cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/9700996
Nvidia’s AI customers are scared to be seen courting other AI chipmakers for fear of retaliatory shipment delays, says rival firm
That should be your very first clue that Nvidia needs to be broken up into smaller, competing companies.
Yikes, how Draconian. Id be fucking pissed if someone came in and forcibly open sourced a product I had invested millions in developing.
Yeah, don’t be unrealistic. We can’t just have a group of competent individuals properly plan out how to dismantle a monopoly to allow for proper competition in the industry. If they don’t hold onto their monopoly, how will we ever see technological advancements?
No really. NVIDIA’s entire business is based on one main chip design. How would you brake up a company, that essentially only has one design it implements in various degrees for their products.
There is literally nothing to break up.
There is no monopoly. If Nvidia doesn’t play it right in the coming years they won’t hold on to their current position. Nvidia aren’t getting into custom chips just for fun. If the major cloud providers end up using their own custom silicon, that’s a major blow for Nvidia.
Limit them producing PCIe cards to low volume reference models and require their software to be open source to break that aspect of the lock-in, that’s the two big things. As alternative to the latter, require them to have actual platform docs, right now they’re not only providing the only compiler for their cards which is deliberately incompatible with everything else they’re also making sure that noone else can get performance out of NVidia cards without excessive reverse-engineering, some things are even locked down hard via firmware signing. Splitting AI off from GPU would be a bonus.
require their software to be open source
I’m all for open source, but that would basically be like confiscating and giving away that part of the company.
Something we might expect from China, but not a democratic society.
So essentially destroying one of US’ most important companies going into the future. Their chips are so highly valued that the US government are creating sanctions specifically to stop the sale of their high end chips to hostile nations. I can’t imagine the US shooting themselves in the foot like that.
Monopolies gonna monopoly. Fuck Jensen.
AMD had decades to see where the wind was blowing and offer a first-party CUDA bridge.
NVIDIA earned this monopoly through business savvy predictions.
Deserved never once appeared in my comment so idk what you’re trying to say.
We live in a capitalist society. Deserved? Probably not. Earned? They’re one of the most valuable companies in the world for a reason.
Ever heard of OpenCL? AMD started that project. CUDA is closed source.
What kind of hedge fund, MBA, anti-consumer chud counts it as a point AGAINST a company for developing open source technologies when they could have easily closed their IP warchest and offered a first-party CUDA bridge? AMD actively chose to embrace the open source world rather than further enabling a CUDA monopoly. IMO, every computer user in the world owes AMD a debt of gratitude for their contributions to open source technologies like OpenCL.
I can tell you’re a Windows user because if you used Linux for even a single day (you know, the kernel that is the industry standard for virtually ALL internet servers including Microsoft’s), you’d know all too well that NVidia is objectively hostile to open source technologies and the consumers who are unwitting victims of their anti-competitive, closed source technologies.
Good business sense in the past does not give them a free pass to now assfuck every consumer (both individual and B2B) so he can buy more leather jackets. Fuck wealth-extracting corporate monopolies, fuck Jensen. Do not support such behavior.
NVIDIA earned this monopoly through business savvy predictions.
There’s no such thing as earning a monopoly. Even in theory a monopoly can be earned only for an infinitely small moment, until that monopoly is a result of perpetuating itself.
And since this is intuitively obvious, I’d say every person talking about “earning a monopoly” just cannot imagine more honest ways of being successful.
If only there were some sort of anti-monopoly laws that existed and were actually enforced…
The FTC has at least been going after companies again, but their targeting priorities seem very strange. They seem to like picking impossible fights they can’t win, rather than cases like these.
Antitrust isn’t about just a binary win or loss. A lot of the cases, the FTC/DOJ has been losing because of concessions made by the merging parties. By showing a willingness to fight on mergers, the FTC is influencing the structure of mergers where merging companies are now willing to specifically identify business units to be spun off or sold.
Microsoft/Activision agreed to terms that would prevent their biggest titles from going Xbox exclusive. The Court that allowed the merger to go through specifically cited public statements and legally binding contracts as part of the reason why that deal could go through. The willingness to fight forced Microsoft to preserve some level of competition.
And a lot of the other deals haven’t gone through. The FTC successfully blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. The Nvidia/ARM deal was blocked. So was the Amazon/iRobot deal.
The smaller deals they’ve successfully blocked are also shifting the legal landscape on how courts view these deals. Nobody outside of biotech is familiar with names like Illumina/Grail, but that FTC win is a big deal for applying to a vertical merger between companies operating at different points of a supply chain, rather than a horizontal merger between direct competitors.
The heightened regulatory scrutiny is chilling mergers, even before they get to the point of FTC review, too. So there is some concrete effect here.
I guess the monopoly has to be preserved, so that Mr. Jensen has pocket money for another leather jacket.
