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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

#191

Post by roenxi »

hot_gril wrote: post #187
roenxi wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supe…

You and a few others have said that OpenCL is buggy on AMD. Is it buggy on Nvidia too?

I don't know. I'd use CUDA rather than experimenting with it; CUDA seems to be where all the investment is and my experience with OpenCL on AMD was so bad I don't feel the cross-platform argument would make any sense.

It is a bit of a chicken-egg problem for me. I couldn't make OpenCL work on an AMD GPU, so I didn't manage to learn that much about OpenCL. At the time I assumed it was just me, but in hindsight I never saw an OpenCL-based approach to a compute problem that worked reliably on my machine so maybe it wasn't.

But I don't think it really matters. The algorithms in the field don't seem to be hard and I never felt like I was struggling when implementing them on the CPU without any special API at all. My issues were conceptually similar to George Hotz's famous rants where he had crashes when running the demo app in a loop. In the experimenting phase I found I couldn't run code on the GPU with any API.

I'm sure the situation improved and part of it was just me; towards the end of my time with AMD I could run stable diffusion inference and it'd work great for 10-40 minutes before the kernel paniced or whatever - so it was definitely technically possible to get a "hello world++" style thing running. But I never felt it was the APIs that were holding me back.

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

#192

Post by fnordpiglet »

foota wrote: post #62
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…

Say that Nvidia partners with open AI because they think open AI is the best positioned to succeed (and hence result in increase demand for Nvidia) as opposed to if they got some direct financial kickback, it that legal?

Probably yes if Nvidia has a monopoly. Because competitors of open ai have no alternatives they’ve killed competition. If doing so is to their advantage that doesn’t make it better, that just makes it rational from their perspective. But regulation against anticompetitive behavior targets behavior that structurally kills competition. Most collusion isn’t direct financial transfers but cooperative agreements to dominate adjacent markets for mutual benefit.

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

#193

Post by fnordpiglet »

wmf wrote: post #165
JamesBarney wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except as there’s a backlog if the enter into collusive agreements as a monopoly they are impacting adjacent markets (AI and adjacent companies competing with open ai and Microsoft). Also bulk pricing agreements can be seen as collusive even without inventory scarcity because it structurally advantages a picked winner.

When you hold a monopoly the same rules don’t apply. That’s why it’s often advantageous to allow material competition in your own market because your adjacency influence can be outsized and cause unintended consequences -even if you normally would have been allowed to do such things-. Those unintended consequences don’t require malicious intent they just have to exist and be materially a result of your monopoly. The more your maliciously collude though the worse the remedy will be for you.

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

#194

Post by fnordpiglet »

eru wrote: post #100
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…

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…

If you read the article rather than selectively quoting antitrust movement on standard oil started in 1880s and culminated in 1911. Likewise Netscape vs Microsoft concluded long after Netscape was very dead. The fact litigation and stuff takes a long time to unfold is not a material fact in such a case. A large part of standard oils erosion of market share was an attempt to prop up their case against breakup as well as headwinds against them due to the governments pursuit.

But it’s a bizarre misreading to say they were not a monopoly to say that by the time things hit the fan they had lost a lot of market share from their peak monopoly.

The specific issues that standard oil hit up against was their deals with railroads that solely benefited them by virtue of their scale and their ability to effectively dictate their own pricing for logistics. Likewise they would buy up all capacity on crucial lines for competitors and only partially use it purely to block market access for competitors. There is also a view that being incredibly efficient can reduce competition in markets adjacent to you. Success in business for an individual company isn’t the only goal of a capitalist state, but rather competition in markets is considered a goal of the state in itself - survival of the fittest implies there’s something to survive against, and an ever expanding monopoly growing into new markets and dominating them starts to retard innovation and competition systemically. You don’t have to agree with the thesis, but that’s the way the system works.

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

#195

Post by eru »

hot_gril wrote: post #188
eru wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vendor "lock in" is because it takes a few years for decisions to be expressed in marketable silicon and literally only Nvidia was trying to be in the market 5 years ago. It's crazy, because even 10 years ago it was already obvious that machine learning was big and is only going to become more important. AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol happened in 2016. Computer vision was making big strides. 5 years ago, large language m…

Goes to show how difficult and important execution is. There was also Hangouts vs Zoom.

Or Skype vs Zoom. Skype had a lot of mindshare, it was basically synonymous with calling people via the internet for a while.

But somehow Zoom overtook them during the pandemic.

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

#196

Post by paulmd »

paulmd wrote: post #159
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.

AMD’s first attempt at displacing CUDA-as-a-runtime was called AMD APP (advanced parallel processing) so this layer did indeed exist. It just sucked as badly as the rest of AMD’s slop. https://john.cs.olemiss.edu/heroes/papers/AMD_OpenCL_Program... Bonus points: the rest of the software libraries intended to compete with the CUDA ecosystem are still online in the “HSA Toolkit” GitHub repo. Here’s their counterpart to…

Link seems to have gone dead since earlier, lol, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_APP_SDK

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

#197

Post by jb1991 »

jonas21 wrote: post #167
jb1991 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For similar reasons why Microsoft created DirectX. It allows them to have a system where the software and hardware are more tightly integrated than using a cross-platform spec. It also allows them to situate the API within the context of the operating system and other languages that are used on Apple platforms, making things easier on developers. And at least in that regard, they certainly succeeded. Metal is probably the easiest GPU API offered on any platform. Not necessarily the most powerful, but it’s almost trivial to hand write a compute kernel and spin it off.

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

#198

Post by hgomersall »

aydyn wrote: post #184
hgomersall wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not angry, I'm simply pointing out that you place undue value on a name the vast majority of people don't care about. What you're doing, explicitly, is placing more value on name than idea. A fallacy. I'm obviously not saying "worship of a minor deity" literally, but colloquially. You're right, I can read it or not. Same with you, you can take valid criticism or ignore it and be all the poorer for it. You can als…

You have no criticism. You object to the fact that I linked to an article I liked. You think I did that because I assign undue weight to the author. I did not. I referenced the author because he is well known and it allows others to know what they are linking to. The fact you assert I did it to invoke some kind of authority is flat out wrong. I didn't summarise because the linked article is, in my opinion, a very well argued article - a summary is only going to be a poor facsimile, so better to link to the article itself.

Generally discourse would be better if we linked to well argued and reasoned articles than have a load of blow hards that like the sound of their own voice rather too much.

If you're going to say things like "literally the dictionary definition of idolatry" when it's nothing of the sort, expect people to pick up on it. Your reasoning appears to be very much in the domain of a cheese.

I shall no longer be replying to or monitoring this thread. Take care.

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

#199

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ickelbawd wrote: post #141
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #119

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). 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 us…

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

"no company shall have more than 30% market share in any market, any that does shall be broken into no fewer than twelve independent pieces."

It doesn't contain the word "you".

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

Then your company would be violating the law. "Company" means a set of entities that share a common ownership.

> what defines a “market”?

A set of products or services that serve as fungible substitutes for one another.

> What does “broken” mean here?

It means they no longer share common ownership. This is also what independent means.

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

But all of those things are just their ordinary meaning. Writing them down would make the law more explicit but it doesn't make it any more complicated. The definitions aren't each a separate set of criteria that have to be complied with separately, they're just a clarification to reduce possible ambiguity.

In particular, what you're doing is resolving edge cases. But the basic law has already addressed 99% of cases, because they're not ambiguous. An independent restaurant in a major city does not have >30% market share for food because there are many, many competitors. Microsoft has >30% market share for desktop operating systems because Microsoft has ~70% market share for desktop operating systems.

And we have to distinguish between two things here. One is, you see the word "company" and the dictionary says one of the meanings is a military unit, and then Microsoft claims that they aren't a company because they aren't a military unit. But if something has two meanings and one of them doesn't make sense in context, that's not the intended meaning. Using the "spirit of the law" for this kind of resolution is inherently necessary.

The other is, the law isn't ambiguous, but the unambiguous result is undesirable and the only way for a judge to fix it is to disregard the text and make something up. They shouldn't do this.

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

#200

Post by mike_hearn »

eru wrote: post #135
mike_hearn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

It is and you'll notice a lot of people really, really hate it. Trump just broke all fundraising records by miles, because a lot of people who previously didn't support him feel that New York has ignored the written letter of the law in favor of a tribalistic "spirit". There are similar society-rending controversies happening in Europe due to the activist lawmaking of the ECHR.

These two perspectives aren't both equally valid: the courts are not allowed under any system of civics to simply do whatever the judge feels like. They are only given leeway to interpret the law when they have no other choice because the statutes are unclear. It's a last resort, and often the result will be people "getting away with it" because there's no law against what they did.

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