Nvidia to Buy Assets From Groq for $20b Cash
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The AI chip landscape just got a major shakeup: Nvidia is acquiring Groq's assets for a whopping $20 billion, sparking debate about the fate of Groq's innovative technology. While some commenters worry that Nvidia will squash the competition, others point out that the deal includes a non-exclusive licensing agreement, allowing Groq to continue operating independently. The twist: Groq's cloud business is excluded from the sale, leading some to speculate that Nvidia might be trying to neutralize a potential threat while still profiting from the technology. As one commenter quipped, Nvidia might simply "sell the asset and then lease it from the buyer," but others counter that Nvidia has every incentive to kill the asset as a competitor.
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Wait, what? How is the cloud business supposed to run if Nvidia is acquiring the rights to the hardware?
This is how business works in the 21st century - once one company has a dominant position and a massive warchest they can just buy any business that has any potential of disrupting their revenue. It's literally the thesis Peter Thiel sets out in Zero To One. It works really well for that one business.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer.
GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
They were also the faster one compared to groq but they were always a little slow on adding new models compared to groq but not sure what changed right now.
Definitely recommend cerebras tho now that groq's been eaten up from inside basically
States are "not allowed" to regulate AI companies.
But Jimmy Carter was an honorable human, and, well...there are fewer people fitting that description sitting behind the Resolute desk, today.
[0] He didn't sell it, he put it into a blind trust. He should have sold it. When he left office, the farm was $1MM in debt.
In some ways, it's not about eliminating a competitor. It's about eliminating all the competitors. Nvidia can use its resources to push AI ASICs farther faster than others, potentially cutting off a whole host of competitors that threaten their business. Nvidia has the hardware and software talent, the money, and the market position to give their AI ASICs an advantage. They know if they don't lean into ASICs that someone else will and their gravy train will end. So they almost certainly won't be abandoning the technology.
But that doesn't mean that it'll be good for us.
It will prove to be simple corruption.
All they have is a demolition site. There's no final design. Trump keeps changing his vision of his mausoleum. They don't have an architect since the previous one quit.
They have less than a week to submit construction plans[1], and they're clearly missing that deadline. It is of course not the end, but it's a sign of things to come, about half a year in.
Trump is personally running the project instead of delegating it and as we all know he's ruled by whims and disorganized plus rapidly mentally deteriorating at 79 years of age. He's talking about getting into heaven and desperately slapping his name on random physical things because he's obsessed with leaving a grandiose "legacy", any kind of mark on history. He will, but it'll rather be as a seditionist and corrupt ravager of civil institutions and the rule of law -- a pitiful despoiler.
There's no section about the ball room in Project 2025, and no one else but Trump cares about this pet project.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-denies-request-to-tempora...
But demolishing a third of the White House? That'll be clearly visible in every single aerial shot of the building during every single political event for years. It is, quite literally, a scar on the political face of the country.
It's like turning the Pentagon into a Square, or blowing Washington's face off Mount Rushmore, or selling Alaska back to Russia: you're not going to forget when you are constantly being reminded of it.
What do those people have to do with anything besides being popular right-wing targets?
His approval rating is currently around 42%.
If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
It should be noted that Don Jr. is one of the investors who will benefit greatly if/when this goes through.
Will there be a truck full of paper money or not?
Electronically, yes!
This deal is framed as IP transfer and talent transfer without owning the full company. Probably to skirt anti trust, among other things.
If not, the owners are likely liable to be sued for "selling in effect" without paying equity holders.
Presuming the company becomes a defacto subsidiary of Nvidia (even if not legally so)
My guess, without researching it, is they will compensate existing equity holders to avoid that possibility. I mean the valuation multiple is enormous, it's worth it simply to derisk the legal aspect
its sort of like proxy wars and this is sort of whats happening in software side of things with open source models but I think that the benefit of the proxy wars is going to be for the end consumers
But although on the other hand, having two large countries compete with each other while buying everything else and all feels like it astronomically increases the price if someone wants to compete with these two giants (any other country perhaps)
We definitely need a better system where it doesn't feel like we are seeing pacman eat everything up basically
One of these things is not like the others
Well, I mean, isn't that exactly what they should be doing? (I'm not talking about whether or not it benefits society; this is more along the lines of how they're incentivized.)
Put yourself in their shoes. If you had all that cash, and you're hearing people talk of an "AI Bubble" on a daily basis, and you want to try and ensure that you ride the wave without ever crashing... the only rational thing to do is use the money to try and cover all your bases. This means buying competitors and it also means diversifying a little bit.
It's just an anti-competitive move that could be very bad for the consumer as it makes the inference market less competitive.
Also: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783
However, I would say you are wrong about it being only smoke
It is peak delulu.
This is the power of tinygrad
My guess is you're trying to communicate "tinygrad doesn't need gpu drivers" which maybe is transmutated into "this replaces CUDA" and you think "CUDA means other GPUs can't be used for LLMs"
I know George has pushed this idea for years now, but, you have to look no further than AMD/Google making massive deals to understand how it works on the ground. I hope he doesn't victimize you further.
Re: has someone else does this? Yup! https://github.com/albertstarfield/apple-slick-rtx
Wonder what happened that it never came.
> Willy's got his i3-12100 Gen RTX3090 hosted on Ubuntu with Juice Server
E-gpu my ass
it's not like Nvidia doesn't invest a ton into R&D, but hey, they have the cash, why not use it? like a good business.
In this case, removing a competitor, absorbing their IP, and maintain their ability to dictate the direction of an entire industry. They're hurting the industry itself by removing competition, since competition is good for consumers and also good for progression forward.
Businesses with a monopoly of some sort often stop innovating in the space and end up slowing the entire thing down. Often, they do their best to block anything and anyone that tries to do better, and effectively keep progress back in doing so, simply to maintain their position.
They're selfish self-preserving entities often driven by the same kinds of people, disregarding the harm they do in the name of profits and shareholder "value". Sure, until someone disrupts that (or they get bought out and dissolved).
When I have asked LLMs to read/dictate a linked text, the output is usually not a clean read but something reinterpreted with its own style.
I wonder if equity holding employees get anything from the deal or indeed if all the investors will be seeing a return from this?
Getting screwed out of your payout by such a totally-not-an-acquisition is wage theft. It's like promising a sales-related bonus at the beginning of the year, and then in December changing the metric to "AI-related sales to the CEO's golf buddies".
This may have been more true before 2010s where public companies were not paying as much in liquid cash and private companies were not valued so aggressively. Fact is most employees take the startup offer because they don't actually have a liquid offer that's super competitive at that moment, or they are just kind of bored and taking a break of the corporate job that does not give them too many responsibilities, i.e. they are compensated via the title, not just the promise of making bank.
My point was more that the high end ones they do get are usually in the front piece of the airplane in the acquisition split.
I understand that a lot of inexperienced people (like in this thread) think they're going to get rich though. No, it is not what theft.
Groq is now changing the deal after the fact by making those stock options worthless 100% of the time. It's like you participate in a lottery, and then the organizer decides to just not do a draw and keep all the proceeds for themselves. Sorry, but that's theft.
Don't intend to pay out in the unlikely event that you hit it big? Then don't offer stock options to your employees and pay market-rate salaries - plus of course a decent premium for the fact that (unlike an established company) your startup can go bust at any time and doesn't offer stable employment. You can't have it both ways.
> No, it is not "wage theft" to not get rich when the company exits
I don't think anyone in this thread thinks they're gonna get rich by working for a startup. There's a hope that they will, that's why they are working, but there's no expectation.
What's being discussed is a startup exiting for billions of dollars and the employees with equity seeing zero of it.
Working for a startup usually means lower wages and longer hours, for the chance at striking it rich if the company succeeds. If employees don't see anything when the company succeeds, there's literally no upside to working for a startup.
If the employer is explicitly making the employee options worthless, then they should be obligated to disclose this. Otherwise it’s trivial to engineer a corporate entity which pays the employees while “licensing” the technology from an IP holding firm. Later they can simply sell the IP holding firm without owing employees a dollar.
If you were an employee, you were not a founder. A founding-employee would be someone who explicitly "invested" time/money into a company without compensation. If you are also an employee earning a wage you better have a written agreement stating what amount was "investment" and what amount was compensated wage.
I don’t know about you, but every company I’ve ever worked at is a shitty business partner if that’s the metric. The standard has always been I get what we agreed to if I was lucky, and otherwise I got full “I’ve altered the deal, pray I don’t alter further” and dared you to defend your rights.
I actually have called their bluff a few times and gotten some money out of it, but it was always a year long event or more to resolution and involved risking even more money on lawyers.
Your startup won't succeed when its founder starves to death. It's why the founder will usually get a bunch of cash during investment rounds [0]: they can't focus on the company if they are constantly worried about cash in their personal life. Unless the founder is already independently wealthy, it is a guarantee that they'll be employed by the company and being paid a living wage. Heck, in some countries this is even legally required!
According to your logic, no successful startup will ever have a founder, as any form of pay instantly degrades them to regular employee, and any kind risk taken and below-market salary is completely irrelevant. Never mind the fact that they are taking home a minimum-wage salary while working 100 hours a week - they are earning a wage so they can't possibly be a founder.
So if this logic already breaks down for the founder, why couldn't it also break down for early employees whose compensation is mostly in stock options? How is their situation any different from the founder's?
[0]: https://www.stefantheard.com/silicon-valleys-best-kept-secre...
If you were an employee, you were not a founder. A founding-employee would be someone who explicitly "invested" uncompensated time/money into a company without compensation and also worked as an employee. If you are also an employee earning a wage you better have a written agreement stating what amount was "investment" and what amount was compensated wage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44673296
She didn't see a dime out of it, and was let off (together with a big chunk of people) within 6 months.
Let's face it and accept that the golden days of people working in tech startup (and soon large companies) are over.
RIP 1980 - 2023.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
/s
I guess you'll have to face the music at some point.
I’m more curious how angel investors are being treated in these exits. If _they_ dry up the whole pipeline goes away
So the only ones getting shafted are the employees.
Yes, correct
Quite obvious that Groq would get acquired. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820
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