AMD just paid $8.2 billion for the researcher who accidentally made Nvidia the most valuable company on Earth.
Back in 2007, Fei-Fei Li was a junior professor with an idea her mentors warned would end her career. She wanted to label millions of internet photos so machines could learn to see. Funding agencies passed. Senior colleagues told her the field advanced on algorithms and that data collection was grunt work beneath a Princeton PhD.
She built it anyway. Roughly 49,000 workers across 167 countries spent two and a half years labeling images. Then she released the whole dataset, ImageNet, for free.
In 2012, a Toronto grad student named Alex Krizhevsky trained a neural network on her free dataset using two $500 Nvidia gaming cards. AlexNet nearly cut the error rate in half, and that one result is why every AI lab on the planet started buying GPUs. Nvidia's data center business was a rounding error in 2012. Today it does over $100 billion a year, and the whole company is worth more than the GDP of most countries.
So the woman who created the demand for AI chips now works for the chip company that came in second.
AMD's logic is the underrated part. You can no longer design a chip without knowing where models will be in three years, because a chip taped out today ships into a model landscape nobody has seen yet. Nvidia solves this by being the default everyone builds on. AMD just solved it by buying one of the few people who decides where models go next, and making her chief scientist reporting directly to Lisa Su.
Li immigrated from China at 15 speaking almost no English and spent her Princeton years running her parents' dry cleaning shop on weekends.
She gave the dataset away for free. Getting her cost $8.2 billion.
ChatGPT has crossed 1M+ users in just 5 days.
To compare, it took Netflix 41 months, FB - 10 months, and Instagram - 2.5 months.
But many haven’t yet realized its full potential.
Here are the 10 mindblowing things you can do using it right now:
Um... I just had like a 20 minute conversation with ChatGPT about the history of modern physics. If I had this shit as a tutor during high school and college.... OMG.
I think we can basically re-invent the concept of education at scale. College as we know it will cease to exist.
"I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment."
@naval
I woke up today , having dreamt early morning at 4 AM . I was in the biggest Mall of India looking to buy a pair of socks and a neck tie .
As I walked in, I noticed a sweater with a price tag of RS 9000 .Next to the sweater were a pair of Jeans for Rs.10000 .
"Success is the enemy of learning. It can deprive you of the time and the incentive to start over. Beginner’s mind also needs beginner’s time." - @naval