>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.
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.