Peter Thiel just sold all his stock in Nvidia - about $100 million dollars worth.
Does he think the LLM bubble will pop soon?
Maybe he’s decided that the future is human neurons in dishes.
“Biocomputing advocates claim that these systems could one day rival the capability of artificial intelligence and the potential of quantum computers.”
[There’s some genuinely interesting research here, but also a lot of ridiculous hype, like this quote.]
@gregeganSF - Maybe the person who wrote the quote thinks that quantum computers will never scale up and AI is just a bubble.
@johncarlosbaez @gregeganSF The mistake in that toot was the presence of the word "thinks". Thinking doesn't have a lot to do with what passes for tech sector "news" coverage these days.
@cstross - I guess we either need a lot of scare quotes, or new derogatory words.
@johncarlosbaez
Thiel has has invested into smaller Nvidia competitors.
Michael Burry (who is famous for his correct 2008 bet against the US housing market) revealed that he has put options in both Nvidia and Palantir.
Early on there's an asymmetric reward: lose a small investment or make huge gains. But Nvidia is already the largest company in history by market cap. Is it realistically going to double? Probably not, but it could half easily. So pull the plug and try to find something that's going to grow and isn't likely to drop.
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Brain consumes about 20 Watts while running a model with ~500 trillion parameters.
That's efficient.
@johncarlosbaez $100M is not much...not even in the decimals below
Market capitalization of NVIDIA (NVDA)
Market cap: $4.544 Trillion USD
As of November 2025 NVIDIA has a market cap of $4.544 Trillion USD. This makes NVIDIA the world's most valuable company by market cap according to our data. The market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the total market value of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares and is commonly used to measure how much a company is worth.
@noplasticshower - of course Thiel's investments are tiny compared to the total market cap of Nvidia. They're even tiny compared to Thiels' net worth of $21 billion. The question is why he decided to pull out.
@noplasticshower - It may not matter to you. But if Thiel's knows something we don't know (whcih is quite possible since he's well-connected), and this reveals some information about that, perhaps in conjunction with other clues, it's worth noting.
@johncarlosbaez @noplasticshower Even if he knows nothing, it may still matter as the investments are based on hype and people may assume he knows something and do the same out of fear, causing the eventual collapse.
@johncarlosbaez Even if it isn’t, won’t the rush of people unloading their stock turn this into a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts?
@Abazigal - self-fulfilling prophecies help bubbles form and also helps them pop.
@johncarlosbaez LLM bubble (as opposed to AI bubble) is an interesting turn of phrase. Yes there might be a local collapse, like the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s / early 2000s. but online industry has grown stupendously since then despite the setback. main difference is AI may lead to a dystopia where humans are obsolete :(.
I see current LLM stuff as being like spark gap radiotelegraphy, the earliest wireless communications. it took megawatts of power to communicate from a transmission platform to a ship at sea. but now you can do it (even without satellites) with a tiny little radio. AI technology will also evolve like that. probably a bad thing, sort of like the manhattan project a-bomb being optimized into a pocket sized one. :(
@johncarlosbaez Here are some graphs https://i.redd.it/hjvpic1za32g1.png
@solrize - thanks! Naively comparing it with dotcom bubble, it looks like this one could go on a while longer. Of course that's ignoring everything except the graph (in log scale).
@Photo55 - bwahaha! Maybe buying an island for Christmas?
@johncarlosbaez It occurs to me that the dotcom bubble merely set a lot of good money on fire, while e.g. the subprime mortage crisis had lots of bad money too, an AI financing is looking like the latter. I haven't been saving links but here's a tweet from today: https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/1990530634960478584