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U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#21

Post by vlovich123 »

osnium123 wrote: post #10

I don’t understand why the US government is moving to cripple NVidia. It’s not Jensen’s fault that he’s a visionary CEO who anticipated this market and invested in CUDA. Jensen also didn’t anything to do with the fact that Intel had incompetent leadership for 15 years before Pat Gelsinger joined in 2021.

It’s questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market vs he just positioned the company to eat up sales to high energy particle physics & similar super-computer applications and then got lucky that this accelerator also turned out to work pretty well for AI. At best, he saw that he needed a more general compute platform for GPUs but OpenCL was a thing so he wasn’t alone in recognizing this. There’s even an argument to be made that NVidia intentionally undermined OpenCL to cause it to fail; since NVidia has the fastest cards & mind share, if they make CUDA perform better than OpenCL, they encourage developers to buy into that development environment and thus lock out the standard from adoption.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#22

Post by shmerl »

lostmsu wrote: post #20
shmerl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA is pure lock-in, so it only makes sense for antitrust regulators to evaluate if it's causing anti-competitive damage to the market. Hint - it is. Lock-in is never good.

How can a product on its own cause anti-competitive damage?

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to.

To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market.

That's why there is value in something that breaks lock-in - that improves competition.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#24

Post by trhway »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

>Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams.

I wonder why Jensen wouldn't help his cousin Lisa Su with a good advice :)

In general it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software - just talk to any programmer at such a hardware shop. What striking is that Jensen is able to have such a prominent and huge software development in a naturally hardware company. NVDA is the only hardware company where my programmer acquaintances don't complain about it being a hardware company.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#26

Post by roenxi »

vlovich123 wrote: post #18
roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

The thing with monopoly laws is it doesn’t matter how you got into pole position. The point is that you’re illegally utilizing tangential benefits of the pole position to maintain that position as well as enter new markets. > including how the company’s software locks customers into using its chips, as well as how Nvidia distributes those chips to customers. The lock-in is probably a losing argument on technical meri…

Just on that last paragraph, because the frame annoys me - that is bullying. It isn't fair to insinuate that a company did something wrong by attempting to obey the law.

MS knows all about antitrust. They've hired a bunch of lawyers and told them to do what needs to be done to be compliant with the regulations. That shouldn't then be implied as evidence that they are guilty of antitrust activities! What are the lawyers supposed to do, structure the company to maximise the likelihood of an antitrust lawsuit being bought? Nobody should want that, regulator, company or customer.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#27

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

shmerl wrote: post #22
lostmsu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a product on its own cause anti-competitive damage?

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to. To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market. That's why there is value in something th…

> If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to NVIDIA hardware...

Initially I thought that AMD didn't offer a CUDA reimplementation out of NIH-syndrome (as it would be a marketing coup for NVIDIA), but then I saw that NVIDIA seem to be actively trying to shut-down independent attempts at running CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware: https://www.techpowerup.com/319984/nvidia-cracks-down-on-cud...

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#28

Post by 1123581321 »

shmerl wrote: post #22
lostmsu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a product on its own cause anti-competitive damage?

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to. To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market. That's why there is value in something th…

There would have to be more to it. If cuda is just the software that Nvidia customers use, or nvidia hardware is chosen because cuda is better software, it's not going to pass a market welfare test nor would monopolistic practices be found. Expensive switching costs per se aren't considered damage to welfare.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#29

Post by radicalbyte »

vlovich123 wrote: post #21
osnium123 wrote: post #10

I don’t understand why the US government is moving to cripple NVidia. It’s not Jensen’s fault that he’s a visionary CEO who anticipated this market and invested in CUDA. Jensen also didn’t anything to do with the fact that Intel had incompetent leadership for 15 years before Pat Gelsinger joined in 2021.

It’s questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market vs he just positioned the company to eat up sales to high energy particle physics & similar super-computer applications and then got lucky that this accelerator also turned out to work pretty well for AI. At best, he saw that he needed a more general compute platform for GPUs but OpenCL was a thing so he wasn’t alone in recognizing this. There’s eve…

It seemed like a no-brainer to me to open the hardware up to more general purpose compute.. but I'm a software guy who started on machines where where completely open and can "do magic" thanks to that.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#30

Post by jonathankoren »

shmerl wrote: post #22
lostmsu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a product on its own cause anti-competitive damage?

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to. To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market. That's why there is value in something th…

But what prevents anyone from developing an OpenCUDA?

It's been almost 25 years ago, but this was the crux of the Sun Microsystems v. Microsoft lawsuit. It's why OpenJDK exists. Even three years ago the Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright an API.

I mean, it feels breathtakingly obvious. Not only is there historical precedents for just doing this, there're legal precedents as well.

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