Making predictions for the year ahead is difficult enough. What if we tried to predict the future not one year out, but half a decade out? The further into the future we attempt to peer, the hazier things look and the more speculative our thinking must become. If one thing is certain in technology, it is that no one can actually predict the future—and that we are all going to be surprised by how things play out. But putting a stake in the ground about how things will unfold is nonetheless an informative and fun thought experiment. Nvidia is the hottest company in the world right now. It has been the biggest beneficiary of today’s generative AI boom, with its market cap skyrocketing from under $300 billion in late 2022 to over $2 trillion today. But Nvidia’s position as the single dominant provider of chips for AI cannot and will not last. What Nvidia has built is difficult, but not impossible, to replicate. A resurgent AMD is emerging as a credible alternative provider of advanced GPUs, with its cutting-edge new MI300 chip about to become widely available. The big tech companies—Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta—are all investing heavily to develop their own AI chips in order to lessen their dependence on Nvidia. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is seeking up to trillions of dollars of capital to build a new chip company in order to diversify the world’s supply of AI hardware. As demand for AI chips continues to grow in the years ahead, relentless market forces will ensure that more competitors will enter, supply will increase, prices will drop, margins will tighten and Nvidia’s market share will fall. In addition, as the market matures in the years ahead, the primary type of AI computing workload will shift from training to inference: that is, from building AI models to deploying those models in real-world settings. Nvidia’s highly specialized chips are unrivaled when it comes to training models. But inference can be done with cheaper and more commoditized chips, which may undermine Nvidia’s advantage in the market and create an opening for competitors.
Full opinion : 5 AI Predictions For The Year 2030.
