Nvidia's Risky Business • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#181

Post by galaxyLogic » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #179

galaxyLogic wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't quite get is why can't they use AI to translate CUDA programs into more open architectures like AMD ROCm? AI is supposed have solved the "coding problem". But shouldn't translating a program from one platform to another be an even easier, more mechanical, task for the AI?

No, because the two platforms often don't share the same underlying kernels; this has been one of the main issues and complaints with ROCm/MIOpen since the start, although they are catching up slowly. This is actually a corollary to the point I was making about "CUDA" usually also including a ton of the included kernels and not just referring to a crappy programming environment; translating mid-level C that does math…

> translating "doBigDNNThingNVidiaGaveMeInAKernel()" to "doBigDNNThingByHandBecauseAMDDoesntSupportIt()" isn't a rote translation at all.

I wonder if this points to a deeper limitation of AI, it can not do coding tasks it has not seen in its training material. Or could it possibly "generalize" to accompllish something like this anyway?

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#182

Post by epolanski » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

gizajob wrote: post #76

Laughable to cite and reiterate the idea that Google is cooked where it comes to SoTA and AI in general when they operate, reliably and successfully for decades, one of the largest computing infrastructures on Earth and will likely continue to usefully serve the 90% of AI requests that don’t involve managing large codebases. Also seems strange to suggest that Google would need to Aquihire a company like Thinking Mach…

I actually agree with the article stating that not aiming for SOTA is actually a benefit for Google.

Gemini is already good for enterprise users, most companies I know are using Gemini 3.1 to interact with their email and sheets and creating presentations on the fly.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#183

Post by grey-area » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 5:19 AM UTC

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #177

grey-area wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see China as very risky due to Taiwan.

I see Nvidia as very risky due to their chips all being fabbed in Taiwan and Taiwan is risky due to China.

That’s not even the primary reason I think Nvidia is risky, but it is another important one.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#184

Post by mdp2021 » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 11:13 AM UTC

larnon wrote: post #175

mdp2021 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is supposed have solved the Which AI? LLMs are coding facilitators and code producers. A problem is solved when the solution is reliable. Non-deterministic Neural Networks are not reliable. In fact, > more mechanical[] task that suggests an expectation of process and procedure, which is still not a capability of current architectures. Sure, you can ask a brains-deficient operator to perform a huge task, but then…

The tool itself (AI) may not be reliable, but that is also very true for every other tool (e.g. Human). Also, you are right about when a problem is solved, but this doesn't need the tool to be reliable as you said, just the solution part. Hence, as long as the produced code works as intended, it doesn't matter what you used to produce the output.

> but this doesn't need the tool to be reliable as you said, just the solution part

And where are the warranties that the solution built be reliable (and optimal, etc.)?.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#185

Post by tomaskafka » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #112

tomaskafka wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a hard time understanding why didn’t AMD make a better developer experience for this two years ago, and am now even more baffled that even with all the LLMs they still don’t seem to have moved a single inch, despite this probably being a tens of billions dollars worth feature.

Hardware companies are notoriously bad at software. The software they use sucks, the languages they use suck, the internal tooling software they write sucks. They don't know what good developer experience is, how do you expect them to deliver it to other people?

I understand this; I would expect that a $50bn carrot would suffice to move the donkey, but it seems it does not.