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

I.e. a must have can be a must have without artificially added tying (lock-in) detail. Then it's not causing harm.

CUDA won big because it made a big bet. Were it that OpenCL was ubiquitous and at feature-parity with CUDA, maybe there would be more than one player dealt-in at the table today. But everyone else folded while Nvidia ran the dealer for 10 long years.

But really, the blame has to be put on the rest of the industry. If you want to kill CUDA, you have to attack it where Nvidia won't defend; make something Open Source and cross-platform. The problem is getting everyone to sit at the same discussion table. Microsoft has a half-dozen accelerator programs in the work and benefits from the ecosystem fracture. AMD is desperate for anyone but themselves to do their work for them. Apple is hedging their bet on piecemeal acceleration while trying their hardest not to fall behind. Google is trying their hardest to distance themselves from hardware and focuses mostly on software. And Nvidia could care less what everyone does, because they're shipping the largest servers out of everyone mentioned.

> Microsoft is truly unstoppable no matter which way this whole AI race goes.

I can forsee one way they get crushed. If OpenAI keeps dealing in risky business with celebrities and intellectual property, Microsoft might be forced to divest one way or another. Without their OpenAI deal, Microsoft is in a much worse position more similar to Google. If everyone else is willing to ante-up on an Open Source CUDA alternative, then Microsoft's window closes to exploit the demand for a solution. Slim chance that everyone buries their hatchets though.

> In pushing for CUDA, Jensen Huang aimed for the Nvidia GPUs to become a general hardware for scientific computing. CUDA was released in 2006. Around 2015, the focus of CUDA changed to neural networks.[8]

Credit to Jensen for pivoting, but I recall hearing about CUDA networks from Google tech talks in 2009 and realizing they would be huge. It wasn't anything unique to realize NNs were a huge innovation but it did take another 5 years for it to mature enough and for it to become clear that GPUs could be useful for training and whatnot. Additionally, it's important to remember that Google had a huge early lead here & worked closely with Nvidia since CUDA was much more mature than OpenCL (due to intentional sabotage or otherwise) and Nvidia's chips satisfied the compute needs of that early development.

So it was more like Google leading Nvidia to the drinking well and Nvidia eventually realizing it was potentially an untapped ocean and investing some resources. Remember, they also put resources behind cryptocurrency when that bubble was inflating. They're good at opportunistically taking advantage of those bubbles. It was also around this time period that Google realized they should start investing in dedicated accelerators with their TPUs because Nvidia could not meet their needs due to lack of focus (+ dedicated accelerators could outperform) leading to the first TPU being used internally by 2015 [2].

Pretending like Jensen is some unique visionary seeing something no one else in the industry didn't is insane. It was a confluence of factors and Jensen was adept at navigating his resources to take advantage of it. You can appreciate Nvidia's excellence here without pretending like Jensen is some kind of AI messiah.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

With banking, structuring laws mean banks need to report any transaction over $10,000.

So if I need to send you $100,000 and s split it up into 11 payments so each payment comes under the $10,000 reporting limit that breaks the law because my payment was for $100,000 but i structured it to get around the $10,000 reporting limit.

If Microsoft approaches anit trust limits if it owns more than 50% of a company and buys 49% then no strucuturing took place as they only bought 49%. Now if they bough 10% in each of 6 different shell companies that they own such that they'd control 60% of hte company, then this is illegal as it works around the limits.

But owning up to the limit is perfectly fine as it doesn't in anyway break the law or work around it. That's the very reason for having a limit, to say you can go up to this limit, but not over.

I'm guessing you don't deal in finance at all as we deal with this all the time. You'll see funds owning up to 9.9% of companies to avoid the 10% reporting threshold. Again, nothing illegal here as the government has said they are perfectly fine with funds owning up to <10% of a company.