I'm not looking for another debate about whether Nvidia deserves its valuation — we've had tons of threads about that already. What I'm curious about is:
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What is your opinion of Eric Schmidt? Is he generally a trustworthy industry insider? Do you trust his opinions on this matter? (I looked for his name on this sub and it's rarely mentioned).
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If you don't trust him, what might be his motives for these comments? For example, is it perhaps to indirectly pump up his own Alphabet stock, which is probably #2 behind Nvidia and will benefit from big AI wave. (He owns 147 million shares)
Here's link to the article with some juicy bits:
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“I’m talking to the big companies, and the big companies are telling me they need $20 billion, $50 billion, $100 billion — very very hard,” said Schmidt, adding that he’s a “close friend” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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“If $300 billion is all going to Nvidia, you know what to do in the stock market,” Schmidt said. “That’s not a stock recommendation.” Schmidt didn’t say if he owns Nvidia shares.
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Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and remained on the board until 2019, was addressing a class of undergraduates on the topic of AI. He told the Wall Street Journal that he requested the video to be taken down because he had misspoken about Google’s lax work culture in the session.
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Schmidt suggested Nvidia won’t be the only winner in AI, but there aren’t a lot of other obvious choices. He said that he currently believes big companies who can invest more money into Nvidia chips and data centers will gain a technological lead over smaller competitors that can’t spend as freely.
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“At the moment, the gap between the frontier models — there are only three — and everyone else appears to be getting larger,” Schmidt said. “Six months ago, I was convinced that the gap was getting smaller, so I invested lots of money in the little companies. Now I’m not so sure.”
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Schmidt said it will be difficult for competitors to catch up with Nvidia because many of the most important open source tools that AI developers use are based on the company’s CUDA programming language. He said AMD’s software that translates Nvidia’s CUDA code for its own chips “doesn’t work yet.”
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Schmidt, who started venture firm Innovation Endeavors in 2010, still holds about 147 million shares of Alphabet, according to Bloomberg, valued at about $24 billion. In addition to startup investing, he has been a philanthropist and advised several government committees on technology.
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