In this episode of La Loupe, Xavier Yvon analyzes Nvidia’s success and strategy with Frédéric Filloux and Maxime Recoquillé, journalists in the Tech department of L’Express.
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The team: Xavier Yvon (presentation and writing), Ambre Rosala (editing), Jules Krot (directing) and Marion Galard (work-study).
Credits: WSJ, Tech News
Music and dressing: Emmanuel Herschon/Studio Torrent
Picture credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/AFP
Logo: Anne-Laure Chapelain/Benjamin Chazal
How to listen to a podcast? Follow the leader.
Xavier Yvon: In this podcast, we are going to talk about the future of computers and the digital industry, but I would like to start by taking you to the middle of the 19th century, in the United States.
We are in 1848, and in a still wild California, the rumor is spreading: gold has been found in the American river. In San Francisco, which was only a hamlet at the time, a merchant named Samuel Brannan sniffed out a good deal: he bought up all the gold digger’s equipment available for miles around and became essential for the men and women who arrive by the hundreds of thousands, hoping to make a fortune. On the strength of his success, Samuel Brannan opens several stores, buys land to build the housing necessary for the influx of population, and becomes the richest man in California, without having sought or found the slightest gram of gold.
Since then, it has been said that those who got richest during the gold rush were those who sold shovels and pickaxes.
You will immediately understand where I am coming from: today, since the success of ChatGPT, we are witnessing a frantic race for artificial intelligence. Those who derive the main benefits for the moment are, here again, those who provide the tools: the manufacturers of microprocessors, essential to supercomputers.
In particular, one of them, whose name may not ring a bell to you yet: Nvidia. The American company is now worth more than 1000 billion dollars, a symbolic bar exceeded only by digital giants like Apple, Microsoft or Amazon.
Like Samuel Brannan in his time, Nvidia does not intend to stop at “shovels and pickaxes”. The electronic chip manufacturer wants to bypass the platforms that today structure our relationship to the web to perhaps become the next GAFAM.
For further
PODCAST. The lucrative turn of the creators of ChatGPT
ChatGPT: a technology that has already reached its limits?
Gilles Babinet: “We live in a reactionary Internet era”
Bloom, the French ChatGPT: in the secrets of its manufacture