Showing posts with label Nvidia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nvidia. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

The Pink Slips Keep Coming: Cloudflare and Others Reduce Headcount

While Meta grabbed headlines with their layoffs, the rest of the tech industry has been quietly swinging the same axe.

Slash, slash, slashing jobs!

[For the complete Meta backstory, you can take a look at my posts from May 24 and yesterday].

One example I know of is Cloudfare. 

On May 07, 2026, the San Francisco, US-headquartered Internet infrastructure and cyber security company announced that they would trim 1,100 jobs, representing approximately 20% of their workforce across thirteen global offices. 

The leadership at Cloudfare had noted a 600% increase in internal AI use over a three-month period, reducing the need for headcount in specific back-office and support functions. 

This was candidly stated by CEO Matthew Prince that the restructuring around an "agentic AI-first operating model" is making many roles obsolete, significantly boosting productivity. 

The move is notable in the tech industry because it was initiated during a period of record-setting financial growth rather than a revenue decline.

Even the crypto and fintech world has not been spared. Block slashed 4,000 jobs. Coinbase let go of roughly 700 staff. PayPal plan to trim nearly 4,800 over the next few years. Website builders Wix and Webflow both announced rounds and enterprise software company Atlassian cut about 1,600. Many of these firms cited AI directly. 

However, there are dissenting voices. 

Demis Hassabis (left), Google DeepMind CEO told Wired in an interview published on May 19, 2026, just ahead of the Google I/O developer conference that when developers become 3 or 4 times more productive, the smart move is to do 3 or 4 times more work, not march people out the door. 

To him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy. 

Jensen Huang (left), Nvidia CEO had called the AI-to-layoffs narrative as "just too lazy". 

In a Channel NewsAsia interview on May 25, he pointedly asked: "AI has just arrived. 
How is it possible they're already losing jobs?"

And Sam Altman (right), OpenAI CEO had admitted last week, that the human element is still essential for most work. He had earlier brashly predicted humans may not be needed for jobs as soon as 2035. 

Now, he admits that this isn’t possible.

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Raging Mideast War is Escalating







Today is Day 13 of the US-Israel war on Iran! It has already outlasted the 12-day war initiated by Israel – as is this war, by the way – on June 13, 2025, with the US joining nine days later. 

In fact, US President Donald Trump affirmed on Monday the war against Iran will end “very soon” but not this week!

“We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely”, the Orange Man trumpeted the destruction of more than 50 Iranian naval ships, and decimation of its air force and anti-aircraft defenses. 

He also said that the war would be over when Iran no longer had the capacity to use weapons against the US, Israel and other allies for a long time, according to CNBC on March 09, 2026. 

In fact, Trump had blithely described the war on Iran as a “short-term excursion”, maintaining that the US is ahead of schedule and already achieved “tremendous success”, as per Al Jazeera on March 10.

But this time around, the conflict has engulfed neighboring Arab countries, entering an escalatory phase as Tehran unleashed its 37th wave of missile and drone attacks across the region. 

Oil, gas and fuel storage facilities in Israel’s Haifa were repeatedly targeted while Gulf states scrambled to intercept drones and missiles heading toward energy hubs. Sirens echoed from Bahrain and Kuwait to Dubai, UAE, as defenses raced to stop incoming threats. 

At the same time, Washington and Tel Aviv intensified airstrikes inside Iran, hitting key sites across the country. 

Already, oil production in Iraq has dropped by 70%, from 4.3 million bpd before the conflict to 1.3 million bpd. Saudi Arabia has lowered output by 2 million to 2.5 million bpd, while the UAE has cut 500,000–800,000 bpd, and Kuwait has cut 500,000 bpd.

On top of that, drone attacks have hammered key infrastructure, including the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia and the Ras Laffan gas facility in Qatar, the latter responsible for 20% of global LNG supply. Already, QatarEnergy declared force majeure on LNG shipments yesterday.

Moreover, Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a global energy chokepoint, handling about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and significant liquefied natural gas (LNG) and fertilizer.

Predictably, Trump threatened “death, fire and fury” if Iran keeps obstructing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Tehran hit back, vowing it won’t allow “one liter of oil” to leave the Middle East until US and Israeli attacks cease. A top Iranian official even warned Trump to be careful not to be “eliminated” himself. 

With oil and gas facilities now at the center of the battlefield, the conflict is rapidly turning into a wider energy war.

And more. Yesterday, Iran identified new targets, i.e., offices and infrastructure run by top US companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications. Al Jazeera confirms this, saying the companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, and those companies offering cloud-based services that are located in multiple Israeli cities, as well as in some Gulf countries. 

And banks too. Yesterday, state-owned Bank Sepah in Tehran which were reportedly responsible for processing salary payments for Iran's military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, got hit by enemy missile(s). This presents Iran with the option to target economic centers and banks belonging to the US and Israel within the region. It's damn serious because Iran's military command (Khatam al-Anbiya) are warning civilians to stay at least one kilometer away from these establishments in the region.

The raging war is escalating, that's for sure. Yet, just hours ago, Trump is telling Axios in a 5-minute interview that there's "practically nothing left" to target in Iran! 🤣🤣🤣

As of March 11, the death toll has reached over 1,300 in Iran and at least 11 in Israel, with additional casualties reported among US troops in the region. 

Monday, February 9, 2026

Big Tech's High-stakes AI Gamble


Skyrocketing AI infrastructure outlays have raised investor concerns over future returns and the potential for a bubble. 

Already, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta announced plans to spend a combined $660 billion on artificial intelligence in 2026. 

Certainly, the spending is humongous, even as tech companies are racing to get a lucrative piece of the proverbial pie. 

But there are concerns with overhyped valuations and uncertain profitability. A case in point is OpenAI having secured computing agreements with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle worth over $1 trillion. And Nvidia alone completed more than 100 AI-related venture deals in 2024. 

Analysts warn that much of the investment flows within a small group of closely linked companies, are creating what they describe as circular financing that inflates market values beyond the industry’s actual profits. 

According to a recent PwC survey, most CEOs say their companies have not yet seen financial returns from AI, with only 12% reporting both higher revenue and lower costs. 

Still, this won't discourage Big Tech from spending big (except it is said, Apple, which so far, are keeping AI infrastructure spending low). 

At the same time, in the back of their minds, they are painfully aware that they'll get punished when investors begin worrying they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending. 

A Big Tech’s high-stakes gamble on a fickle future.

Manchester City scored twice at Anfield to earn a 2-1 Premier League victory over Liverpool on Sunday.

It was Dominik Szoboszlai who sent Reds into the lead in the 73rd minute with a glorious free-kick goal which clipped the woodwork before nestling in the back of the net. 

But Citizens levelled ten minutes afterward and then scored again from the spot (90+3) to wrap up the game. 

Thus, Man City keep their title race alive as they close the gap on leaders Arsenal to six points. And Liverpool remain sixth, five points off the top four.

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Apple Siri Deal Drives Google Past Historic Trillion-dollar Milestone

On Monday, Apple announced a huge new deal with Google – the AI version of Siri will be powered by Google Gemini. 

Not long after, Google achieved something very few other Big Tech companies have. Specifically, Google's parent company Alphabet became just the fourth company to hit a $4 trillion stock market valuation, following Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, per CNBC. 

The other three companies all reached that threshold less than a year ago, so this is a recent phenomenon in the stock market. 

It should be noted that Apple and Microsoft are both back below the $4 trillion line, so Google could easily lose this honor at any time, for any reason. 

And in case you're wondering just how much money is four trillion dollars, here's a fun fact. If you were to convert the $4 trillion into one dollar bills and stack them on a football field, the resulting pile would be about half a mile high, roughly equivalent to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Or if you were to simply stack one bill on top of the other, the resulting pile would reach far past the moon.

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Nvidia Went From 95% to 0%

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (left) urged nuance when it comes to regulating China’s access to US technologies that are critical to developing artificial intelligence.

In an interview with Citadel Securities on Tuesday, he warned that what harms China can often harm the US, and sometimes in even worse ways. 

“Before we leap towards policies that are hurtful to other people, take a step back and maybe reflect on what are the policies that are helpful to America”, Huang said. 

His words of caution come as Nvidia processors have become hot commodities in the AI race as well as political bargaining chips in the US-China trade war. 

Huang said he’d like the world to run on US know-how, but noted about half the world’s AI researchers are in China. 

“I think it’s a mistake to not have those researchers build AI on American technology”, he added. 

Trying to strike a balance between his goal of maintaining US tech supremacy along with access to China will require nuance rather than an all-or-nothing approach, Huang said. 

But that’s not the case now, as Nvidia is “100% out of China”. 

“We went from 95% market share to 0%, and so I can’t imagine any policymaker thinking that that’s a good idea, that whatever policy we implemented caused America to lose one of the largest markets in the world", he said. 

For now, Huang told Citadel, all of Nvidia's financial forecasts assume China will remain out of the picture.

Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan's bid to  reclaim the French Open title ended in the quarter-finals on Friday, after going down 21-16, 21-16 to China's Olympic champions Chen Qing Chen-Jia Yi Fan, who are making one last campaign together before parting ways.

The world No. 2 put up a determined fight but we're unable to break the dominance of their long-time rivals, with the result likely drawing a close to an intense rivalry that ends 8-1 in favour of the Chinese pair.

Friday, July 11, 2025

Bomb the Shit Out of Moscow and Beijing

Donald Trump told a private gathering of donors at New York’s Pierre Hotel on May 14, 2024 that he once sought to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine and to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping from attacking Taiwan by threatening to “bomb the shit” out of Moscow and Beijing in retaliation, according to a leaked audio obtained by CNN and detailed in a new book published on Tuesday. 

The said book, "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America" chronicles how US President Trump secured his victory in the November 2024 election, and how former President Joe Biden's team dismissed concerns about his age in the US campaign cycle. 

It is authored by Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of the New York Times and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post. And it is based on over 300 interviews conducted over 18 months.

Nvidia beat Apple and Microsoft to the $4 trillion mark. 

Apple entered this year as the world’s most valuable company at just about $3.9 trillion before tumbling in recent months amid Trump’s tariff turmoil. 

Nvidia and Microsoft traded places as the world’s most valuable company in recent months, before the former surged ahead to reach the $4 trillion mark first. The US chipmaker have had a remarkable march to record highs and have soared around 21% this year, thanks to their leading role powering the artificial intelligence boom. Nvidia’s chips power the data centers that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google need to fuel their AI models and cloud services – and AI investments are only expected to grow. 

Global spending on AI infrastructure is expected to surpass $200 billion by 2028, according to market research firm The International Data Corporation.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

The US Economy Is Suddenly Looking A Bit Shaky

It didn't take long for doom and gloom to slowly but surely manifest itself under US President Donald Trump's presidency. And many people will be cheering.

I just saw a news report that the Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 10% from its record high set in late 2024. The S&P 500 is also down nearly 9% from its February peak. And Monday saw the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 posted its worst day since September 2022, wiping out more than $1 trillion in value. Investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones lost almost 900 points, slipping below its 200-day moving average for the first time since November 01, 2023.

The market selloff comes as Trump’s back-and-forth tariff announcements have unnerved investors and stoked fears that the US economy could be headed for a major slowdown, or even a recession. 

The spreading fear is that Trump's tariffs – which are taxes on goods applied as they enter the country – will lead to higher prices and dent growth in the world's largest economy.

Even Trump in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday acknowledged that the economy was in a "period of transition", when asked about suggestions of a potential recession. 

Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, pushed back against those projecting a bleak outlook for the country. In an interview with CNBC, Hassett said Americans can be optimistic about the US economy and that that tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico and China were already bringing manufacturing and jobs to the United States. 

"There are a lot of reasons to be extremely bullish about the economy going forward", he pronounced. Still, he admitted there were some "blips in the data" for this quarter, which he pinned on the timing of Trump's tariffs and the "Biden inheritance".

The above aside, a Harris poll from February 13 to 15, among a nationally representative sample of 2,131 US adults found that 51% of Americans now believe that the US economy is worsening, while just 20% said it was improving and 29% said it was the same.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

China's Moonshot Launch Kimi k1.5

The US Commerce Department are now investigating whether DeepSeek have used AI chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, with the restrictions previously put in place by the US so that the country can win the so-called “AI race” against China. 

According to Reuters, which sourced a person familiar with the matter, an organised AI chip smuggling ring has been tracked out of a number of countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

For context, current restrictions on Nvidia artificial intelligence processors are meant to stop its most sophisticated chips from reaching China, though the US Commerce Department think maybe Chinese companies such as DeepSeek did somehow get their hands on them.

However, DeepSeek have clarified that they used the previous generation H800 chips by Nvidia, which they could legally purchase in 2023. And that they also have the less powerful H20s chips, which can still lawfully be shipped to China. 

Meanwhile, Nvidia stressed that their partners comply with all applicable laws and that they haven’t received any information about their AI chips being smuggled into China. 

The US government just love to cast a smear on Chinese innovation. Sore losers, that's what they are. 

The above aside, the AI arms race took another turn as Beijing-based China start-up Moonshot AI have launched their latest model, Kimi k1.5 on January 25, just days after the rise of DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-R1. 

While DeepSeek has already been seen as a formidable competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4, Kimi k1.5 is now being touted as an even more powerful alternative, outshining OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet on key benchmarks. 

Moonshot’s Kimi k1.5 is a multimodal AI model that integrates visual, text, and code inputs to solve complex problems. It has surpassed some of OpenAI’s models by up to 550% on some benchmarks, particularly in areas like problem-solving and reasoning. Note that DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-R1 lacks multimodal capabilities.

And unsurprisingly, one of the standout features of Kimi AI is that it is completely free to use with no limits! Unlike many US competitors that operate on subscription models, Kimi aims to make advanced AI accessible to everyone as well. This approach democratizes access but also challenges traditional business models in the tech industry.

It’s the era of Chinese supremacy in generative AI, and I love it!

Saturday, February 1, 2025

China's Alibaba Release AI Model Qwen 2.5-Max

While tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google largely recovered Monday’s losses as investors speculated they could benefit from cheaper input costs, Nvidia’s shares remain depressed as experts question the conventional wisdom that expensive equipment is needed to produce AI models.

And on January 29, in a Q&A during ASML’s fourth-quarter earnings call – a session that was dominated by the sudden emergence of DeepSeek – President and CEO Christophe Fouquet (right) suggested onlookers shouldn’t have been so surprised by the arrival of a new player in the AI race. 

“I know some of you maybe were surprised in the last few days that a new company suddenly comes and wants to compete”, Fouquet said. “Well, I think we have to get used to that, because this is such an opportunity that there will be more and more players to grab this". 

He later added: “AI is a huge opportunity. Therefore, I think you should expect to see a few elephants in the room in the next few months, or few years, because everyone will want to be in”.

He's so right, y'know!

On that same day too, Chinese tech company Alibaba released a new version of their Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that they claim surpasses the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. 

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Chinese New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also their domestic competition. 

"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B", Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on their official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models. 

The January 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of their R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States. 

But DeepSeek's success has predictably led to a scramble among their domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. 

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to their flagship AI model, Doubao-1.5-pro, which they claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. 

This echoed DeepSeek's claim that their R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on a number of performance benchmarks.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Happy Chinese New Year 2025












Here's wishing you and your family a very happy Chinese New Year! 

新年快乐 (Xīnnián kuàilè)!

My choice of CNY videos this year. It's a light-hearted skit that celebrates family, tradition, and the importance of remaining true to our roots regardless of where life takes us. 

My yesterday's post "Everybody Is Freaking Out About DeepSeek" refers. 

Major US tech stocks – including Nvidia, Microsoft and Tesla – suffered a stunning $1 trillion rout on Monday as fears over an advanced Chinese artificial intelligence model triggered hysteria from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. 

Chipmaker Nvidia, which rode the AI wave last year to become the richest company in the world, plunged nearly 17% – erasing $589 billion in value in the largest one-day drop in market history – as investors learned about DeepSeek, a China-based startup launched just last month. 

DeepSeek’s launch – referred to by tech investor Marc Andreessen as “AI’s Sputnik moment” – triggered a global meltdown that slammed AI firms and chipmakers.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Everybody Is Freaking Out About DeepSeek

Chinese firm DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence chatbot offering an open-source alternative to proprietary systems like OpenAI's o1/o3 and Google's Gemini 2.0 has soared to the top of the Apple Store’s download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with their ability to match their US competitors. 

The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit US titans including Nvidia and Meta, which have spent vast sums of cash to get ahead in the fast-developing AI sector. 

DeepSeek-R1 was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost (reportedly about $5-6 million), with far fewer graphics processing units (GPU) that are under a strict embargo imposed by the US, OpenAI’s home turf. 

But unlike o1, which is available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers of the Plus tier ($20 per month) and more expensive tiers (such as Pro at $200 per month), DeepSeek-R1 was released as a fully open-source model, which also explains why it has quickly rocketed up the charts of AI code sharing community Hugging Face’s most downloaded and active models. 

Also, thanks to the fact that it is fully open-source, people have already fine-tuned and trained many variations of the model for different task-specific purposes, such as making it small enough to run on a mobile device, or combining it with other open-source models. Even if you want to use it for development purposes, DeepSeek’s API costs are more than 90% lower than the equivalent o1 model from OpenAI. 

FYI, DeepSeek was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, known for its high density of tech firms. And, obviously, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do – write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what’s in the fridge. 

Moreover, it can communicate in multiple languages, though it told AFP that it was strongest in English and Chinese.

Thursday, June 6, 2024

Apple Replaced as the World’s Second-most Valuable Company

Nvidia have overtaken Apple to become the world’s second-most valuable company, with furious demand for the artificial intelligence chipmaker’s shares taking their valuation to over $3 trillion. 
 
Shares of Nvidia gained 5.2 percent on Wednesday to close at $1,224.40, lifting the company’s market capitalisation to $3.012 trillion.
 
Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, rose 1.91 percent, while Apple gained 0.78 percent. 
 
Nvidia’s rally continues an extraordinary streak of gains for the California, US-based firm, whose graphics processing units have fueled a boom in artificial intelligence (AI). The company’s revenues have soared more than 260 percent over the past year as tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon race to roll out AI.
 
Americans love to believe they are righteous and morally upstanding, even if that is a big lie.
 
👇This is the original United States of America, where over 20 million Native Americans dispersed across over 1,000 distinct tribes, bands, and ethnic groups populated the territory:
 
But when the Europeans arrived on American shores, the lands, before long, bled uninterrupted as Native Americans were soon slaughtered.
 
In fact, it has been claimed that over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids had been waged on the "Indians", the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. 
 
By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, according to www.history.com. 
 
They have been almost wiped out! The description "slaughter" doesn't begin to detail the mass killings that visited the Indians; it was pure genocide! 
 
And according to www.history.com, the reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land – and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them. 
 
Even more fundamentally, the Native Americans were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. And so, the Indians were painted as pagan savages who must be eliminated in the name of civilization and Christianity.
 
The Indians became a broken, vanishing race. Ironically, just over 100 years later, the resilient American Indian population survived into the 21st century and swelled to more than 5 million people.
 
Fast forward to today. According to the US Census Bureau (2022, October 11), people who are American Indian (or Alaska Native), often considered an “invisible minority”, make up just 2.9% (9.7 million, alone or in combination*) of the total US population of 329.5 million in 2021.
 
[*Race, like all other US Census data, is self-reported. Since 2000, the US Census allowed people to indicate more than one race. 
 
Those who marked “American Indian or Alaska Native” along with one or more additional races are classified as “American Indian or Alaska Native in combination”. Those who marked only “American Indian or Alaska Native” are categorized as “American Indian or Alaska Native alone”]. 
 
The white Americans have yet to properly face up to the genocide. And to think, these Americans remain stubbornly convinced that they are superior to everybody else. This explains why they are so determined to maintain US hegemony over the rest of the world.
 
As for the American Indians, sad to say, they are a defeated people and having to submit themselves to their colonisers.