Nvidia’s free AI model will echo across the tech industry
Browsing social media recently, I was invited to put my money into artificial intelligence (AI). Get passive income, the advertisement said, by investing in AI-powered pizza vending machines.
In fairness, the red flags are numerous. For a start, the advertisement was in Elon Musk’s X, which since its transformation from Twitter has become home to all manner of dubious marketing schemes. Then there’s ‘passive income’, a phrase which should certainly set alarm bells ringing.
Finally, just what AI has to do with pizza vending machines is far from clear.
This is the salient point, of course. AI has set investors’ hearts aflutter and, as a result, virtually every money-making racket is now promoted as having something to do with AI. Not everything is pizza machines, of course: Microsoft, Broadcom, AMD and others have seen their shares rise thanks to the technology. All we are waiting on now is some actual proof of profit-making, but that is a story for another day (and, frankly, it does seem likely that 2024’s AI experiments will become 2025’s business cases for the technology).
No-one has benefited more from the AI boom than chip designer Nvidia, shares in which have risen by more than 750% since that fateful day in November 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3.5. And Nvidia’s most recent move, to dump a complete AI model on the Internet, both for free and open sourced, is designed to protect its newfound supremacy.
Hitherto not known as a lover of free and open source software, Nvidia’s act is quite the bombshell and could wipe billions in value from AI software model developers. Nvidia’s model, called NVLM, is said to rival OpenAI’s GPT 4.0, and training code would soon follow, the company has said.
However NVLM’s licence is not truly open source, given it comes with commercial use restrictions, meaning Google and OpenAI can breathe easy for now. However, in releasing it Nvidia has effectively granted researchers and developers free access to the cutting-edge of AI technology in the form of a multimodal large language model, thus both potentially undermining competing closed models and guaranteeing future sales of the silicon needed to run AI applications.
Small teams can now build and iterate on NVLM, removing one of the greatest barriers to entry in AI. For Nvidia, of course, this is a ‘picks and shovels’ play, meaning the real money is in selling tools, not AI itself, just as the real money made during the California gold rush was made by shops flogging mining equipment, not the miners and prospectors themselves.
Interestingly, the move came as OpenAI, which is not as yet publicly-traded, secured funding of $6.6 billion (approx. €5.99 billion). The cash injection means investors estimate the company’s total value at $157 billion (approx. €142 billion).
Curiously, Nvidia is one of OpenAI’s investors, so opening NVLM is hardly designed to torpedo Sam Altman’s outfit. Nonetheless, the more AI technology is used the more infrastructure will be required to run it and, therefore, by promoting AI in any way possible Nvidia clearly hopes to sell more chips than your local McDonald’s. The AI wars really have begun.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers