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It was not meant to be...

I imagined today' day (Nov 19, 2023) little differently than what it turned out to be..had a watch gathering at my place with few friends for India vs Aus ICC Cricket World Cup Final. Both teams deserved to be in the final - India winning all games in this tournament and Aus winning last 8 games after initially losing 2 games at start of tournament. The match was being played at the biggest stadium in the world (over 132,000 capacity) and over billion people tuning in...maybe most watched single sports event ever. After Australia won the toss, they choose to field (that's what most likely India wanted). India started well but then wickets kept dropping and India ended with total of 240 all out. That's when all of us knew that the dream of winning third world cup is over...despite one of the best bowling squad India ever had....The score was just not enough even for the best bowling to defend against one of the most professional and mentally strong team....No wonder Australia ended up with 6th World Cup Title...They outplayed India in every field - batting, bowling and most importantly fielding...

Billion dreams were broken with this loss and given that India won last two world cups in 1983 and 2011, we instantly knew how long we may have to wait for another win...it could be a decade. But we all feel even more sorry for all Indian players...They did their best throughout the tournament winning all games convincingly...But today it was not meant to me. Most of them will be retired or may not be selected for  next version of this tournament in 2027. So this was their only chance to make history (except Virat who was part of 2011 team). Hats off to all of them. While Virat Kohli deserved and won "Man of the Tournament",  he was visibly saddened that India could not win today's final. I wish at least Virat and Rohit play in 2027 and get another shot at making history.

In the end....It was not meant to be...

Weekend was interesting for another major news...OpenAI changed the world with launch of ChatGPT on Nov 30, 2022. It captured the imagination of world (not only tech world) and unleashed the power of AI which can be compared only with arrival of Internet in 1990s and Smart Phones with launch of the iPhone. But in less than one year the man behind this revolution Sam Altman was fired from CEO position of OpenAI....The reasons given are not clear or convincing. And now there are rumors that OpenAI board is trying to get him back as CEO...What a drama...it's even beyond typical Silicon Valley Startup drama...and we thought Twitter drama was the peak (that's still continuing but it has become as boring and repetative as recent Marvel movies)

What does it mean to AI revolution (or as some call "hype"). The AI genie is out of the bottle and firing of Sam Altman won't change that. In fact if Sam and OpenAI employees start another AI company, it would be able to instantly raise billions of $. 

Next week would be one of the most important earnings season for all of tech world - Nvidia. Can it repeat the feat of last two earnings?..Tech world is betting that it will be able to do exactly that. That would mean Nvidia would be nearly $75 Billion revenue company (from less than $25 billion) in less than one year. But now almost everyone wants a piece of Nvidia's GPU pie..Traditional competition like AMD, INTC as well cloud players like AMZN, Google, Tesla and now Microsoft. In two years there would be enough alternatives to run LLMs that Nvidia's earnings calls in 2025 would be quite different than in 2023. Till then Nvidia shareholders can enjoy the ride.

That's all for now...

Happy Thanksgiving!

/Shyam



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