Forbes, Dec 15, 2016

choi

(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."

slapdash (adj; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slapdash

(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.