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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

#161

Post by paulmd »

jb1991 wrote: post #117
roenxi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you think about SYCL as a viable cross-platform GPU API?

The biggest problem with SyCL is that AMD doesn’t want to back a horse that they don’t control (same reason they opposed streamline) so they won’t support it. When the #2 player in a 2-player market won’t play ball, you don’t have a standard.

Beyond that, AMD’s implementation is broken.

Same as Vulkan Compute - SPIR-V could be cool but it’s broken on AMD hardware, and AMD institutionally opposes hitching their horse to a wagon they didn't invent themselves.

This is why people keep saying that NVIDIA isn't acting anticompetitively. They're not, it's the Steam/Valve situation where their opponents are just intent on constantly shooting themselves in the head while NVIDIA carries merrily on along getting their work done.

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

#162

Post by paulmd »

uoaei wrote: post #50
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 and they operate in a commodity space that will behave like a normal competitive market Sure, until you consider the massive difference in accessible capital vs their rivals. Sure, VCs can fund startups, but Nvidia is publicly traded, which is just investment of a different form, and largely a form that you are barely accountable to. And that's on top of all the capital they directly control. That'…

AMD actually had more resources than NVIDIA for a good long while (although they did have more places to spread them over, that was their choice to do so), and the balance of power didn't really shift until the 2014-era when AMD really "took their foot off the gas" on R&D. 290X was the last time AMD could be described as "in the lead" and Maxwell opened up a gap that AMD never managed to close.

Raja actually specifically called out 2012 as being the timeframe when that happened, because AMD decided the future of GPUs was iGPUs and not dGPUs, that the latter segment was going to go away entirely as iGPUs got faster and faster. Oops.

https://youtu.be/590h3XIUfHg?t=1956

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

#163

Post by paulmd »

faeriechangling wrote: post #13
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…

Nvidia has done many anticompetitive things over the years even if what you’re saying is generally true. Gameworks comes to mind.

It's not anticompetitive to try and foster fields of software in which your competitors are underinvested/underperforming/disadvantaged. AMD is trying to do the same thing right now - AI/NPU is an area where they think they have the lead over Intel, so guess what, they're selling AI now. AI hardware, AI software...

As far as typical gameworks examples, I am specifically thinking back to tessellation - everyone freaked about Crysis 2 (despite the fact that it didn't actually use max-LOD or no-culling during actual gameplay) or Hairworks. All of a sudden it stopped being a thing, around the Polaris/Vega era, right? You know why that was?

Because AMD finally fixed their tessellation performance. Their hardware was deficient and underperforming, and the problem went away when they fixed their hardware.

The same is true of the software today. AMD's problem isn't that NVIDIA is stomping on their fingers, it's that ROCm crashes when you run the tutorial/sample programs.

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

#164

Post by paulmd »

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…

> 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

it's actually specifically not questionable because it's been covered by journalists etc.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua...

> Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me.

> The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”

> Around the time Huang sent the e-mail, he approached Catanzaro, Nvidia’s leading A.I. researcher, with a thought experiment. “He told me to imagine he’d marched all eight thousand of Nvidia’s employees into the parking lot,” Catanzaro said. “Then he told me I was free to select anyone from the parking lot to join my team.”

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

#165

Post by wmf »

JamesBarney wrote: post #157
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it illegal to choose who you sell to? That's not bullying their competitors out of their own market.

If they wanted to, Nvidia could pick winners and losers in AI by withholding GPUs. That would be using their power in one market to influence another market. I haven't seen much evidence of that though.

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

#166

Post by bri3d »

vlovich123 wrote: post #51
roenxi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just on that last paragraph, because the frame annoys me - that is bullying. It isn't fair to insinuate that a company did something wrong by attempting to obey the law. MS knows all about antitrust. They've hired a bunch of lawyers and told them to do what needs to be done to be compliant with the regulations. That shouldn't then be implied as evidence that they are guilty of antitrust activities! What are the lawye…

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,…

I think the issue here is the overloaded use of the term "structuring."

If I think I might be doing something that antitrust regulators won't like, so I hire a lawyer to tell me what I can do, and they tell me "you can buy up to 49.9% of this company," and I buy 49.9% of the company, that's fine. It's neither illegal nor unethical. It's also not "structuring" in the technical, financial sense, but a layman might say "you structured the deal to avoid falling afoul of regulation," even though it's the wrong use of the word. I think that's what's happening in this conversation (I have no idea about what MSFT actually did or didn't do, just the direction the conversation here is going).

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

#167

Post by jonas21 »

jb1991 wrote: post #110
mschuetz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenCL is just a spec. It's up to companies to implement it in a successful way or not. There is no reason in and of itself that OpenCL can't compete with CUDA on performance. The fact that Apple's Metal, which is pretty good, is actually implemented with a private OpenCL system is proof that the spec is not to blame.

> The fact that Apple's Metal, which is pretty good, is actually implemented with a private OpenCL system is proof that the spec is not to blame.

I don't understand. If OpenCL was so good, why did Apple create Metal instead of just using OpenCL?

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

#168

Post by EasyMark »

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…

Well I'm sure that the courts will agree with your assertion if it's quick. That's why it's not left up to just one regulatory agency to define an illegal monopoly. I, for one, am glad they are coming under scrutiny. If there's "no there there" then they'll be just fine.

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

#169

Post by EasyMark »

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.

why is any journalist, blogger, or critic important? They are popular the vast majority of the time, and have earned it via their blog/podcast/magazine articles. It's not because they're the best SME in the field or even ever practiced in the field, it's "can they bring things to light?" for the masses, and he often does.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

paulmd wrote: post #164
vlovich123 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 it's actually specifically not questionable because it's been covered by journalists etc. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua... > Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNe…

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