Excuse towards failure

It is an old expression and I didn’t expect to hear this again, but there you have it. To give reference. In the 90’s sales teams were all about the ‘pipeline’ and making ‘quota’ but at times the bosses of these sales teams didn’t have the right glasses on and they would overcompensate in many ways making life close to impossible for the sales teams. Now we get CEO’s and other ‘things’ needing to do the same thing towards shareholders and that is where the story starts. Reuters gives us ‘OpenAI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and looking for alternatives, sources say’ and we see (at https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-unsatisfied-with-some-nvidia-chips-looking-alternatives-sources-say-2026-02-02/) that the setting is pretty much what I expect. As we are given “OpenAI is unsatisfied with some of Nvidia’s latest artificial intelligence chips, and it has sought alternatives since last year, eight sources familiar with the matter said, potentially complicating the relationship between the two highest-profile players in the AI boom.” As I see it, Sam Altman and his OpenAI aren’t making things happen and to thwart things as much the blame game comes into play. He has no other option, he is the top of the mountain and that means that he is subject to shareholders and the story “the chips aren’t cutting it” is as good as it gets for him. I reckon that the “sought alternatives since last year” excuse is about gaining time. But take a look at what Nvidia achieved. 

So, where are the shortcomings? Are the expectations of Same Altman realistic? And who are the 8 sources that Reuters is referring to? So when September came, some were given “Nvidia said it intended to pour as much as $100 billion into OpenAI as part of a deal that gave the chipmaker a stake in the startup and gave OpenAI the cash it needed to buy the advanced chips.

The deal had been expected to close within weeks, Reuters reported. Instead, negotiations have dragged on for months. During that time, OpenAI has struck deals with AMD and others for GPUs built to rival Nvidia’s. But its shifting product road map also has changed the kind of computational resources it requires and bogged down talks with Nvidia, a person familiar with the matter said.” This now gives pause to consider if it is merely the hardware, or the slice that OpenAI gets from it all and why go for the inferior AMD chip? Because if OpenAI claims that it is superior or even equal to Nvidia, the press better get that lowdown, because as far as I can tell there is no western equals to Nvidia (optionally the Huawei chip, but that is an assumption by me, myself and I). 

So when we get “On Saturday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brushed off a report of tension with OpenAI, saying the idea was “nonsense” and that Nvidia planned a huge investment in OpenAI.

“Customers continue to choose NVIDIA for inference because we deliver the best performance and total cost of ownership at scale,” Nvidia said in a statement. A spokesperson for OpenAI in a separate statement said the company relies on Nvidia to power the vast majority of its inference fleet and that Nvidia delivers the best performance per dollar for inference” the simple setting is even that OpenAI Marketing is not one of those 8 sources. As such, if we cannot get clear information, could someone please alert these shareholders that OpenAI is making an optional training run with their money? 

As I personally see it, Sam Altman is coming up short for meeting expectations, especially as he is  trying to catch up with Google’s Gemini. I reckon that this will give him nightmares too. But overall the setting is one I expected to come, because in the end AI doesn’t yet exist and now that 100% of that hardware vendors are intentionally wrongfully label their chips AI (they’ll call it ‘Alternative  Intelligence’ at some point) and that is when the class cases will plaster every courthouse from Alberta to Zurich and I reckon it will not take that much longer, especially when the excuse that the chips aren’t good enough are coming out. I might have believed them if it was the Adler chip (a 80186 joke), but it is Nvidia, the hardware darling of the IT world.

As such my skepticism overtakes my feeling of fairness and openminded justice (that being said, justice is almost never openminded) but do not take my word on this, ask the OpenAI program with all that AI in play. 

So time for some ZZZZZZ’s, you all have a great day. I am ready to snore mine away.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, IT, Media, Science

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.