One, coincidences happen all the time. Two, the world is always undergoing some sort of event that would make you go, "the timing is suspicious". There, distributed systems are hard.
> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created
That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.
If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.
>> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created
>That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
I can assure you that the people you are targeting the question at, have never/rarely done any of the things you asked. I call them the socialists. They sit in judgment of people who do things while they lead their petty lives and all they look forward is the next Superbowl game, or next Netflix series.
(p.s you might like the writings of author by name Ayn Rand, Disclaimer: I'm no worshiper of Rand)
This is hilarious because Jensen’s idea of leadership is petty authoritarianism. I’m not sure if this is just HN being emotionally bought in to great man theory or financially bought in to NVDA, but most of their value creation is on the back of gamer chips being useful for crypto and later AI.
> That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.
You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.
Sorry, what hard decisions did Jensen make, exactly? "Hey team, I'm going to make the tough decision here to propose that next year's GPU is faster than last years"?
Do you know for sure that Jensen personally was involved in recruiting Ian Buck and starting up the CUDA project? A project that's largely attributed to John Nickolls? What other major decisions did Nvidia even make over the last, say, 15 years?
The decision to support CUDA and include it in retail GPUs so that he could create a massive installed base, even in the face of criticism and loss of stock value, for years. Sort of like Tesla building superchargers to cause BEVs to become viable.
I also agree that he shouldn't be workshipped. Most billionaires are very flawed people. And Jensen also isn't 10,000x better than average.
Here's a list of decisions where Jensen most likely played a huge personal role in and put the company where it is today:
1. Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem
2. Abandoning the first product’s architecture (1996–97). Nvidia’s first chip, the NV1, bet on a rendering approach the industry rejected. Huang scrapped it, laid off about half the staff, and put everything into the RIVA 128 with the company weeks from bankruptcy. It sold well and saved Nvidia.
3. GeForce and the “GPU” (1999): He launched the GeForce 256 and marketed it as the first “graphics processing unit”, defining the category. Nvidia went public the same year, then won the original Xbox contract and bought the assets of rival 3dfx.
4. CUDA (2006): Probably his most consequential bet. He put the hardware and software for general-purpose computing into every GPU, at large cost and with no clear market. Margins and the stock suffered for years, but it later locked in AI researchers.
5. Pivoting the company to AI (from about 2012): After the AlexNet breakthrough showed neural networks trained far faster on GPUs, he reoriented Nvidia around deep learning. In 2016 he hand-delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI.
6. Ray tracing (2018): He pushed RTX and the AI upscaling technology DLSS before games supported them, and both later became industry standards.
7. Buying Mellanox (2019, about $7B): This added data-centre networking and let Nvidia sell whole AI systems rather than just chips.
However, I believe Service-as-a-Software has a more powerful future. Business pay for shifting a problem to someone else (like hosting, or accounting, ...). The software isn't the solution, it's not what's valuable, the service is.
I asked before about rooftop solar because it seems so well suited to the US, especially the Southern US. Loads of large single family dwellings => each roof is owned by a single electricity bill payer, even if they're not owned outright because there's a mortgage, surely a lender can be prevailed upon to lend for Solar PV too?
Most of the EU has higher household electricity bills so rooftop solar makes faster economic sense. So that's probably part of it. A capital expenditure now which pays back in 5-10 years is quite different from one which pays back over 20 years.
I am still baffled that no electric car dealership worked out selling a garage covered in solar panels as a financing add-one for a new vehicle purchase --- even as a publicity stunt it seems the sort of thing one could have gotten a good bit of coverage with.
I have wondered about this actually - it would be amazing to have a single product which is a carport with preinstalled panels, non-grid-tied-inverter and charger. Then there's no electrical component of the installation on site, you just assemble. Most of the complications of installation would go away, you just concrete in four posts.
If nothing else, you could maybe get some sales leads (I'm assuming you run a building contractor/solar panel install business?) --- fall-back position buy the new car purchase information for the relevant zip codes? (this must be pretty inexpensive to purchase judging by the junk mail caused by my wife's new car purchase)
Solar’s payback time is poor, and comes close to lifetimes, leaving not much time for pure profit. Plus grid rules are bad and often hostile to individual solar, further breaking the economic model. And few have the extra income to spend on such long term returns.
Can you share some numbers? In Belgium I paid it back in 6 years. In South Africa where I live now, it'll take about 8 years. And as a big bonus it solved load shedding when that happened in 2023-2024.
I’m in Canada, payback on my 7.3kw system will be 7 years.
I got an interest free loan for the full cost, so nothing out of pocket, just putting the money I would have spent on electricity onto the loan for 7 years, the will profit $1000 a year for 20 years.
Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.
Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.
You'll have to be a bit more specific - is it export restrictions, or connection limits or what?
Even if you go for something that isn't grid tied then you're still breaking even within years if you spec it right.
Obviously if you've got grid electricity that's almost too cheap to meter than I wouldn't bother but for most of the western world the economics to not install solar simply aren't there.
I've been in Japan since 2015, but am from the US so that is where I had gotten most of my information. At the same time, I don't own a house and haven't been in a position where I had to decide solar vs. something else.
A lot of things have changed since then: EU taxes and duties, AI-induces HW shortages and price hikes. For example RPI prices today are untenable compared to a year ago.
That's why I asked about the prices of today. Whatever people paid in the past, is not necessarily applicable anymore.
What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?
Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/
1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
The timing is suspicious but could indeed be a coincidence.
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