Astral Codex Ten

NVIDIA

12 min read

NVIDIA

Article

NVIDIA is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between October 10, 2024 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “the first stock is NVIDIA”; “NVIDIA? Seems like a good bet for the early stages”; “Biden bans NVIDIA from sending advanced chips to China”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: October 10, 2024
  • Last seen: February 05, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
You can’t see it in the screenshot, but the first stock is NVIDIA, the second TSMC, the third Alphabet, and the fourth Microsoft. On average they went up about 0.5%, on a day when the NASDAQ as a whole also went up about 0.5%.
Should we have expected a single California law to have an effect visible in the markets? According to Daniel and @GroundHogStrat , past history says yes: when California passed a proposition backing down from their attempt to crack down on Uber over gig workers, Uber’s stock went up 35%. If SB 1047 was going to be as bad for AI as the anti-gig-worker rules were for Uber, we would expect a similar jump. Even if the bill would be fine for incumbents but only hurt small startups, we would have expected a hit for NVIDIA, who sells chips to those small startups. But NVIDIA went up less than the NASDAQ overall.
Inline links: @GroundHogStrat
It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
January 02, 2025 · Original source
If we expect the Singularity to grow the economy by orders of magnitude, it might be worth investing in stocks rather than other instruments (eg bonds) that pay out a fixed sum. Are AI stocks better than other stocks? Not obviously - see the classic stories about how the computing revolution failed to enrich IBM, or the Internet revolution failed to enrich Yahoo. NVIDIA? Seems like a good bet for the early stages, but it’s purely intellectual labor and therefore replaceable after superintelligence; at some point you would want to switch to physical capital. All of this seems a lot more dangerous than just investing in index funds; the upside is so high that it seems silly to risk missing it by over-optimizing.
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
April 15, 2025 · Original source
Homeowners want to preserve or increase the value of their houses. Of these, I think 6 is one of the less important ones - if this were the dominating factor, people would support upzoning, since it usually raises the value of properties in the upzone (if developers can build skyscrapers on your land, then your land value goes up relative to the profitability of skyscrapers). But part of the problem is that people don’t support upzoning. So 6 can’t be the dominating factor. Without POSIWID, people could think about all of these possibilities and come to their own conclusions. POSIWID tries to ban thinking about 1-5 by fiat, insisting that 6 is the only possible explanation and anyone considering the others is naive. I think this makes it a bad heuristic. But there are two more concerning things about how Negating is using POSIWID. First, he’s picking out one particularly salient thing the system does (raise house prices) and claim that’s “the” purpose. He could equally well pick any of the other results - preserve neighborhood character, protect the environment, help Chinese people escape currency controls. Like I said in the original post, in practice POSIWID serves as justification for paranoia - whatever effect you like least, whatever possibility would be most sinister - that’s the one that the system is intentionally aiming for. Second, he’s saying it’s the purpose of “the” system. Which system? I bet whatever government he’s talking about has some organization called the Affordable Housing Bureau, or whatever. And I bet that the Affordable Housing Bureau really does make housing slightly more affordable, relative to the counterfactual where it doesn’t exist. It’s just that lots of other government, market, and social forces conspire to make it much less affordable. If Negating were to claim “The purpose of the Affordable Housing Bureau is to make housing less affordable”, this would be false even if the overall picture (the government is deliberately raising real estate prices) were true. Brad writes: I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years. Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist. And hwold writes: I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes" For example : https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034 I think this sounds profound on first glance, and it’s probably true in some cases. But it’s not nearly true enough to be an Iron Law. Try to think about it in specific Near Mode cases: If you eliminated police, would crime go down, because the police have an incentive to preserve crime? If you eliminated the fire department, would fires go down, because the fire department has an incentive to preserve fire? If you eliminated doctors, would cancer deaths go down, because doctors have an incentive to preserve cancer deaths? If you eliminated the FDA, would dangerous drug side effects go down, because the FDA has an incentive to preserve dangerous drug side effects? If you eliminated the Federal Reserve, would bank runs go down, because the Federal Reserve has an incentive to preserve bank runs? Brad’s original comment mentions homelessness and drug abuse, but I know some drug abuse doctors, and they’re (mostly) good people who do their best in a tough situation. Drug abuse doesn’t continue because drug abuse doctors are secretly ensuring it continues to help their bottom line. Drug abuse continues because fentanyl is really, really addictive. Even good conspiracy theories don’t work like this. Was there a conspiracy among pain pill manufacturers to addict people? Yeah, kinda, although I think the degree to which this caused the opioid crisis is pretty overblown. But the pain pill manufacturers weren’t a system dedicated to preventing addiction. They did their job (reduce pain) fine, then ran an unrelated evil conspiracy on the side! Breb writes: This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else. I’m against this for individuals too! There are a million self-help gurus who try to convince you that that if you procrastinate - let’s say you always do term papers the night before and get terrible grades and it’s threatening your ability to complete college - then it must be because this secretly benefits you in some way. Maybe your overly-strict father wants you to complete college, and you’re deliberately trying to fail as a secret act of rebellion against him hidden even from yourself. Although something like this might sometimes be true, more often a clearer understanding of the circuitry involved (in this case, hyperbolic discounting) saves you from these labyrinths and lets you think about things straightforwardly again. Tom J writes: In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was *intended* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that *does* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people *claim* the point of the system is. This may be true in cybernetics. Or it may be an interesting methodological commitment, in the same way that the behaviorists’ “assume there is no such thing as human interiority” was an interesting methodological commitment. But I don’t think it’s common or valuable in normal-life analysis of social systems. When Biden bans NVIDIA from sending advanced chips to China, black box analysis would have to be ambivalent between explanations like: Biden personally hates Jensen Huang and wants his company to suffer
Inline links: writes, writes, https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034, writes, hyperbolic discounting, writes
Biden thinks NVIDIA produces bad chips and wants to save China from buying inferior products.
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
41: Related: NVIDIA is emerging as a new villain in US tech policy; they really want to be allowed to sell advanced technology to China, and are swinging their weight as World’s Largest Company to undermine anyone who who raises national security objections. David Cowan makes the case here: NVIDIA Is A National Security Risk. Steven Adler goes further, saying there is “widespread fear” among think tank researchers who publish work against NVIDIA’s interests. You would think that whatever the disadvantages of having an super-nationalist America First administration in power, at least they would be strongly against handing key military tech to rivals - but it’s not clear which way this will end up going.
Inline links: NVIDIA Is A National Security Risk, saying, handing key military tech to rivals
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
Compute: America is far ahead. We have better chips (thanks, NVIDIA) and can produce many more of them (thanks, TSMC). Our recent capex boom, where companies like Google and Microsoft spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, has no Chinese equivalent. By the simplest measure - total FLOPs on each sides - we have 10x as much compute as China, and our advantage is growing every day. A 10x compute advantage corresponds to about a 1-2 year time advantage, or an 0.5 - 1 generation advantage (eg GPT-4 to GPT-5).
It gets worse. NVIDIA, America’s biggest company, constantly lobbies to be allowed to sell its advanced chips to China. It’s not afraid to play dirty, and stands accused of trying to get China hawks pushed out of government for resisting; Steven Adler reports “widespread fear among think tank researchers and policy experts who publish work against NVIDIA’s interests”. Foundation for American Innovation fellow David Cowan goes further, saying that “NVIDIA is a national security risk”.
Inline links: Steven Adler reports, “NVIDIA is a national security risk”
All of this lobbying has paid off: the administration keeps proposing changing the rules to allow direct chip sales to China. So far cooler heads have prevailed each time, but the deal keeps popping back onto the table. NVIDIA tries to argue that the models being proposed for export are only second-rate chips that won’t affect the compute balance, but this is false - last month’s talks involved the most price-performant chip on the market. Here’s IFP’s calculation for how caving on this issue would affect the AI race:
Inline links: keeps proposing changing the rules to allow direct chip sales to China, deal keeps popping back onto the table, the most price-performant chip on the market
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
January 13, 2026 · Original source
“Oh goodness no, I’m scared of commitment and I work at NVIDIA. I’m going to keep stringing her along forever.”
“Cause, uh, NVIDIA gave OpenAI ten trillion dollars to invest in Oracle conditional on Oracle investing in Broadcom conditional on Broadcom funding the Series A of a vehicle that buys OpenAI stock in exchange for OpenAI backstopping AMD investing ten trillion dollars into us, and every company in the chain had its stock go up 80% on the news, but if our valuation goes down even for one second then it crashes the global economy. And I’m sure I can solve this eventually, but just, uh, don’t let anybody involved in the global economy hear about this until then, okay?”
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
Obvious explanation is the world’s most ham-fisted paid influence campaign by NVIDIA. I, for one, am shocked - shocked! - to hear about a lapse in the ethical standards of our nation’s right-wing Twitter influencers. I hope people in the AL policy world are paying attention.