On the Jensen Dwarkesh Interview
Let me preface this by saying that i've finally managed to find a podcast i will actively listen to, In Himanshu/Groundzero and Dwarkesh.
I think Jensen's response on the Dwarkesh interview was kinda weak-sauce and made him look scared even though I think it was the most "honest" answer. Nvidia needs to expand evermore. There is no other option.
If they can get a decent grasp on China and be able to freely sell them GPUs, even if China develops their own, they stand a chance at being an extra choice in the free market. Nvidia is both "doesn't need to compete" and "needs to compete" because... well they own all major AI labs with a chokehold, BUT if they don't compete with offerings for TPUs and ASICs, and Chinese GPUs - they'll lose. If they don't maintain the software moat of CUDA, they lose.
This quote is something I was discussing by saying... China doesn't need compute because what goes into making a majorly large model like Mythos is both good data and arch choices. It was once thought hard to pretrain and do what DeepSeek did on their compute budget, but they did do it. Same will be true for Mythos and Chinese GPUs not far down the line.
Jensen is right in that DeepSeek wasn't a random jump. Of course, then he goes on to say that they should sell more compute to lock them into Nvidia (which is a good position for Nvidia, so yeah), and while it's not accurate to say they can't really compete, a better answer would've been... we don't need to compete in China. Not at all.
This is what i would've said akin to: "You don't need to capture every market. Will they do good things, sure, but they'll do them a different way and people don't like change — they will stick to what they know. There's no point in wasting time in a niche regional market when you own the rest of the world. It'd be a sucker's bet."
Two main reasons: one, a company as a whole should not and cannot make a hold on this type of commodity — a real problem real companies really have had that killed them. They captured the ENTIRE market and no one was left since they had no new markets to potentially break into, growth stalled, and they were abandoned. I don't think this should happen with Nvidia. Two, Nvidia can afford to do this right. No matter how salty they are over other labs switching to TPUs and Trainium, they can very much afford to look them in the eyes and tell them to fuck off to their faces because they are filthy rich. They are not losers. Jensen makes this very clear. I don't think so either, Neither should anyone with a sane mind, So they shouldn't attempt to look like ones either.