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U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
- tzm 2y agohttps://archive.ph/cBKj7 https://archive.ph/cBKj7
- moose_man 2y ago[flagged]
- imchillyb 2y ago[flagged]
- srackey 2y ago[flagged]
- exabrial 2y agoFfs, how about Apple, Google, Facebook? Quit jacking around.
- moose_man 2y agoGoogle and Apple are currently in antitrust litigation, and the government is looking into Facebook's acquisitions of Insta and Whatapp.
- passwordoops 2y agoPlease go to your favorite search engine and copy the following: -DOJ v Google -DOJ v Facebook -DOJ v Apple -DOJ V Amazon
- roenxi 2y agoNvidia 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 success. Nvidia has nothing close to a monopoly; there is no moat and they operate in a commodity space that will behave like a normal competitive market. It just happens that their competitors were wall-to-wall complacent about how quickly the hardware world can change and they stupidly thought graphics cards were for displaying graphics. It turns out graphics cards are for building AI and crypto markets.
- nimish 2y agoYep. 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.
- deadbabe 2y agoHow do we know the strategy wasn’t to avoid releasing a CUDA alternative until NVIDIA is wounded by an anti-trust lawsuit and then when they get broken up deploy your CUDA alternative and speed past them? Could be playing the long game.
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoThat’s not the case at all. AMD and Intel could be making money hand over fist right now if they had products that worked with the ML ecosystem. If they had any magic bullet they’d be idiots to not have used it years ago, they’re missing out on tens of billions of dollars on purpose for what? Even if NVIDIA got broken up their cards would still have massive demand and profit margins. I don’t think you understand how much of a shortage of compute there currently is, anyone who isn’t blatantly incompetent or ignoring ML can make money. AMD and Intel are just fat corporations who didn’t see the potential and thought business as usual would stay number one. Now they’re standing on the sidelines with their dicks in their hands while Jensen is leading the parade.
- oytis 2y agoThe 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.
- mschuetz 2y agoOpenCL is an alternative to CUDA just like Legos are an alternative to bricks. The problem with OpenCL isn't even the performance, it's everything. If OpenCL were any good, people could use it to build similarly powerful applications on cheaper AMD GPUs.
- mdorazio 2y agoIt'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 engineers. Investigating is fine, but if the concern is the direction of AI in general then that's a job for legislation, not antitrust action. I.e. a job that Congress kind of sucks at.
- moose_man 2y agoIt seems like the investigations are linked so it could be they are acting in concert in a way that prevents or disrupts competition. Say for instance, OpenAI was using Microsoft money to buy chips and Nvidia was favoring it in a way that hurt other AI startups.
- shmerl 2y agoCUDA 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.
- arvinsim 2y agoWouldn't that logic also apply to, say, Apple?
- osnium123 2y agoI 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.
- vlovich123 2y agoIt’s questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market vs he just positioned the company to eat up sales to high energy particle physics & similar super-computer applications and then got lucky that this accelerator also turned out to work pretty well for AI. At best, he saw that he needed a more general compute platform for GPUs but OpenCL was a thing so he wasn’t alone in recognizing this. There’s even an argument to be made that NVidia intentionally undermined OpenCL to cause it to fail; since NVidia has the fastest cards & mind share, if they make CUDA perform better than OpenCL, they encourage developers to buy into that development environment and thus lock out the standard from adoption.
- radicalbyte 2y agoIt seemed like a no-brainer to me to open the hardware up to more general purpose compute.. but I'm a software guy who started on machines where where completely open and can "do magic" thanks to that.
- bcatanzaro 2y agoPeople have been saying that GPUs randomly happened to be good at ML since at least 2014 when Nervana was founded. It was clear 12 years ago to anyone paying attention that DL was revolutionizing the world and that NVIDIA GPUs were at the center of the revolution. Whatever random chance factored into NVIDIA's success is outweighed by the decade+ of pedal-to-the-metal development NVIDIA has undertaken while its competitors decried AI as an overhyped bubble. I have been there for this history, working on ML on GPUs at NVIDIA for a few years before Jensen decided to productize my little research project, CUDNN.
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- JieJie 2y agoNYT Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/nvidia-microsoft-openai-antitrust-doj-ftc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xk0.dgco.2VvKlIb74lDK&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/nvidia-microso...
- bicepjai 2y agoSometimes we just need to understand we donot have all the information before we give subjective opinion with incomplete information
- ineedaj0b 2y agowe all work in the industry. you can tell if something is fishy you don't need to wait. where there is smoke there is fire
- XiS 2y agoCan't wait for al the upcoming internal tech emails, hehe
- ineedaj0b 2y agoinitially tech was an apolitical asleep bear. the bear is waking up and both sides are not happy there is a bear in the room. the bear needs to pick a side or even better... be a bear. be competent. bears are strong and can command a room themselves. you have to accept responsibility you're a bear now.
- zooq_ai 2y agowhat'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.
- threeseed 2y agoDOJ operates independently of the White House. And Merrick Garland is about as bi-partisan a choice as you could pick.
- zooq_ai 2y agoDOJ and FTC is appointed by White House and they make sure they align with their ideologies. There is a reason Lina Khan goes after companies while her republican counterpart wont. Thank God the supreme court will kneecap all these useless agenda-driven agencies
- robotnikman 2y agoMicrosoft and OpenAI I might see something, but Nvidia? The only reason they are where they are right now was by investing a decade beforehand into CUDA
- surfingdino 2y agoIt's about using their status today and how, not where they were yesterday.
- surfingdino 2y agoMicrosoft seems to have found themselves with more than they bargained for when they decided to go all in on AI. OTOH, Microsoft is quite familiar with antitrust inquiries, because they've been there before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- teh_infallible 2y agoSounds to me like some regulators saw dollar signs and wanted a cut.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoMicrosoft for sure needs to be split up, fined for what they did with Teams, and regulated for how they are bundling AI. I’m less concerned about Nvidia
- null_investor 2y agoPeople 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.
- Synaesthesia 2y agoYes the US government is definitely assisting US tech companies, and their global monipoly. Look at how they went after Huawei.
- vinyl7 2y agoAfter WW2, the US was the manufacturing superpower of the world, and it made the US very wealthy. China has since taken that spot, and the US didn't have any major play in the global economy. Starting with Obama, the US started investing heavily into tech via regulatory dismemberment and fiscal policy (ZIRP). The tech monopoloy is intended so that the US has control of a market in the global economy.
- SilverBirch 2y agoIt's interesting to me that Microsoft and Nvidia are being lumped together in this reporting. To me there seems to be two very different issues. Nvidia managed to execute on a combined software/hardware product category that has yielded fantastic results and is difficult to copy. That's great. It's nothing to do with Anti-trust. Are they charging a premium for scarce products now? Sure, but all you can do is damage the market by attacking them there's no real way to increase demand. At best you can limit their profits, just handing over margin to their customers. The Microsoft situation is very different however. You've got this behemoth that has basically just decided to take it's magic money tree and use it essentially buy growth through a huge number of complex deals that are designed to circumnavigate anti-trust. Sorry but "We're not buying you, we're just handing your investors a tonne of money, letting you shut down your company and then hiring all your employees" is bullshit. And also "We're investing in you <oh and here are all these terms about how we own X Y Z of your technology and you must buy A B C of our resources" is also bullshit. You can make a credible argument that Nvidia uniquely earned the success they're seeing with the AI stuff, I don't think you can make that argument with Microsoft. Now if you can join the dots - Nvidia has a cosy deal with MSFT to give MSFT GPUs and small companies then have to deal with MSFT because they have all the access to compute, then I think that would be a slam dunk. Leverage Microsoft's Cloud business to hoover up startups in AI.
- maeln 2y agoSeeing some of the comment here, you could make a conspiracy theory that NVidia/MS/OAI used their generative algorithm to write comment defending them on HN :p . All jokes aside, I know that antitrust is not just about monopoly, but if we just focus on this part, it really does not matter if one company became a monopoly fair and square by just being better/smarter/luckier than everyone else, you still probably don't want it to be a monopoly. And making sure it still has competitor is usually beneficial in the long run. A monopoly might act "fair" for a long time (although it would be hard to know since you won't have anything to compare them with), but their power allow them to turn against the consumer whenever they want with little to no consequence. As an example, you can't really complain about an inquiry against NVidia, and then complain about their pricing and/or how hard it is to get some of their card (especially the one meant for training) because they don't care about you if you don't have a good relationship with them (and a lot of $$). All in all, pretty sure this inquiry will lead nowhere, or just a slap on the wrist, as is usually the case. It is just a signal to those company to be careful and to avoid using their dominant position on one market to push themselves unfairly in another.
- pciexpgpu 2y agoI am surprised the path to AGI isn’t first paved with a simple request to the AI gods to replace cuda. On the other hand, Microsoft does seem to have used mere mortals to write a driver/gpu independent way to run workloads in azure (Maia/Triton). Microsoft is truly unstoppable no matter which way this whole AI race goes.
- talldayo 2y agoI mean, I own an Nvidia GPU and I'd rather CUDA get replaced too. Very few people besides Nvidia shareholders truly love the status-quo here. But really, the blame has to be put on the rest of the industry. If you want to kill CUDA, you have to attack it where Nvidia won't defend; make something Open Source and cross-platform. The problem is getting everyone to sit at the same discussion table. Microsoft has a half-dozen accelerator programs in the work and benefits from the ecosystem fracture. AMD is desperate for anyone but themselves to do their work for them. Apple is hedging their bet on piecemeal acceleration while trying their hardest not to fall behind. Google is trying their hardest to distance themselves from hardware and focuses mostly on software. And Nvidia could care less what everyone does, because they're shipping the largest servers out of everyone mentioned. > Microsoft is truly unstoppable no matter which way this whole AI race goes. I can forsee one way they get crushed. If OpenAI keeps dealing in risky business with celebrities and intellectual property, Microsoft might be forced to divest one way or another. Without their OpenAI deal, Microsoft is in a much worse position more similar to Google. If everyone else is willing to ante-up on an Open Source CUDA alternative, then Microsoft's window closes to exploit the demand for a solution. Slim chance that everyone buries their hatchets though.
- jb1991 2y agoSome talk of OpenCL vs. Cuda in this thread, but I'm wondering what, if anything, does SYCL have to offer in this area? Do Nvidia GPUs support SYCL?
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoWorks when "gift link" does not: https://web.archive.org/web/20240606160558if_/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/nvidia-microsoft-openai-antitrust-doj-ftc.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240606160558if_/https://www.ny...
- jenniferw011 2y ago[dead]
- sofiacaleb74 2y ago[dead]