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NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

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Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#11

Post by tomrod »

arthurcolle wrote: post #9
sounds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs

Two concepts

- Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive).

- Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#12

Post by patates »

arthurcolle wrote: post #9
sounds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs

Maybe if they grow too much they'd develop their own chips. Also if one company wins, as in they wipe out the competition, they'd have much less incentive to train more and more advanced models.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#13

Post by someone7x »

sounds wrote: post #7
hobofan wrote: post #3

If Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the most closed part of the whole stack right now.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

> commoditizing their complements

Feels like a modern euphemism for “subjugate their neighbors”.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#14

Post by next_xibalba »

tomrod wrote: post #11
arthurcolle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs

Two concepts - Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive). - Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances

Who is the one buyer in the Nvidia scenario? How would that benefit Nvidia?

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#15

Post by jvanderbot »

someone7x wrote: post #13
sounds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

> commoditizing their complements Feels like a modern euphemism for “subjugate their neighbors”.

Business has always been a civilized version of war, and one which will always capture us in similar ways, so I guess wartime analogies are appropriate?

Still it feels awful black and white to phrase it that way when this is a clear net good and better alignment of incentives than before.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#16

Post by NitpickLawyer »

grim_io wrote: post #10
arthurcolle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs

Google shows that Nvidia is not necessary. How long until more follow?

Tbf, goog started a long time ago with their TPUs. And they've had some bumps along the way. It's not as easy as one might think. There are certainly efforts to produce alternatives, but it's not an easy task. Even the ASIC-like providers like cerberas and groq are having problems with large models. They seemed very promising with SLMs, but once MoEs became a thing they started to struggle.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#17

Post by vlovich123 »

arthurcolle wrote: post #9
sounds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs

If OpenAI becomes the only buyer, they can push around Nvidia and invest in alternatives to blunt their power. If OpenAI is one of many customers, then they’re not a strong bargaining position and Nvidia gets to set the terms.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#18

Post by amelius »

sounds wrote: post #7
hobofan wrote: post #3

If Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the most closed part of the whole stack right now.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI.

A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true.

The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#19

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

next_xibalba wrote: post #14
tomrod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two concepts - Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive). - Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances

Who is the one buyer in the Nvidia scenario? How would that benefit Nvidia?

It would hurt nvidia not benefit, that's why nvidia spends a lot of effort to prevent that from happening, and it's not the case currently.

They really need to avoid the situation in the console market, where the fact there's only 3 customers means almost no margins on console chips.

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