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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

#51

Post by vlovich123 »

roenxi wrote: post #26
vlovich123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawye…

This is a confusing argument to me. Are you saying that structuring and smurfing should then be legal? All structuring and smurfing is is an attempt to make sure that financial transactions stay below the statutory reporting threshold.

Also, I think you’re conflating my statement which was meant to be prescriptive with a descriptive statement. I’m saying if structuring and smurfing are illegal in a financial context, MSFT doing so to skirt antitrust laws should be similarly illegal - if the laws don’t prohibit it, the laws should be updated. But I’m not a lawyer so it’s possible laws already prohibit it or MSFT violated some laws. Commenting in either direction on an information free article isn’t wise.

As for the spirit of the law vs letter of the law, that’s an ongoing debate as old as history. It’s personally weird to me to encounter letter of the law people given that the spirit of the law has a much richer history behind it to my view and seems more defensible. Some amount of rule lawyering is required, but violating the spirit of the law is a more robust legal principle that can withhold participants trying to find creative workarounds around the spirit of the law.

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

#52

Post by 7f4784e3f1 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #41
trhway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 devel…

>it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software A lot of what keeps Intel relevant is their prowess in both hardware and software, bringing properly refined products to market when it matters. Intel's failure against Nvidia had far more to do with their business strategy of CPU First missing the broadside of a barn; it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, of course you're going to g…

Intel has some great software like MKL and related libraries, but, speaking from experience, due to its internal politics Intel is unable to innovate in a meaningful way or build a reasonable SW strategy for GPUs.

The oneAPI heavily contributed to their GPU failures IMO. Choosing SYCL and promoting non-existing performance portability and pouring resources in the trying to shove CPU and GPU (and at some point FPGA!) into the same programming model while disinvesting from OpenCL was a big mistake, but it was probably the only way to please both CPU and GPU management.

And the problem is not SYCL per se but the fact that they try to make it an open standard rather then trying to provide a way to extract maximum performance from their HW. They needed to build a CUDA alternative, where, after jumping through considerable hoops, you can get to actually programming tensor cores for those who need it. Not surprisingly, Intel is not using SYCL for their GPU kernels (look at oneDNN sources). With Raja gone there may be hope, but I'm not holding my breath.

The only thing that they have that is competitive is Habana's stuff which is outside of the oneAPI.

I would not be surprised if AMD has a similar issue of infighting due selling both CPUs and GPUs.

And NVIDIA does not have this problem.

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

#53

Post by roenxi »

vlovich123 wrote: post #51
roenxi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawye…

This is a confusing argument to me. Are you saying that structuring and smurfing should then be legal? All structuring and smurfing is is an attempt to make sure that financial transactions stay below the statutory reporting threshold. Also, I think you’re conflating my statement which was meant to be prescriptive with a descriptive statement. I’m saying if structuring and smurfing are illegal in a financial context,…

Ah I see, I was in two minds about including the quote but decided against it. I was talking about "Microsoft structured its minority stake in OpenAI in part to avoid antitrust scrutiny, The Times has reported. Microsoft also reached a deal in March to hire most of the staff of Inflection AI, another A.I. start-up, and license its technology. Because the deal was not a standard acquisition, it may be harder for regulators to scrutinize.", not what you wrote. Obviously they structure the deal to involve scrutiny; they aren't going to structure it to invite scrutiny; the deal is designed to avoid anything that would allow a random regulator to get involved. The Times is insinuating without cause.

I don't think you're in a position to bully Microsoft. I doubt they care about your opinion.

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

#55

Post by orhmeh09 »

7f4784e3f1 wrote: post #52
Dalewyn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software A lot of what keeps Intel relevant is their prowess in both hardware and software, bringing properly refined products to market when it matters. Intel's failure against Nvidia had far more to do with their business strategy of CPU First missing the broadside of a barn; it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, of course you're going to g…

Intel has some great software like MKL and related libraries, but, speaking from experience, due to its internal politics Intel is unable to innovate in a meaningful way or build a reasonable SW strategy for GPUs. The oneAPI heavily contributed to their GPU failures IMO. Choosing SYCL and promoting non-existing performance portability and pouring resources in the trying to shove CPU and GPU (and at some point FPGA!)…

What are your thoughts on the move from ICC to the LLVM-based ICX? Does that fit in with this product strategy somehow?

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

#56

Post by reissbaker »

samplatt wrote: post #46
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. You're pretty close, but it's one level of abstraction away from the truth: NVidia spends absolutely earth-shakingly stonking amounts of money working directly with the devs of major studios, fixing issues with their drivers as they come, and in some cases paying studios to lock-in talking to them about t…

Of course AMD and Intel could just do the same thing. But they don't. That's not Nvidia's fault.

In fact I wish Intel and AMD would do the same! It's great customer service to know that games are going to work well out of the box with Nvidia, because Nvidia spent tons of money working directly with devs on optimization and even per-game bugfixes.

As a longtime PC gamer I wish AMD released better GPUs, but they seem incapable of doing so generation after generation. Intel is getting better at the low end, so there's at least some hope there. But Nvidia is just the best in class, because they put in a huge amount of polish and work.

My understanding is this is the same approach Nvidia took with CUDA: investing a massive amount to make it fast, accurate, and broadly available, while AMD continued to push out barely-tested drivers — for example, see hotz's woes with tinygrad and finally giving up and labeling the "red" (aka AMD) tinybox driver quality as "Mediocre" on their product page, with the "green" (aka Nvidia) tinybox driver quality listed as "Great" https://tinygrad.org/ — and to this day restricts their competing library (ROCm) to specific ultra-expensive server-class GPUs.

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

#57

Post by blueboo »

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…

Their competitors didn’t win. That’s not the same as failing, insofar as building technology goes. Business, sure

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

#58

Post by deadbabe »

nimish wrote: post #16
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…

Yep. AMD and Intel had two decades to come up with a CUDA alternative or even a parallel implementation and both failed to do anything. Incompetence.

How do we know the strategy wasn’t to avoid releasing a CUDA alternative until NVIDIA is wounded by an anti-trust lawsuit and then when they get broken up deploy your CUDA alternative and speed past them? Could be playing the long game.

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

#59

Post by roenxi »

torginus wrote: post #42
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…

Honestly I don't get how the current situation could develop. Video games have used compute shaders forever, and those work just fine on other cards. I remember doing some quite involved stuff for my thesis using OpenCL a decade ago, and it worked just fine. Nowadays OpenCL is dead for some reason... I just don't get what is there in CUDA that makes it so special. As far as I remember, a GPGPU API consists of a shade…

There probably isn't anything in CUDA that makes it special. They are well optimised math libraries and the math for most of the important stuff is somewhat trivial. AI seems to be >80% matrix multiplication - well optimised BLAS is tricky to implement, but even a bad implementation would see all the major libraries support AMD.

The vendor "lock in" is because it takes a few years for decisions to be expressed in marketable silicon and literally only Nvidia was trying to be in the market 5 years ago. I've seen a lot of AMD cards that just crashed when used for anything outside OpenGL. I had a bunch of AI related projects die back in 2019 because initialising OpenCL crashed the drivers. If you believe the official docs everything would work fine. Great card except for the fact that compute didn't work.

At the time I thought it was maybe just me. After seeing geohotz's saga trying to make tinygrad work on AMD cards and having a feel for how badly unsupported AMD hardware is by the machine learning community, it makes a lot of sense to me that it is a systemic issue and AMD didn't have any corporate sense of urgency about fixing those problems.

Maybe there is something magic in CUDA, but if there is it is probably either their memory management model or something quite technical like that. Not the API.

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

#60

Post by deadbabe »

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…

AMD is more than just cards.
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