For a few days, AI chip juggernaut Nvidia sat on the throne as the world’s biggest company, but behind its staggering success are questions on whether new entrants can stake a claim to the artificial intelligence bonanza.

Nvidia, which makes the processors that are the only option to train generative AI’s large language models, is now Big Tech’s newest member and its stock market takeoff has lifted the whole sector.

Even tech’s second rung on Wall Street has ridden on Nvidia’s coattails with Oracle, Broadcom, HP and a spate of others seeing their stock valuations surge, despite sometimes shaky earnings.

Amid the champagne popping, startups seeking the attention of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are being asked to innovate — but without a clear indication of where the next chapter of AI will be written.

When it comes to generative AI, doubts persist on what exactly will be left for companies that are not existing model makers, a field dominated by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

Most agree that competing with them head-on could be a fool’s errand.

“I don’t think that there’s a great opportunity to start a foundational AI company at this point in time,” said Mike Myer, founder and CEO of tech firm Quiq, at the Collision technology conference in Toronto.

Some have tried to build applications that use or mimic the powers of the existing big models, but this is being slapped down by Silicon Valley’s biggest players.

“What I find disturbing is that people are not differentiating between those applications which are roadkill for the models as they progress in their capabilities, and those that are really adding value and will be here 10 years from now,” said venture capital veteran Vinod Khosla.

– ‘Won’t keep up’ –

The tough-talking Khosla is one of OpenAI’s earliest investors.

“Grammarly won’t keep up,” Khosla predicted of the spelling and grammar checking app, and others similar to it.

He said these companies, which put only a “thin wrapper” around what the AI models can offer, are doomed.

One of the fields ripe for the taking is chip design, Khosla said, with AI demanding ever more specialized processors that provide highly specific powers.

“If you look across the chip history, we really have for the most part focused on more general chips,” Rebecca Parsons, CTO at tech consultancy Thoughtworks, told AFP.

Providing more specialized processing for the many demands of AI is an opportunity seized by Groq, a hot startup that has built chips for the deployment of AI as opposed to its training, or inference — the specialty of Nvidia’s world-dominating GPUs.

Groq CEO Jonathan Ross told AFP that Nvidia won’t be the best at everything, even if they are uncontested for generative AI training.

“Nvidia and (its CEO) Jensen Huang are like Michael Jordan… the greatest of all time in basketball. But inference is baseball, and we try and forget the time where Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and wasn’t very good at it,” he said.

Another opportunity will come from highly specialized AI that will provide expertise and know-how based on proprietary data which won’t be co-opted by voracious big tech.

“Open AI and Google aren’t going to build a structural engineer. They’re not going to build products like a primary care doctor or a mental health therapist,” said Khosla.

Profiting from highly specialized data is the basis of Cohere, another of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups that pitches specifically-made models to businesses that are skittish about AI veering out of their control.

“Enterprises are skeptical of technology, and they’re risk-averse, and so we need to win their trust and to prove to them that there’s a way to adopt this technology that’s reliable, trustworthy and secure,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told AFP.

When he was just 20 and working at Google, Gomez co-authored the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced Transformer, the architecture behind popular large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

The company has received funding from Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures and is valued in the billions of dollars.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Nvidia Corps.’s chief executive Jensen Huang has become the 11th richest person in the world, as per Forbes’s real-time billionaire list. 

Mr Huang added over $4 billion to his net worth in a single day on Tuesday, June 18. It happened after Nvidia became the world’s most valuable public company, riding on an artificial intelligence-driven surge. 

The company’s shares climbed over 3% on Tuesday, June 18, taking Mr Huang’s net worth to nearly $119 billion.

Nvidia shares have more than doubled this year after growing threefold in 2023. The shares have been up by nearly 28 times in the past five years.

Jensen Huang, who was ranked the 546th-richest person in the world in 2019, has added over $114 billion to his net worth in the last 5 years, as per Forbes. His net worth surged over 2250% during the period.

The Nvidia boss was ranked the 76th richest person in the world with a net worth of $21 billion at the end of 2023.

The 61-year-old tech executive derives his net worth from a 3.5% stake in Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia. Mr Huang co-founded the computer chip company back in 1993 with Chris Malachosky and Curtis Priem. He has occupied the chair of Nvidia’s chief executive and president since its inception.

The tech giant went public in 1999 and has surged in trading in recent years. 

Last month, Nvidia became the first computer chip company to hit $3 trillion in market capitalisation, surpassing Apple Inc. Nvidia recently executed a stock split that cut Nvidia’s share price below $130 after trading above $1,200.

Nvidia controls an ecosystem of hardware and software solutions that rivals are trying to replicate, thanks to its dominant market share for the high-end accelerator that trains AIs. The company has laid out an ambitious plan to upgrade its AI accelerators annually. 

Tesla’s Elon Musk retained his position of the world’s richest with a net worth of $214.1 billion followed by Jeff Bezos at number two and Bernard Arnault & family at the third spot.

A smartphone with a displayed NVIDIA logo is placed on a computer motherboard in this illustration taken March 6, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Nvidia edged ahead of other tech companies on June 18 to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in the latest sign of the might of artificial intelligence.

The chip company, which has enjoyed a monumental ascent over the last 18 months amid enthusiasm over generative AI, jumped 3.4% near 1.25 p.m. (10.55 p.m. IST), giving it a market capitalisation of about $3.3 trillion, slightly ahead of Microsoft and Apple.

The California-based company, which is led by Jensen Huang, has seen profits soar due to torrid demand for its powerful GPU chips, which have set the industry’s pace in pushing new advances in AI.

In May, Nvidia reported a net profit of $14.9 billion, while its revenue of $26 billion was almost four times what it took in during the same fiscal quarter last year.

“We believe over the next year the race to $4 trillion market cap in tech will be front and center between Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft,” said a note earlier this week from Wedbush Securities.

“Nvidia’s GPU chips are in essence the new gold or oil in the tech sector as more enterprises and consumers quickly head down this path with the 4th Industrial Revolution well underway.”

Washington:

Nvidia edged ahead of other tech companies Tuesday to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in the latest sign of the might of artificial intelligence.

The chip company, which has enjoyed a monumental ascent over the last 18 months amid enthusiasm over generative AI, jumped 3.4 percent near 1725 GMT, giving it a market capitalization of about $3.3 trillion, slightly ahead of Microsoft and Apple.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)