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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

#121

Post by bmacho »

qeternity wrote: post #112
bmacho wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies to game consoles as well, nintendo/sony/microsoft selling a hardware, and require to pay THEM when I want to run something on it, is outrageous.

I don't really understand this argument. There are tons of alternatives. If I want to build and design a product a certain way, and you don't like it, simply don't buy it? This is a genuine question because I realize I am probably in the minority on HN, so please don't downvote just because of that. I just think that regulations in general should be applied only when necessary, and then be applied with great force. T…

It was, probably, but it is not anymore. It forces itself to be a middle man by every possible method, and just leeches on transactions.

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

#122

Post by criddell »

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.

Many of us appreciate the work he’s put in with the EFF. When you are right about things over-and-over for 20 or 30 years, people tend to listen to you.

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

#123

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bee_rider wrote: post #118
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt. This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests. "Letter of the law" often leads…

Seems like either system is exploitable by the rich.

The difference is this: If you use the letter of the law, an ordinary person has the same chance to find a loophole as the rich. Which will tend to cause them to get closed, because the rich have more money but ordinary people are more numerous, and the ability for ordinary people to exploit them would pressure the government to fix them.

Sometimes this would make the law more complicated, because the situation has intrinsic complexity and you have to enumerate the edge cases. Sometimes it would make the law simpler, because the existing complexity is extraneous and only an opportunity for gamesmanship. But either way it creates an evolutionary pressure for improvement.

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

#124

Post by DarkNova6 »

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…

> Standard oil wasn't a monopoly.

Bro...

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

#125

Post by mike_hearn »

eru wrote: post #99
mike_hearn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For those people there is no "spirit" or "true law". Actually, there is. Many judges take various interpretations of the 'spirit' into account. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism for one example. And if the courts use some 'spirit' guide them, companies and their lawyers better try and predict what that 'spirit' recommends. > If they didn't write it down properly or the resulting compromise was a mess…

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 without the wording itself changing.

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

#126

Post by lmeyerov »

oytis wrote: post #61
nimish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. AMD and Intel had two decades to come up with a CUDA alternative or even a parallel implementation and both failed to do anything. Incompetence.

The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.

And much more importantly for ooencl's success, poor compatibility of OpenCL implementations on Nvidia hardware by Nvidia + Microsoft platform-level software

Eg, opencl on Nvidia GPUs for windows is/was missing (I have a many-year GitHub issue with them + Microsoft), which matters for individuals, and Nvidia does not support OpenCL for its core convenience analytics libraries like the RAPIDS Python ecosystem, which is core to its massive data center market. We initially built for compatibility/distribution, but it didn't matter: That gap closed a lot of doors for us as a small ISV choosing what & how to build, and in turn, ultimately prevents our customers from buying AMD, Intel, etc

I'm not up to snuff on whether that qualifies as using its position anti-competitively anywhere, but it's a real market issue

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

#127

Post by roenxi »

oytis wrote: post #61
nimish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. AMD and Intel had two decades to come up with a CUDA alternative or even a parallel implementation and both failed to do anything. Incompetence.

The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.

That theory doesn't really make sense. Nvidia didn't need AMD's permission to write a high-quality compute interface. Why would AMD need Nvidia's? AMD has their own internal opinions for how well they want compute to work; if OpenCL isn't doing it for them they should have figured that out quickly and then built their own layer as a stopgap. But we've seen what happens when they do that; ROCm. The problem is that they don't really know how and it is a glaring capability gap (didn't know I suppose - I expect they're learning fast).

If anything, the situation with OpenCL suggests AMD and friends were the ones dragging their feet. Nvidia correctly identified that being led by the OpenCL committee would lock them out of billions (trillions, if you believe the stock market) of profit and routed around the blockage rather than compromise their engineering standards.

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

#129

Post by roenxi »

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?

I'd have been happy to use OpenBLAS if it worked on a GPU. Any API is good enough for me. I have yet to see anything in the machine learning world that required real complexity, the pain seems to be in figuring out black box data, models and decyphering what people actually did to get their research results.

The problem I had with my AMD card was that SYCL, like every other API, will involve making calls to AMD's kernel drivers and firmware that would crash the program or the computer (the crash was inevitable, but how it happened depended on circumstances).

The AMD drivers themselves are actually pretty good overall, if you want a desktop graphics card for linux I recommend AMD. Open source drivers have a noticeably higher average quality than the binary stuff Nvidia puts out. Rock solid most of the time. But for anything involving OpenCL, ROCm or friends I had a very rough experience. It didn't matter what, because the calls eventually end up going through the kernel and whatever the root problem is lives somewhere around there.

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

#130

Post by hgomersall »

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.

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.
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