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Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative?

183 points spacebanana7 | 20 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

I appreciate developing ROCm into something competitive with CUDA would require a lot of work, both internally within AMD and with external contributions to the relevant open source libraries.

However the amount of resources at stake is incredible. The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain. Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each, it'd still be a good investment.

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johnnyjeans ◴[01 Apr 25 14:53 UTC] No.43547510[source]▶
> The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain.

Nvidia is massively overvalued right now. AI has rocketed them into absolute absurdity, and it's not sustainable. Put aside the actual technology for a second and realize that public image of AI is at rock bottom. Every single time a company puts out AI-generated materials, they receive immense public backlash. That's not going away any time soon and it's only likely to get worse.

Speaking as someone that's not even remotely anti-AI, I wouldn't touch the shit with a 10 foot pole because of how bad the public image is. The moment that capital realizes this, that bubble is going to pop and it's going to pop hard.

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1. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 14:57 UTC] No.43547559[source]▶
You state this very confidently. Are you shorting Nvidia stock? If not, why not?
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2. chrisan ◴[01 Apr 25 15:01 UTC] No.43547619[source]▶
You imply you either would believe his word or would short nvidia yourself if he said he was. If not, why not?
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3. jayd16 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:04 UTC] No.43547659[source]▶
You can believe a stock is overvalued and also believe it will stay that way.
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4. bee_rider ◴[01 Apr 25 15:09 UTC] No.43547716[source]▶
I see this form of argument sometimes here but I really don’t get it.

Lots of people don’t play the stock market or just invest in funds. It seems like just a way of challenging somebody that looks vaguely clever, or calls them out in a “put your money where your mouth is” sense, but actually presents no argument.

Anyway, if you want to short Nvidia you have to know when their bubble is going to pop to get much benefit out of it, right? The market can remain stupid for longer than you can remain solvent or whatever.

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5. spacebanana7 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:15 UTC] No.43547803[source]▶
The market can stay stupid for longer than we can stay liquid.
6. johnnyjeans ◴[01 Apr 25 15:19 UTC] No.43547847[source]▶
I forbid myself from speculative trading as a consequence of idiosyncratic principles that I live my life by. One of many symbolic rejections of toxic profiteering that infests our neo-mercantile society. I have enough digits in my bank account that adding any more would be unambiguously greedy and distasteful, so in the end it would be violating my principles simply to debase myself. No thanks.

Anyways you'd need some kind of window of when a stock is going to collapse to short it. Good luck predicting this one.

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7. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:20 UTC] No.43547856[source]▶
Close - If I had the degree of confidence that post implies about Nvidia being overvalued, I would take an aggressive short position.
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8. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:20 UTC] No.43547867[source]▶
I agree; that's not what the post implies: > that bubble is going to pop and it's going to pop hard.
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9. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:22 UTC] No.43547885[source]▶
I respect, and adore your philosophy.

For a short, I think you don't need that strong of a window. For an options combination, yes.

10. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:26 UTC] No.43547942[source]▶
Spot on on the timing being important. I don't think you need to fine-tune it that much; short and hold until the pop happens. If you hold off for a the pop could happen at an indefinite time; maybe very far from now, then I think that invalidates the individual prediction.

One frustrating aspect of investing is that confident information is tough to come by. It's my take that if you have any (I personally rarely do), you should act on it. So, when someone claims confidently (e.g. with adjectives that imply confidence) that something's going to happen, then that's better than the default.

I don't have the insight the claimer does; my thought is: "I am jealous. I with I could be that confident about a stock's trajectory. I would act on it."

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11. dagw ◴[01 Apr 25 15:27 UTC] No.43547944{3}[source]▶
I would take an aggressive short position.

Lots of very smart people have lost a lot of money by being completely right about the destination, but wrong about the path and how long it will take to get there.

12. jayd16 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:30 UTC] No.43547984{3}[source]▶
But they didn't say soon.
13. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:31 UTC] No.43547996{3}[source]▶
> Lots of very smart people have lost a lot of money by being completely right about the destination, but wrong about the path and how long it will take to get there.

If you make a habit of this and still lose money, then either you statistically were very unlucky, or did not have a history of being right.

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14. the__alchemist ◴[01 Apr 25 15:32 UTC] No.43548013{3}[source]▶
> But they didn't say soon.

Setting an indefinite timeline devalues any claim. You could prove this to yourself using Reductio ad absurdum, or by applying it to various general cases.

15. ◴[01 Apr 25 15:43 UTC] No.43548153{3}[source]▶
16. themaninthedark ◴[01 Apr 25 15:58 UTC] No.43548338{3}[source]▶
I was a student up until 2009; watching people talk about buying houses for 50K and selling them for 100K, everyone talking about easy money.

I knew things were bad when a friend of my sister was complaining that her father(a building framer) was not able to get a loan for a 500K house, something that his colleagues had been able to get. It took another 6 months before the collapse started to hit and the banks when up.

Timing is hard.

17. dagw ◴[01 Apr 25 18:48 UTC] No.43550152{4}[source]▶
The 'fun' things with shorts is that they have a fixed upside and infinite downside (ie if you go short $1000, the most you can earn is $1000, but you could lose any amount of money and much more than you invested. This is the opposite of buying a stock, where if you invest $1000, the most you can lose is $1000, but there is no limit to how much you can earn). You can be perfectly right 9 times out of 10, but that 1 time you're wrong can quickly wipe out everything you made from being right those 9 times.
18. mancerayder ◴[02 Apr 25 02:25 UTC] No.43553158[source]▶
I agree with most everything you said, but the timing doesn't have to be exact and you don't have to short the stock to profit on its downfall. You can buy long-dated puts. Alas, they're not cheap because the risk is very real.
19. pointyfence ◴[03 Apr 25 05:28 UTC] No.43565113{3}[source]▶
What you're describing is what Nassim Taleb calls "tawkers." People like economists, journalists, pundits, etc. who talk big but don't have any skin in the game for being wrong or irrelevant (time is a great example). Since there is no feedback loop to punish bad or irrelevant takes, they can continue tawking for a long time.

When I have similarly strong opinions, I do act on it because I enjoy seeing how right or wrong I was. Markets are a harsh, expensive teacher. You either learn a trick or two about uncertainty, overconfidence, humility, etc, or you run out of money.

I think you're better at it than you're letting on even if you decided to not play. You already understand the properties of the game.

20. ActorNightly ◴[03 Apr 25 07:10 UTC] No.43565915[source]▶
You can short over any period of time. You just pay interest for borrowing the stock.

Basically, its a really good question to ask, because even in the case that the person doesn't have investments because they don't play the stock market, it shows that they are not motivated enough to actually go short the security, which means that they truly aren't that sure.