AI providers "raises" are a fraction of the reported "raise", like this one.

They didn't "raise" $100b. They got commitments for $35b, with said commitments being dependent on meeting certain criteria.

Every "raise of $FOO" I've seen in the past year or two has not resulted in them getting their hands on $FOO in cash to spend.


You might be surprised to learn that there isn’t even $100b of cash [1]. Some sort of commitment structure necessarily substitutes.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USDIVCA


I can hardly believe that this is legal. They’re basically committing money that doesn’t exist just yet.


> I can hardly believe that this is legal. They’re basically committing money that doesn’t exist just yet.

What do you mean "just yet" :-)

I don't really know how likely it is that the money being committed will actually exist when the time comes (Softbank's commitment didn't exist, they had to sell off assets and rope in other investors to meet their commitments).

Maybe it is very likely to exist, but, really, who knows?

IOW, your statement would be equally true by ending the sentence at the word "exist".


would the correct read of this situation that they’re betting on the AI bubble popping?


> would the correct read of this situation that they’re betting on the AI bubble popping?

I really cannot tell. To be frank, I seriously doubt that they can tell either.


Vault cash are actual bills in vaults. It doesn't even include the bills in your wallet or under your mattress.

It's small because few people go to the bank to withdraw a suitcase of $100 bills, it's a weird time series to pull up because it's not really indicative of anything outside of narrow interests for regulators and the mint - it's probably some conspiracy theory trope from crypto bros or something.

Most money exists purely in electronic form these days.

Monetary base [0] which includes the digital money banks have on deposit at the Fed, is over $5 trillion, and even that is tiny compared to M1 [1] which includes the kinds of things backing your money market account, which is around $19T.

When money is invested, they're going to wire it, not pull up with wheelbarrows full of bills.

0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE 1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL


GP is wrong though, vault cash is the incorrect time series for that.

GP should have used Monetary Base if they wanted to consider purely electronic cash (that is not a result of any fractional reserve stuff at all), which is over $5T disproving their point.


> When money is invested, they're going to wire it, not pull up with wheelbarrows full of bills.

I think GP was making the point that the "money" doesn't exist even in electronic form.


That's what I was referring to. They're committing money they don't have in any monetary form at all. They're just promising they'll have it when it comes due. This is kind of like MLM.


Doesn't that show physical cash in bank vaults? Am I misunderstanding? That number would be utterly meaningless for this discussion.

Edit: I see this was covered in other replies


If the bubble bursts, having more money in OpenAI is worse for NVDA..


Agreed. I will add NV has product dominance - they don’t need to buy strategic MFN supplier status - why not deploy capital elsewhere?


You could get something smaller but have it closer to your face than 1m?

The sort of “visual impact” a screen can have is mostly a combination of what percentage of your FOV it consumes.

People think they’ve got a bunch of screen real estate when they buy a big TV to use as a monitor… and then they use it a twice or more the distance of a regular monitor.


It feels very nice on the eyes to have it at a certain distance.


Personally at this point my combined AI spend is the most expensive recurring monthly subscription I have, and that’s even with my company also paying for the AI tools I use at work.

If it weren’t subsidized I would pay more. Wouldn’t be happy about it but I would do it.

At this stage in the game I don’t really understand where this skepticism of the value these tools provides comes from.


> At this stage in the game I don’t really understand where this skepticism of the value these tools provides comes from.

Fear


I get it. I’m scared too. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.


Actually it is not about this stage. It is about the sustainability of this when training data runs out and there is less and less human generated content.

An echo cannot go on forever!


> Actually it is not about this stage. It is about the sustainability of this when training data runs out

This is an argument from 2024. Somehow, the models have continued to improve.

If they stopped improving today they are good enough as they already are to generate profound change.

The wave front is already visible, we’re just on the shore waiting for the impact.


When training data runs out, they usefulness will diminish quickly. They will still be useful for searching documents etc, but I guess they are not good at that even now.


When training data runs out, their usefulness will stop growing quickly. Why should their usefulness diminish?


Because they would not be up-to date with programming languages, tools, best practices etc.

May be there is some way to keep the model up-to date in less dramatic ways. But I think something gotto give..

I mean, even now the vibe coded stuff is reprehensible.


What? SoftBank has been investing in them repeatedly for years now.


This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations

Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.

Lazy.


I would guess there's not enough volume due to limited use-cases of the tech compared to more traditional screens.

The typical e-ink uses cases boil down to e-readers, dumb-phones, and hobbyists, which is not a huge market. Anything niche or specialized tends to carry a higher cost.


There are probably billions of e-ink price tags in supermarkets around the world, but I guess scaling it up is not easy?


Yeah. Everyone sort of assumes that not having personally written the code means they can’t debug it.

When is the last time you had an on call blow up that was actually your code?

Not that I’m some savant of code writing — but for me, pretty much never. It’s always something I’ve never touched that blows up on my Saturday night when I’m on call. Turns out it doesn’t really change much if it’s Sam who wrote it … or Claude.


The problem is you lose abilities if stop writing code completely.

There is a difference between a lector and an author


"hey coworker, I know your team wrote this, can you help?" Except there is no coworker, just Claude


Do you know what on call means?

It means Sam is 7 beers deep on Saturday night since you’re the one on call. He’s not responding to your slack messages.

Claude actually is there though, so that’s kind of nice.


Sam might be 7 beers deep, or maybe he's available. In my org, oncall is just who gets the 2am phone call. They can try to contact anyone else if needed.

Claude is there as long as you're paying,and I hope he doesn't hallucinate an answer.


> In my org, oncall is just who gets the 2am phone call. They can *try* to contact anyone else if needed.

Emphasis mine.

> Claude is there as long as you're paying

If you’re at a company that doesn’t pay for AI in the year 2026, you should find a new company.

> and I hope he doesn't hallucinate an answer.

Unlike human coworkers with a 100% success rate, naturally.


"Yeah our team wrote it but everyone who built that part of it has moved to different teams or companies since."


Yeah it happens, and it's not ideal, and now instead of a risk, it's a guarantee.


Yeah but now you get an LLM to help you understand the code base 100x faster.

Remember, they're not just good for writing code. They're amazing at reading code and explaining to you how the architecture works, the main design decisions, how the files fit together, etc.


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