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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

#61

Post by oytis »

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.

The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.

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

#62

Post by foota »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #49
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…

Some companies such as standard oil had extraordinarily effective vertically integrated monopolies. The issues came into play when they used their market dominance to secure things like rebate structures with rail roads and made agreements to buy up transit capacity at very favorable rates that left competitors at a serious disadvantage. A real question might be how Nvidia prioritizes capacity and delivery and pricin…

Say that Nvidia partners with open AI because they think open AI is the best positioned to succeed (and hence result in increase demand for Nvidia) as opposed to if they got some direct financial kickback, it that legal?

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

#63

Post by aydyn »

hgomersall wrote: post #48
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…

Cory Doctorow argues well why it doesn't matter how you got into a monopoly position: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-bi...

Still have no idea how this dude is relevant other than he wrote some scifi books one time. What are his technical accomplishments. Oh, nothing?

Anyone can talk, especially nowdays because of AI, ironically.

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

#64

Post by kortilla »

roenxi wrote: post #53
vlovich123 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regul…

If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse.

“We packed the goods in nondescript boxes to avoid scrutiny by the border guards…”

Scrutiny isn’t something you need to avoid as a big company if you’re not fucking around. The lawyers are there to handle the scrutiny, not to hide stuff from it.

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

#65

Post by Dalewyn »

reissbaker wrote: post #56
samplatt wrote: post #46

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. 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 i…

>In fact I wish Intel and AMD would do the same!

Intel at least works very closely with Microsoft to iron out the details for Windows.

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

#66

Post by skocznymroczny »

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…

I don't know specifically about OpenCL, but the big thing about CUDA is that it's supported across operating systems and across the whole spectrum of NVidia GPUs. AMD has ROCm, but they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to support any of the consumer grade GPUs. ROCm is still pretty much Linux only, with limited support on Windows and only the high-end consumer offerings (7900XT and 7900XTX) are officially supported for ROCm. Because they want to push compute users (and AI users) into workstation grade GPUs. In comparison, CUDA is usable and supported even on mid range NVidia GPUs such as RTX 3060. And most of the software around things like AI is done by enthusiasts with gaming PCs, so they write their software for the interface that supports them.

I have an AMD card that I try to use for AI stuff and it's an uphill battle. The most popular workloads such as Stable Diffusion or Llama more or less work. But as soon as you go into other, less mainstream workloads it starts to fall apart. Projects install CUDA versions of torch by default. To make them work you have to uninstall them manually and install the ROCM versions of torch. Then it turns out some Python dependency also uses CUDA, so you also have to find a ROCM fork for that dependency. Then there's some other dependency which only has a CUDA and CPU version and you're stuck.

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

#67

Post by mschuetz »

oytis wrote: post #61
nimish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.

OpenCL is an alternative to CUDA just like Legos are an alternative to bricks. The problem with OpenCL isn't even the performance, it's everything. If OpenCL were any good, people could use it to build similarly powerful applications on cheaper AMD GPUs.

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

#68

Post by roenxi »

kortilla wrote: post #64
roenxi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regul…

If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. “We packed the goods in nondescript boxes to avoid scrutiny by the border guards…” Scrutiny isn’t something you need to avoid as a big company if you’re not fucking around. The lawyers are there to handle the scrutiny, not to hide stuff from it.

> If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse.

It doesn't. That is like saying that if someone structures their affairs to pay less taxes it implies that wanted to do something illegal. They had to choose some structure, they picked the safest and easiest one. In both the hypothetical tax case and the real MS case, I suspect.

The incentive is to choose structures that minimise regulatory engagement. The fact that MS is following incentives isn't a red flag. Not a green one either, it isn't interesting except as something that the NYTimes can hook insinuations on.

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

#69

Post by mschuetz »

roenxi wrote: post #59
torginus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

The magic is that CUDA actually works well. There is no reason to pick OpenCL, ROCm, Sycl or others if you get a 10x better developer experience with CUDA.

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

#70

Post by jbenjoseph »

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…

I think a lot of it is customer service. If you work in ML you probably have some NVIDIA engineer's number in your phone. NVIDIA is really good at reaching out and making sure their products work for you. I am not a Torch maintainer but I am sure they have multiple NVIDIA engineers on speed dial that can debug complicated problems gratis.
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