The short version

Ben Thompson predicted on January 1, 2025: “Training will continue to matter, and Nvidia’s current architecture, including high-speed compute, large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, and high-speed networking, will likely continue to dominate. Answer inference will be a meaningful market, albeit a relatively small one, and speed from chips like Cerebras or Groq … will be very useful. Specifically, agentic inference…

Prediction by

Ben Thompson

On January 1, 2025

“Training will continue to matter, and Nvidia’s current architecture, including high-speed compute, large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, and high-speed networking, will likely continue to dominate. Answer inference will be a meaningful market, albeit a relatively small one, and speed from chips like Cerebras or Groq … will be very useful. Specifically, agentic inference will be the largest market by far, because that is the market that won’t be limited by humans or time.”

Follow-up

Nvidia’s architecture continued to dominate AI training. Alternative inference-focused hardware gained visibility for specific scenarios. Industry rhetoric increasingly emphasized 'agentic' AI workloads, aligning with predictions.

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