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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

#141

Post by ickelbawd »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #119
vlovich123 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie). It’s also important to remember that societies naturally undergo shifts over time. It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the…

> No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie). The assumption here is that the rules would be complicated and provide lots of opportunities for gamesmanship. Now suppose the rule is "no company shall have more than 30% mark…

Please clearly define the meaning of “you” in your simple law.

Literally me? Okay, I don’t own 50% of the market—my company does.

Oh you mean my company? Okay, my company doesn’t own 50% of the market—each of my companies only control 25%.

Oh you mean me and my companies? Okay, well I only own one company and my wife owns the other one.

Oh you mean… I think you get the point…

Now move on to all the other words you used: what defines a “market”? What does “broken” mean here? What does “independent” mean here? I’m sure it’s quite clear to you—that you know it when you see it. I’m also quite sure others have different interpretations.

I agree with the spirit of your comment otherwise, but simple laws rapidly become complex laws because people are complicated and language is flawed.

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

#142

Post by iforgotpassword »

mike_hearn wrote: post #74
iforgotpassword wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because laws are always flawless and never contain any loopholes, and it has never happened ever that lawyers were specifically instructed by a company to find those loopholes and exploit them as hard as possible.

The idea of law as having loopholes is relevant for politicians, who are tasked with ensuring that the written law reflects their intent. It's not relevant for courts, regulators, people or companies, who are all tasked with following the law as actually written. For those people there is no "spirit" or "true law". The reason this is important is it's a sword that cuts both ways. It's always tempting to argue that wh…

Yes, I'm aware of that distinction. However I read the comment I was replying to so that they suggested the antitrust case is unfounded because Nvidia didn't break any laws. It's precisely why the antitrust case is valid/needed, because if Nvidia were breaking any laws, you wouldn't need antitrust, you'd just take them to court.

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

#143

Post by faeriechangling »

shmerl wrote: post #12
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…

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.

Making a must-have product doesn’t constitute being an anti-competitive monopolist. Coca Cola isn’t a monopolist because classic coke just tastes so good and yet they refuse to share the recipe with Pepsi Cola.

Anti-competitiveness is more leveraging the must-have nature of CUDA to shelter Nvidia from competition. E.G. an OEM can’t sell professional laptops that support CUDA if it sells AMD gaming laptops or something - just to illustrate. Or Coca Cola refusing to sell coke to a store that also sells Pepsi causing the store to not stock Pepsi.

Monopoly law isn’t meant to simply punish success and exclusivity.

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

#144

Post by zooq_ai »

threeseed wrote: post #77
zooq_ai wrote: post #35

what's with democrats and destroying success? It stems from their fundamental philosophy that if you are successful then you must be evil or have done something illegal.

DOJ operates independently of the White House. And Merrick Garland is about as bi-partisan a choice as you could pick.

DOJ and FTC is appointed by White House and they make sure they align with their ideologies.

There is a reason Lina Khan goes after companies while her republican counterpart wont.

Thank God the supreme court will kneecap all these useless agenda-driven agencies

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

#145

Post by aydyn »

hgomersall wrote: post #130
aydyn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he is relevant because he writes stuff that resonates. You might disagree, but I am judging him based on his very real accomplishments.

If his ideas resonate and are so profound, tell us what they are and why. Don't point to his blog and worship him like some minor deity.

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

#146

Post by hgomersall »

aydyn wrote: post #145
hgomersall wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is relevant because he writes stuff that resonates. You might disagree, but I am judging him based on his very real accomplishments.

If his ideas resonate and are so profound, tell us what they are and why. Don't point to his blog and worship him like some minor deity.

How does one worship a minor deity? You're not obliged to read what I post any more than I'm obliged to persuade you. Feel free to ignore the links, or feel free to read them. You might gain something from them as I have, but I'm not going to expend any efforts on trying to enlighten you or any such nonsense.

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

#147

Post by aydyn »

hgomersall wrote: post #146
aydyn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If his ideas resonate and are so profound, tell us what they are and why. Don't point to his blog and worship him like some minor deity.

How does one worship a minor deity? You're not obliged to read what I post any more than I'm obliged to persuade you. Feel free to ignore the links, or feel free to read them. You might gain something from them as I have, but I'm not going to expend any efforts on trying to enlighten you or any such nonsense.

I didnt read what you said because you didn't say anything. You just linked to his blog while carefully making sure to point out it was CD who wrote it.

That's literally dictionary definition of idolatry.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by hgomersall »

aydyn wrote: post #147
hgomersall wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one worship a minor deity? You're not obliged to read what I post any more than I'm obliged to persuade you. Feel free to ignore the links, or feel free to read them. You might gain something from them as I have, but I'm not going to expend any efforts on trying to enlighten you or any such nonsense.

I didnt read what you said because you didn't say anything. You just linked to his blog while carefully making sure to point out it was CD who wrote it. That's literally dictionary definition of idolatry.

Idolatry: noun; the worship of idols.

It has a decent number of up votes, so clearly some people think it worth posting. As I said, you don't have to read it, and I don't really care if you do. I'm not sure how linking to something with a reference is worship, but ok.

You seem very angry.

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

#150

Post by bcatanzaro »

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…

People have been saying that GPUs randomly happened to be good at ML since at least 2014 when Nervana was founded. It was clear 12 years ago to anyone paying attention that DL was revolutionizing the world and that NVIDIA GPUs were at the center of the revolution. Whatever random chance factored into NVIDIA's success is outweighed by the decade+ of pedal-to-the-metal development NVIDIA has undertaken while its competitors decried AI as an overhyped bubble.

I have been there for this history, working on ML on GPUs at NVIDIA for a few years before Jensen decided to productize my little research project, CUDNN.

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