Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 207 posts

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

#71

Post by mschuetz »

shmerl wrote: post #12
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…

CUDA is pure lock-in, so it only makes sense for antitrust regulators to evaluate if it's causing anti-competitive damage to the market. Hint - it is. Lock-in is never good.

Sure is, but there is nothing stopping AMD or Intel from building a working alternative to CUDA, so how is it anti-competitive? The problem with OpenCL, Sycl, ROC, etc. is that the developer experience is terrible. Cumbersome to set up, difficiult to get working accross platforms, lack of major quality of life features, etc.

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

#72

Post by HPsquared »

Dalewyn wrote: post #40
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…

>not the obvious path to success. It is if success is defined as deliberate failure. Personally, a lot of US government actions of the past few decades in hindsight do not look like they had the interests of America or Americans in mind.

I wonder if anyone connected to this is short NVDA.

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

#73

Post by Vespasian »

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.

Laws in this field do not make a moral judgement on how a company got where they are.

They look at what you are doing with the power you actually have. Once you are the size and importance of MS, OpenAI or Nvidia, the rules change and everyone knows that.

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

#74

Post by mike_hearn »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #31
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…

Because laws are always flawless and never contain any loopholes, and it has never happened ever that lawyers were specifically instructed by a company to find those loopholes and exploit them as hard as possible.

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 whatever you'd personally like to happen is what politicians really intended, and any gap between reality and their preferred outcome is therefore a "loophole". But once you get into saying people should follow intent, not written law, others can easily argue that politicians never intended the law to be interpreted like that against them, and so therefore they are morally justified in ignoring it. It can be used against you as easily as you can use it against them.

A common example of this problem is income vs capital gains taxes. One ideological tribe is very fond of arguing that people who have income mostly from investments rather than wages are exploiting a "loophole" in tax law, but of course the reason there are different rates to begin with is exactly because politicians wanted to encourage investment. There's plenty of cases where this intent is discussed in written literature and there's no other reason to distinguish between income sources then set differing rates. There is no "loophole" and nor is the "spirit" of the law being violated. But you hear such claims all the time.

The other reason it's problematic is because you can't really know what the intent of lawmakers was. The law was their best collective effort at writing down what they wanted, as a result of numerous compromises and disagreements between different people. If they didn't write it down properly or the resulting compromise was a mess, that's on them, but a working legal system doesn't allow people to just blow off their written instructions and assume they know what was really meant.

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

#75

Post by bmacho »

arvinsim wrote: post #15
shmerl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA is pure lock-in, so it only makes sense for antitrust regulators to evaluate if it's causing anti-competitive damage to the market. Hint - it is. Lock-in is never good.

Wouldn't that logic also apply to, say, Apple?

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.

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

#76

Post by threeseed »

shmerl wrote: post #39
HWR_14 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't control an entire industry. You can buy an Android phone and fully participate in the mobile phone world never talking to Apple. You cannot participate in the AI world without NVIDIA.

You don't need to control the entire industry to cause anti-competitive damage. You just need to have enough leverage that your influence can't be ignored. Examples of Apple doing that is banning competing browsers on iOS and then pushing W3C and developers in the direction they want due to "you can't ignore us". There was a whole list of bad examples. Touch events, fighting against SPIR-V in WebGPU, fighting against…

Apple doesn't prevent competing browsers. Just different engines.

And just because they don't rush to incorporate every web feature doesn't make them anti-competitive. Especially when most of the time they are right to do because either (a) they impact security or battery life or (b) they are non-standard.

Case in point SPIR-V which unless I am mistaken is exclusively controlled by Khronos.

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

#77

Post by threeseed »

zooq_ai wrote: post #35

what's with democrats and destroying success? It stems from their fundamental philosophy that if you are successful then you must be evil or have done something illegal.

DOJ operates independently of the White House.

And Merrick Garland is about as bi-partisan a choice as you could pick.

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

#78

Post by bmacho »

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.

Nvidia always tries to be anticompetitive, creating and exploiting vendor lock-in, instead of giving back to the world , like e.g. like Sun did, open-sourcing everything.

It is definitely Jensen's fault.

I think it is a law of nature that shitty and harmful behaviour pays off, but that's not a problem, if we can correct it time-to-time. With antitrust inquires for example.

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

#79

Post by null_investor »

People attribute great leadership to Satya, but to me it seems to be about be willing to fight with regulators, and funnily enough the regulators haven't been working so much recently.

Just have a look at the size that Google, Microsoft, Meta others have got, not because they have a outstanding product (like Cuda), but because they can use their dominant market position to buy smaller businesses and monetize their products as part of a bundle (Whatsapp, Activision Blizzard acquisition and the list goes on). Or just build a new product and shove it to their customers, like with MS Teams/Threads.

The US government seems to have actually aided those US companies to keep doing their monopolist practices, with many other countries around the world fighting against them alone, like Europe.

The situation is so bad right now, that Europe itself is now distancing itself from US to potentially also fight even harder against those companies, which bring barely any jobs to Europe, but have market share in the 90s and beyond.

I'm pretty certain that companies in Europe could build its own Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, their own android fork etc. They don't do it because for a long time Europe has been a US pseudo-vassal.

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

#80

Post by pointlessone »

elefanten wrote: post #38
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…

You ignore “the spirit of the law” with fancy acrobatics around “the letter of the law”… at your own peril. I can’t comment on the claims here, but if MSFT is skirting the intent brazenly enough, the predictable regulatory reaction is no bullying. Everyone involved is well aware of that dynamic. No need to pity MSFT.

Is spirit of the law ever a concern in the USA? I’m asking because it is in the EU and every US company seem to struggle with the concept if I am to judge by how they engage GDPR, DMA and similar regulations in the EU.
Post reply on HN