I get the stupid basic excuse about big tech purchasing loads of silicon. That reasoning seems deeply flawed and idiotic to me. If Deepseek R1 democratizes training more for less, then that means customers with mid to small size data centers like universities now have access to train and research models in this space. Nvidia does not have a real competitor, so they get the sale. Their potential customer base just grew exponentially right? OpenAI should be devalued massively by this change, but I don’t see why anything impacts Nvidia negatively in this instance. Am I missing something or is the market this level of stupid? (I have no skin in this game)
R1 made waves for two reasons:
I think number 2 is what hit the nVidia stock so hard. Up until the R1 release, the future of AI development would require more GPU and more power. The R1 release showed maybe that isn’t the case.
Imagine everyone is out driving around in gas powered cars that get 4MPG. Then a new cheaper gas powered car comes out that gets 60MPG. What happens to the price of gas when the 60MPG car is released? Maybe it fluctuates? Maybe it goes down (less gas is needed due to the more efficient cars)? Maybe it goes up as there are more cars on the road (due to the cheaper entry cost)? What happens if the cheaper more efficient car is electric?
Lots of people see the future of AI as being tied to the hardware and have pumped up nVidia’s stock because of that. Anything that goes against that theory will likely let some air out of nVidia’s bubble.
I also think the fact that it’s open source kind of takes the mystery out of the ai game and since it’s said to be preforming as well as ChatGPT. Takes the wind out of any hardware partners of Openai.