(1) Michael Schuman, The Great Mall of China. JD.com has seized on a seismic shift in the way Chinese customers shop online to become the beloved, reliable alternative to Alibaba. http://www.forbes.com/sites/mich ... umers/#13e224e72ceb
Note: Referring to JD founder and CEO Richard Liu: "He had ordered ice cream on JD's Internet shopping mall and, to his dismay, it arrived slightly melted. He would have none of such slapdash service."
(2) Aaron Tilley, The New Intel. Graphics-chip specialist Nvidia's almost accidental dominance of the market for artificial-intelligence processors has propelled its stock to new heights in the past fie years. But its decades-long conscientious policy of treating its employees well is why it ranks first among its peers on the new Just 100 list of America's best corporate citizens. http://www.forbes.com/sites/aaro ... -learning-ai-intel/
Quote:
"despite the surprising resilience of PC gaming (at Nvidia the segment grew 63% year-on-year in its most recent quarter, even as the broader market for PCs tanked), it's not video games that has Wall Street salivating over the firm. It's artificial intelligence. In a fascinating bit of silicon serendipity, it turns out that the same technology that can conjure up a gorgeous alien landscape or paint a picture-perfect explosion is also nearly optimal for the hottest area of AI: deep learning. Deep learning enables a computer to learn by itself, without programmers having to code everything by hand * * * [Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says:] 'it's called GPU computing.'
"Nvidia's dominance of the GPU sector--it has more than a 70% share--and its expansion into these new markets have sent its stock soaring. Its shares are up almost 200% in the past 12 months, and more than 500% in the past five years. Nvidia's market cap of $50 billion brings its trailing earnings multiple to more than 40 times, among the highest in the industry. That performance has generated a $2.4 billion fortune for Huang
"HUANG ALWAYS KNEW his graphics chips had a lot more potential than just powering the latest video games, but he didn't anticipate the shift to deep learning.
"Starting in 2006, Nvidia released a programming tool kit called CUDA[®; stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture] that allowed coders to easily program each individual pixel on a screen. A GPU simulates thousands of tiny computers operating simultaneously to render each pixel. These computers perform a lot of low-level math to render shadows, reflections, lighting and transparency.