I have a feeling Apple will make a play for him.

Apple is considered to be seriously lagging behind in ML. Just his name alone is probably enough for the time being - They can give him his own lab to do whatever he wants. Ilya will attract enough talent, at least some of whom will be willing to take up responsibility over commercial stuff in the coming years.

I have a feeling he would like to publish some stuff, and apple doesnt do that

Times have changed.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research

Ilya is very much in favor of closed source AI albeit for different reasons. I don't see a problem here.

I think so too, GTP-4o but replacing Siri would be world-changing for mobile

That, or something like it, might well be coming at WWDC next month...

They sell the shovels and the buckets, they're not digging for gold.

They do participate pretty heavily in ML research from what I've seen. To continue your metaphor, they try to invent as many gold digging techniques as possible which exclusively work with their own shovels and buckets.

Yep, see for example ‘Earth 2’.

If you look at deep learning super sampling, they are doing digging and being pretty successful at it.

They've got money for a very BIG experiment tho

I feel like they’re not going to want to go into direct competition with their most valuable customers.

Haven't most of the most valuable customers already started rolling their own Nvidia hardware replacements?

Hedging maybe. But there's no real competition currently.

their most valuable customer is cloud providers and they’re already taking big stakes and picking winners

They would if they could

Doesnt hurt to also sell the gold

That is not the main prupose of Nvidia and will make microsoft, google, fb worried too much to go away from Nvidia.

Being both coach and player at the same time is not a good idea.