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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

#131

Post by roenxi »

mort96 wrote: post #90
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?

I don't think so, no. I had an AMD card; I didn't feel like the lack of CUDA was slowing me down. I managed to implement everything I tried on the CPU just fine. My problem was that every approach I tried to implement my own stuff on the GPU using things like Vulkan or OpenCL led to crashes or frustration. In fairness I didn't know how to do basic operations on a graphics card with OpenGL and would be relying on super basic programming material out of AMD with titles like "how to multiply a matrix on an AMD GPU" [0]. They can be forgiven for not supporting amateurs I suppose ... but now I own a Nvidia card and they have stuff like https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cublasdx/introduction1.html.

But I stress that the issue there isn't that CUDA has tutorials. It is that I expect the tutorial code not to lead to a crash or system lockup. There is a well supported path to do those basic operations.

If you look at the CUDA webpage [1] you see things like "cuRAND", "cuFFT" and "cuBLAS". That isn't a moat - those are first year software engineering topics. AMD managed to make it look like a moat by not taking the compute market seriously; and anyone else competes at highly parallel compute.

[0] As far as I can tell; doesn't exist.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone

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

#132

Post by oblio »

aydyn wrote: post #63
hgomersall wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Writing well is a rare and valuable skill.

And this article, especially, really put into words what I had been thinking for 2 decades:

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

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

#133

Post by HWR_14 »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #93
HWR_14 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't control an entire industry. You can buy an Android phone and fully participate in the mobile phone world never talking to Apple. You cannot participate in the AI world without NVIDIA.

And why can’t you just use an AMD GPU? Is it because stores don’t sell them? Is it because motherboards don’t support them? Is it because you can’t rent one from a cloud provider? No, it’s because they don’t fucking work when you try to use them for ML.

That's not really relevant. Antitrust laws tend to focus on abusing your monopoly position, not having it. Microsoft was sued for using its Windows monopoly to force IE on people, not for having the monopoly by itself.

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

#134

Post by eru »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #124
eru wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard oil wasn't a monopoly. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Legacy_and_critic... They even lost market share during the time they were alleged of having and exploiting a monopoly: > Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911, that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent because of the expansion in capacity by competitors. See https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-th…

> Standard oil wasn't a monopoly. Bro...

?

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

#135

Post by eru »

mike_hearn wrote: post #125
eru wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those people there is no "spirit" or "true law". Actually, there is. Many judges take various interpretations of the 'spirit' into account. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism for one example. And if the courts use some 'spirit' guide them, companies and their lawyers better try and predict what that 'spirit' recommends. > If they didn't write it down properly or the resulting compromise was a mess…

Originalism is the opposite of that, no? Originalists are all about following what was actually written down, using an understanding of English as it was used at the time. It rejects modern re-interpretations of the law and avoids speculating about the 'spirit' of the constitution, even if that would be more convenient. The competing view is that of a 'living' body of law in which the meaning continually changes with…

Well, either way: than the 'living body of law' theory is an example of such a 'spirit'.

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

#136

Post by layla5alive »

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…

You're grossly misinformed. CUDA is a huge anti-competitive moat, and that's no accident.

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

#137

Post by HWR_14 »

shmerl wrote: post #39
HWR_14 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't control an entire industry. You can buy an Android phone and fully participate in the mobile phone world never talking to Apple. You cannot participate in the AI world without NVIDIA.

You don't need to control the entire industry to cause anti-competitive damage. You just need to have enough leverage that your influence can't be ignored. Examples of Apple doing that is banning competing browsers on iOS and then pushing W3C and developers in the direction they want due to "you can't ignore us". There was a whole list of bad examples. Touch events, fighting against SPIR-V in WebGPU, fighting against…

Apple is the only competitor to Google's 65% (direct) plus reskinned Chromium dominance of the browser market.

Meanwhile, I'm happy with the direction they push W3C and developers. Without them, Google would just push the web to whatever they want (more than they already do).

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

#138

Post by shmerl »

threeseed wrote: post #76
shmerl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to control the entire industry to cause anti-competitive damage. You just need to have enough leverage that your influence can't be ignored. Examples of Apple doing that is banning competing browsers on iOS and then pushing W3C and developers in the direction they want due to "you can't ignore us". There was a whole list of bad examples. Touch events, fighting against SPIR-V in WebGPU, fighting against…

Apple doesn't prevent competing browsers. Just different engines. And just because they don't rush to incorporate every web feature doesn't make them anti-competitive. Especially when most of the time they are right to do because either (a) they impact security or battery life or (b) they are non-standard. Case in point SPIR-V which unless I am mistaken is exclusively controlled by Khronos.

> Apple doesn't prevent competing browsers. Just different engines

And you should know well it's the same thing, since above listed issues are defined by the engine. Whatever label you put on top doesn't change the essence of what the problem is.

Basically, you completely missed the point.

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

#139

Post by shmerl »

HWR_14 wrote: post #137
shmerl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to control the entire industry to cause anti-competitive damage. You just need to have enough leverage that your influence can't be ignored. Examples of Apple doing that is banning competing browsers on iOS and then pushing W3C and developers in the direction they want due to "you can't ignore us". There was a whole list of bad examples. Touch events, fighting against SPIR-V in WebGPU, fighting against…

Apple is the only competitor to Google's 65% (direct) plus reskinned Chromium dominance of the browser market. Meanwhile, I'm happy with the direction they push W3C and developers. Without them, Google would just push the web to whatever they want (more than they already do).

That doesn't excuse all the garbage Apple doing for the sake of their lock-in. They totally should have been blasted by anti-trust years ago for banning competing browsers on iOS. And many other things.

Seems like EU finally started getting the point before US regulators did.

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

#140

Post by _aavaa_ »

akamaka wrote: post #105
mschuetz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure is, but there is nothing stopping AMD or Intel from building a working alternative to CUDA, so how is it anti-competitive? The problem with OpenCL, Sycl, ROC, etc. is that the developer experience is terrible. Cumbersome to set up, difficiult to get working accross platforms, lack of major quality of life features, etc.

One example of how they might be abusing their monopoly is by forcing data centers to pay an inflated price for hardware that is similar to consumer GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

If this is abuse, I have bad news for you about AMD and their arbitrary restriction of rocm for consumer GPUs.
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