Weekend Warp

This week, there’s a new superhero in town, and he has swept Nadella, Altman, and even Musk, off the floor. His name is Huang. Jensen Huang .

Insane does not even begin to describe the performance of his company, 英伟达 . A year back, it was valued at $400mn, it ended this week at $2.5trn – the third most valuable company on Planet Earth. At this scale, it notched up a 262% growth (yes, not decimal points there) over last quarter bringing in revenue of $26bn. The YoY datacenter revenue shot up 427%, and if that was not enough, the net income was up 628% YoY at $14.9bn! My jaw refused to rise from the floor. Equally remarkable is how Nvidia has become the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom. It is not that it made chips or GPUs which happened to be just perfect for GenAI and Large Language Models. Its GPUs first rode the gaming boom, then pivoted smartly to ride the crypto horse, and then, again, pivoted to capitalize on the biggest of them all – AI and GenAI. You can be lucky once, but when it happens three times, you know that you are making your own luck. Read more here and a fascinating longer story on Huang and Nvidia here .

How long do you think before it becomes the most valuable company on Earth?

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The other AI giant, 谷歌 , on the other hand, does not seem to be having a good week with GenAI. Make that a year. At one hand, Google DeepMind is turning out blockbuster innovations with good old deep learning and machine learning but, on the other, its travails with GenAI, a technology they ‘invented’ continue. Its I/O last week had ‘AI Everywhere’ (I wrote about it here ), but the key dominant announcement on Search Overview is turning out to be another PR nightmare for them. Search Overview was about infusing GenAI in Google Search, so that it gives answers to your questions rather than just 10 blue links. Well a bunch of answers are embarrassing – Barack Obama is a Muslim, Kenya does not exist, pythons are mammals, and it is good to put a glue stick in pizza! Let’s see how they squirm out of this one.

Read more here

Another AI supernova which flamed out a little bit this week was none other than OpenAI . Sam Altman had gleefully tweeted a single word ‘Her’ when his company launched GPT4o . The reference was to the movie Her where the led actor falls in love with an AI avatar, whose very attractive voice was Scarlett Johansson. The movie was a hit, and OpenAI created a similar voice with its voice avatar Sky. While GPT4o did succeed in breaking the Sound Turing Test , people soon discovered the similarity and Johansson spoke out threatening to sue OpenAI. It seems she had been approached for lending her voice, she refused, but OpenAI went ahead and created a similar voice anyway. This raises extremely thorny ethics and copyright issues, on the ownership of voice, mannerisms, looks, creations, art, and writing by human beings, and what will happen to this ownership in the coming age of AI. This time, the human won. Open AI cancelled Sky. ?Arrogance clashed with grace, and was duly pulverized.

Read more here

The space is certainly heating up….at warp speed