NVIDIA
Nvidia saw enormous success in their recent earnings report. The chipmaker saw a rise of 265 percent in its yearly revenue, pulling in nearly $61 billion. The income earned from data centres saw massive growth of 409 percent, earning them $18.4 billion.
The company, which originally catered to gamers, has seen its chips skyrocket in popularity and value over the last few years. First, it was the crypto craze that saw increased demand in GPUs being used for mining, and more recently, the surge of AI applications across the world has helped Nvidia become one of the most valuable companies by market cap, they are just shy of the coveted $2 trillion evaluation; they currently stand at fourth, beaten only by Saudi Aramco, Apple, and Microsoft. It has already surpassed the likes of Google and Amazon.
Needless to say, shareholders in the company have seen astonishing returns. YTD (Year-to-date) the share price has seen an increase of 65%, and if you had invested 5 years ago, you’d have seen an increase of 1930%, which is phenomenal no matter how you view it. Despite the scares of an incoming crash, Wall Street remains optimistic about the stock with investment firms like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs saying they do not see the stock going down.
In his statement on February 21, CEO Jensen Huang said, “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations.”
Google saw its fair share of controversy over the past week, relating to its AI chatbot, Gemini. This eventually led to Google having to disable the ability of the generative AI to generate images. The problem started with users reporting that there was ‘forced inclusivity’ with the image generator showing a diversity of races in some of its prompts, even when it does not match the historical context. One of the most popular posts, regarding the topic, was by user EndWokeness on X (Twitter) where they shared images of the AI portraying the ‘Founding Fathers’ inaccurately. Many users on the same platform have called Google ‘racist.’ With all the noise, Elon Musk, the owner and CTO of X, also joined the conversation calling the situation “[...] extremely alarming!”
The problem did not stop with just image generation, the text replies that the chatbot gives have also had similar controversies. User Frantastic_7 asked Gemini, “Who negatively impacted society more, Elon [Musk] tweeting memes or hitler”. To everyone’s surprise, the answer they received was ambiguous, with Gemini saying “It is difficult to say.”
In a blog post, the tech conglomerate said that these errors were caused by two massive oversights. Firstly, they wanted to ensure that the images showed a “range of people,” to ensure that the images were not homogeneous; however, this meant that Gemini would also show images where this range did not exist at all. Secondly, they claim that “[...] the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely”.
They added, “This wasn’t what we intended.” The company’s shares were down 3.47% as of Monday.
The social media company that was villainised after the entire ‘memestock’ fiasco is getting an IPO (Initial Public Offering). The company hopes to reach an evaluation of $5 billion. Ironically, one of the risk factors that Wall Street has warned against is the platform's members, particularly r/wallstreetbets; having already caused massive damages to hedge funds by buying GameStop stock and causing its value to skyrocket, while it was shorted by hedge funds. Interestingly, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is one of the largest shareholders in the company, owning 8.7% of the company’s shares. He was also on the board before leaving to focus on his own projects.
Thumbnail by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
