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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

#81

Post by rafaelmn »

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…

It's interesting that Jensen seems to be selling this "software development is dead to AI" story when that means his profitability moat (software) is dead as well. All AMD needs to do is "hey Copilot rewrite this CUDA code to run on AMD hardware". Somehow that's not happening.

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

#82

Post by belter »

rafaelmn wrote: post #81
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…

It's interesting that Jensen seems to be selling this "software development is dead to AI" story when that means his profitability moat (software) is dead as well. All AMD needs to do is "hey Copilot rewrite this CUDA code to run on AMD hardware". Somehow that's not happening.

AMD had 10 years to get competent on software. It's not happening.

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

#83

Post by kersplody »

mdorazio wrote: post #9

It's difficult for me to understand the thinking here. Nvidia is dominant because AMD and Intel completely dropped the ball on investing in frameworks to compete with CUDA. Microsoft... invested in OpenAI when it was clear that the newer batch of generative models had legs. OpenAI isn't really anticompetitive as far as I can tell - they just have the most money with which to vacuum up the most data and hire the top e…

It's fine to be a monopoly because you have the best product. It's not OK to use that monopoly position to stifle competitors.

So has enough anticompetitive behavior occurred to distort the market? Unless I'm missing something, I'm just not seeing this investigation having legs.

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

#84

Post by belter »

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…

It's a bit ironic to talk about lawsuits over monopolies in an emerging AI market, that hardly existed 24 months ago, while ignoring the two worst monopolies in different domains, led by Microsoft and Google.

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

#85

Post by SilverBirch »

It's interesting to me that Microsoft and Nvidia are being lumped together in this reporting. To me there seems to be two very different issues. Nvidia managed to execute on a combined software/hardware product category that has yielded fantastic results and is difficult to copy. That's great. It's nothing to do with Anti-trust. Are they charging a premium for scarce products now? Sure, but all you can do is damage the market by attacking them there's no real way to increase demand. At best you can limit their profits, just handing over margin to their customers.

The Microsoft situation is very different however. You've got this behemoth that has basically just decided to take it's magic money tree and use it essentially buy growth through a huge number of complex deals that are designed to circumnavigate anti-trust. Sorry but "We're not buying you, we're just handing your investors a tonne of money, letting you shut down your company and then hiring all your employees" is bullshit. And also "We're investing in you You can make a credible argument that Nvidia uniquely earned the success they're seeing with the AI stuff, I don't think you can make that argument with Microsoft.

Now if you can join the dots - Nvidia has a cosy deal with MSFT to give MSFT GPUs and small companies then have to deal with MSFT because they have all the access to compute, then I think that would be a slam dunk. Leverage Microsoft's Cloud business to hoover up startups in AI.

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

#86

Post by throwthrowuknow »

deadbabe wrote: post #58
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.

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.

That’s not the case at all. AMD and Intel could be making money hand over fist right now if they had products that worked with the ML ecosystem. If they had any magic bullet they’d be idiots to not have used it years ago, they’re missing out on tens of billions of dollars on purpose for what? Even if NVIDIA got broken up their cards would still have massive demand and profit margins. I don’t think you understand how much of a shortage of compute there currently is, anyone who isn’t blatantly incompetent or ignoring ML can make money. AMD and Intel are just fat corporations who didn’t see the potential and thought business as usual would stay number one. Now they’re standing on the sidelines with their dicks in their hands while Jensen is leading the parade.

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

#87

Post by nabla9 »

pointlessone wrote: post #80
elefanten wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ignore “the spirit of the law” with fancy acrobatics around “the letter of the law”… at your own peril. I can’t comment on the claims here, but if MSFT is skirting the intent brazenly enough, the predictable regulatory reaction is no bullying. Everyone involved is well aware of that dynamic. No need to pity MSFT.

Is spirit of the law ever a concern in the USA? I’m asking because it is in the EU and every US company seem to struggle with the concept if I am to judge by how they engage GDPR, DMA and similar regulations in the EU.

Spirit of the law is more important in the US.

In common law systems (US, UK), there is greater emphasis on the spirit or intent behind the law. Judges have more flexibility to interpret laws and use general principles.

Civil law systems place more importance on the letter of the law. The spirit behind the law is secondary. The written legal codes are more important.

EU law is mixture of both, but most continental European countries have civil law system (Ireland does not, Nordic countries have mix of civil and common law)

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

#88

Post by vlovich123 »

pointlessone wrote: post #80
elefanten wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ignore “the spirit of the law” with fancy acrobatics around “the letter of the law”… at your own peril. I can’t comment on the claims here, but if MSFT is skirting the intent brazenly enough, the predictable regulatory reaction is no bullying. Everyone involved is well aware of that dynamic. No need to pity MSFT.

Is spirit of the law ever a concern in the USA? I’m asking because it is in the EU and every US company seem to struggle with the concept if I am to judge by how they engage GDPR, DMA and similar regulations in the EU.

The US Constitution has largely been interpreted in a “spirit of the law” manner since the founding. Originalism has taken significant durable gains in terms of SCOTUS appointments since the 1980s; prior to that originalists had a good chance of changing their POV once appointed. I suspect similar viewpoints are reflected in the judge appointments as well. Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt.

Spirit of the law isn’t perfect itself obviously because it is legitimate to point out that it becomes hard to know what the law actually is, especially since governments have gotten into legislating a lot of regulatory nuance and it’s hard to distinguish malicious compliance from good faith effort. It’s also corruptible from overzealous prosecution looking to make a name for itself by taking on unpopular entities that aren’t actually doing anything wrong.

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

#89

Post by vlovich123 »

nabla9 wrote: post #87
pointlessone wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is spirit of the law ever a concern in the USA? I’m asking because it is in the EU and every US company seem to struggle with the concept if I am to judge by how they engage GDPR, DMA and similar regulations in the EU.

Spirit of the law is more important in the US. In common law systems (US, UK), there is greater emphasis on the spirit or intent behind the law. Judges have more flexibility to interpret laws and use general principles. Civil law systems place more importance on the letter of the law. The spirit behind the law is secondary. The written legal codes are more important. EU law is mixture of both, but most continental Eu…

Since the 1980s letter of the law has seen a remarkable upswing in power. I wouldn’t say spirit of the law applies anymore to SCOTUS rulings & I suspect federal appointments followed similar biases so it’s up & down the federal court. Not sure about state judges. Do you agree?

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

#90

Post by mort96 »

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…

> There is no moat

Isn't the CUDA API a fairly significant moat?

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