4 ms·

Society isn’t shaped just by current laws, but also by where we want things to go. If the current situations is undesirable, changing laws and regulations is th

by mtsr 3y ago

Society isn’t shaped just by current laws, but also by where we want things to go. If the current situations is undesirable, changing laws and regulations is the way to change it. (Of course actually enforcing current laws and regulations can also go a long way in many cases…)

killingtime74 3y ago
Sounds like it's just undesirable to you. (I don't own any Nvidia stock). Their growth to their current position in the market was organic. You don't just break down big companies for no reason other than them being big. If we did, there's a long line of companies ahead of Nvidia to be broken up first.
- benreesman 3y ago
  I don’t see what being organic has to do with market failures (if in fact there were no shenanigans, which seems a stretch to posit at zero). A market failure is a market failure. There’s a big lobby on HN who want to defend or minimize or justify leaving market failures be, which is weird given they’re really bad for most people on HN, it’s a free country. But let’s call it what it is.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
So what changes to the law do you propose? None of the little annoyances that Nvidia is occasionally creating amount to anything that could have resulted in their current dominance in AI processing. They made a good product. The competition is responding too slowly. And they got lucky with this crazy (in a good way) AI boom. I don't see how this could possibly be outlawed or why you would even want to. It will resolve itself on its own given enough time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- panick21_ 3y ago
  How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux. The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons. I think Nvida can still make plenty of money in such a world. In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure. One could make the argument that the x86 interface should be public domain as it amounts to infrastructure that most of society builds on. How such a thing would exactly work is of course up for some debate. But the concept of the government 'liberating' common interfaces makes sense from a society perspective.
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    >How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux. How would that have stopped Nvidia from dominating the AI market? >The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons. I agree that governments should use APIs with multiple competing implementations (or one truly open source implementation) where possible. This could make a difference in some cases, but I doubt it would have had a big impact in this particular case as demand for GPGPU is overwhelmingly coming from the private sector. >In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure. Agreed, but is there a legal reason why AMD and others are not allowed to create a clean room implementation of CUDA? Haven't they done exactly that with ZLUDA (which they have now defunded)? I thought not supporting CUDA was more like a failed strategic move by competitors to prevent CUDA from becoming an industry standard. I think we agree on all the relevant principles. I just don't see how any of these principles make a big difference in this particular case. Also, I don't see the Nvidia situation as particularly problematic. They are not too entrenched to unseat. Some of their biggest customers (themselves huge oligopolists) are shaping up to be their biggest competitors. Most of AI processing will be inference, not training. Bringing the costs down is absolutely key for broad AI use. My bet is that the hardware margins will end up being slim.

by mtsr 3y ago

killingtime74 3y ago

Sounds like it's just undesirable to you. (I don't own any Nvidia stock). Their growth to their current position in the market was organic. You don't just break down big companies for no reason other than them being big. If we did, there's a long line of companies ahead of Nvidia to be broken up first.

benreesman 3y ago
I don’t see what being organic has to do with market failures (if in fact there were no shenanigans, which seems a stretch to posit at zero). A market failure is a market failure. There’s a big lobby on HN who want to defend or minimize or justify leaving market failures be, which is weird given they’re really bad for most people on HN, it’s a free country. But let’s call it what it is.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago

So what changes to the law do you propose? None of the little annoyances that Nvidia is occasionally creating amount to anything that could have resulted in their current dominance in AI processing. They made a good product. The competition is responding too slowly. And they got lucky with this crazy (in a good way) AI boom. I don't see how this could possibly be outlawed or why you would even want to. It will resolve itself on its own given enough time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
panick21_ 3y ago
How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux. The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons. I think Nvida can still make plenty of money in such a world. In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure. One could make the argument that the x86 interface should be public domain as it amounts to infrastructure that most of society builds on. How such a thing would exactly work is of course up for some debate. But the concept of the government 'liberating' common interfaces makes sense from a society perspective.
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  >How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux. How would that have stopped Nvidia from dominating the AI market? >The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons. I agree that governments should use APIs with multiple competing implementations (or one truly open source implementation) where possible. This could make a difference in some cases, but I doubt it would have had a big impact in this particular case as demand for GPGPU is overwhelmingly coming from the private sector. >In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure. Agreed, but is there a legal reason why AMD and others are not allowed to create a clean room implementation of CUDA? Haven't they done exactly that with ZLUDA (which they have now defunded)? I thought not supporting CUDA was more like a failed strategic move by competitors to prevent CUDA from becoming an industry standard. I think we agree on all the relevant principles. I just don't see how any of these principles make a big difference in this particular case. Also, I don't see the Nvidia situation as particularly problematic. They are not too entrenched to unseat. Some of their biggest customers (themselves huge oligopolists) are shaping up to be their biggest competitors. Most of AI processing will be inference, not training. Bringing the costs down is absolutely key for broad AI use. My bet is that the hardware margins will end up being slim.