Would (albeit, likely forced) interoperability of CUDA and the like sufficiently create a level market place for competition[0]?
It doesn't immediately ruin Nvidia and its moat, but it paves the way for competition that isn't thwarted simply because the leader in the space has proprietary software that everyone uses as the de-facto standard.
This would make it possible for AMD and other competitors to compete on hardware and how well they can integrate the software. It would also diversify providers and in all likelihood accelerate AI development as having the same software work across different hardware means there is more total compute available (one of the current bottlenecks as I understand it)
[0]: Kind of like how anti-trust with Microsoft ended up accelerating the market space for alternatives to their products as they started maintaining official documentation for their file formats used across Office products, as part of their strategy to stave off further issues of anti-trust. Same reason they open sourced C# by all accounts.
I would rather let Nvidia take the win for now since they innovated to make CUDA. This is totally not a played out space yet; it's a kludge in the first place that GPUs are used for ML.
I don't see what the problem is. As the article and its linked sources mention, this is according to Politico and NYT's inside sources who are not authorized to speak publicly. This sounds consistent with "US eyes antitrust investigation".
And it's as much as you're going to get until "US formally announces antitrust investigation".
I disagree, I think multiple inside sources is plenty enough evidence to say that an organization is “eyeing” something. It's not a very substantial claim.
I see what you mean. It made me just realize something interesting though and that’s what happens to these news sources the papers the news outlets when there’s no news on any given day or if there’s really no news for a given week, then what do they publish?
There's no such thing. There's 8 billion people on Earth, there's always something going on.
The difficulty that news outlets have isn't finding stuff going on, it's narrowing down that list to the most important things. The news is such a tiny snapshot of the important things going on in the world.
You could easily fill an entire newspaper just with stories about those conflicts. Then there's the entire rest of the world who isn't actively fighting wars. They're doing art, science, medicine, business, politics, sport, etc... every day. There are on average 2,000 thunderstorms happening on Earth at any moment. There's no shortage of news.
Anti trust is just about making sure the federal government is the most powerful entity within the United States. If it was about consumer benefit they would do something about the absolute monopoly that midea has on over the range microwaves. Not that that's anything I'd care about...
How will this possible government action affect American AI development if a case is brought against Nvidia? Wouldn't a case kill AI development by years, if not decades?
A successful case would presumably reduce Nvidia’s markup on GPUs. That by itself would make GPUs more affordable and more widely available to people working on AI.
The problem is if development of those GPUs has such a high fixed cost that in a more competitive environment revenue does not pay for it. But that seems unlikely to me at a first glance. AMD, Apple, Google, and Facebook all have their own chips. They just don’t have CUDA to go with it, or don’t sell their chips to customers.
Nvidia is dominating with high prices; if you force them to lower their prices, wouldn't it make it even harder for the also-rans to compete? What you are asking for is simply to save money, but that is very different than antitrust issues.
An antitrust case against Nvidia would not lower prices by forcing Nvidia to sell at lower prices. In fact, selling below cost is itself a practice that can be subject to antitrust scrutiny.[1]
Rather, a case like this would lower prices by increasing competition. Other commenters have mentioned that if CUDA opened up, that would help companies like AMD become more competitive. Right now, if you want CUDA, you are forced to buy a GPU from Nvidia. So broader CUDA interoperability would benefit "also-rans" and consumers too.
Other than pricing and any anti-competitive deals or collusion that DOJ digs up, CUDA seems like the obvious place you would attack by forcing Nvidia to open it up. But I don't know if that's likely to be an angle the government would pursue.
Kind of, all the other advantages they have are a result of being in such a dominant position in the market, which they gained more or less through that superior toolkit (CUDA).
It'll probably actually help AI development everywhere.
It'd reduce the US advantage over Europe-- since an AI startup could actually do useful stuff without breaking the bank on training and running the models, but it'd basically be a rebalancing where hardware companies get less and actual AI companies get more.
antitrust requires consumer harm. is there any here? nvidia has gotten here by not resting on their laurels as opposed to how others typically do (imho).
Consumer harm = selling their graphics cards at outrageous prices by keeping supply low and reducing the OS support for them by making Linux drivers crap.
Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.
It's circular the way it was described. Seems like Linux servers are fine with Nvidia GPUs for ML training, but not for graphics, which is more applicable to Linux desktops.
This is not true and very ignorant. Linux has huge marketshare especially across server space where NVidia cards are used also. Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this.
Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice. Since Linux isn’t the biggest platform, but a major choice: It is therefor harmful for Nvidia to not support it properly.
> Linux has huge marketshare especially across server space where NVidia cards are used also
Consumers don't generally rent server space. It would be difficult to establish consumer harm on the basis of server prices.
> Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this
Right, this is the insignificant bit. Inconveniencing 2 or 3% of the market is not a valid antitrust claim [1][2].
> Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice
No, it comes when you can prove prices were raised, output reduced, innovation diminished or customers were "otherwise harmed" [3]. To the degree intent is considered in the enabling case, it's in reading the intent of the Congress, not the defendant [4].
Output has been scarce for NVIDIA gpu's for quite some time. Often not even being able to support the demand for their cards. NVIDIA is a trillion dollar company right now. There should be no reason why they are restricting access to their reference cards and not able to support demand.
You are also not counting handheld use such as the Steamdeck. There is a reason Steamdeck doesn't use NVIDIA graphics.
Consumers do rent server space and prices were manipulated, because they could control consumer choice. It’s all done for the control of the consumer, hence the antitrust.
All those Linux servers using Nvidia cards must be getting good enough support from Nvidia for what they need to do, otherwise they wouldn't use it.
GNU/Linux desktop is a different story. Yes it's accurate to say that's an insignificant market share. And I said "GNU" to differentiate from the most popular Linux desktop OS, ChromeOS.
So you’re just looking to isolate consumers so you can make a point. Linux users aren’t insignificant regardless how you roll the dice and want them to be. We push more technology forward than non-Linux users. The insignificance is just something Macos and Windows users tell themselves to feel good about their desire to dislike Linux as they spin up LXC containers.
They're different use cases from the industry's perspective. Nvidia supports GPU compute on Linux very well, but graphics not so much.
I'm not interested in the OS fan wars and neither is Nvidia, but if you want to consider Linux server users the same as Linux desktop users instead of isolating them, you can count me on that side. I have an RPi, a PowerEdge, an Android phone, and yes an Alpine Linux Docker container on my Mac.
I would be surprised if more than a small minority of consumers using CUDA ran anything other Linux. I would like it if I wasn't forced to use their crap drivers that force me to use X just because I want to do some ML.
I understand antitrust law enough to know that "mad I can't game on Linux" is an anti-competitive measure.
As far as what I read about the driver stack, they only recently (within a year) release source for kernel modules. They did not open source the whole stack. And these are only new modules in an alpha state.
Its basically the bare minimum.
Most people aren't running ML on their workstations and these mostly use entirely different types of cards.
I had to use a bleeding edge live mint ISO yesterday because the regular release ISO gave me a black screen on my 3099z. Nvidia drivers continue to be my #1 Linux paint point aside from windows apps that don’t run on wine due to DRM/anticheats.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but Nvidia sells their cards at 1.5 - 2 times the price than AMD's on average and AMD has had strong Linux support for years.
When AMD can run 95% of games as good as any NVIDIA card and you factor in that most games have virtually no ray tracing support or any other fancy feature that NVIDIA offers, coupled with the known low performance/cost gains in their own graphics family, and their lack of ability to support demand despite being a trillion dollar company, I'd say that there isn't much of a leg to stand on.
It would be anti-trust if they were deliberately shrinking supply to hike up prices on their cards.
For example, I know I have the best card in the industry, so I'm going to force the supply low so I can charge effectively whatever I want.
Nvidia and AMD (previously ATI) have had a similar relationship for a long time, before ML was a use case. Nvidia has always been the more expensive option afaik. Kinda like Intel vs AMD.
It wasn't in the 2000's back when ATI and NVIDIA cards had comparable prices. Sometimes ATI cost a little more because they were better, but they were never crazy different from NVIDIA.
And there were never supply problems.
Antitrust law absolutely does not require consumer harm. Consumer harm came about after Robert Bork wrote his book and convinced SCOTUS that his interpretation of antitrust was correct. In fact, before Robert Bork, Courts tended to view competition as more important consumer harm.
Lack of consumer harm requirement is starting a comeback because it's during monopolization effort, consumers actually benefit from low prices. Once monopoly cements itself, prices tend to skyrocket and quality go down because factors make it very difficult for competitors to emerge.
It depends. Not all actions require consumer harm, some can be brought with likely to cause harm. This can mean lots of things but here probably reduction of choices available to consumers, reduced innovation in the market, or any other number of things.
I think it also requires something that limits competition. Because if their margins are too high, some competitor should be able to come in and deal with that. That's one of the underlying principles of capitalism.
Kinda. Nvidia's monopoly affects more the other big-tech players running AI in their datacenters rather than average joe consumers.
I don't like what Nvidia has done to gamers but they're not really a monopoly just because AMD and Intel were too busy tripping over their shoelaces and Jensen Huang built a well oiled machine that outcompeted everyone else.
Even so, isn't the overarching theory of monopoly changing now to not just be about the customers but national defense as well. As we've seeing with Boeing if we let a critical company kill of or buy up its rivals, once it achieves dominance it decays, leaving the host nation with nothing.
If succeeding means failure, then nobody is going to bother succeeding.
Nvidia is a monopoly in the sense there is no competition, but unlike monopolies that are illegal this one came about as a result of the rest of the market simply not bothering to play while they kept pressing on.
Succeeding so hard by legitimately outcompeting every other fucking bastard in sight shouldn't mean getting slapped with antitrust.
This is not an honest interpretation of how we practice this. We do not terminate the company that achieves monopoly, we don't even stop them from succeeding. We simply ensure that others can continue to compete as well. Occasionally when called for we have broken up companies that are in too many spaces at once -- but even then we tend to do that extraordinarily rarely.
It's a bummer when the chosen line of argument is this straw man victimhood a la Atlas Shrugged.
>We simply ensure that others can continue to compete as well.
And there's the million (trillion?) dollar question: What is Nvidia doing to stop others from competing? No, "their product is too good" (which they are) is not a valid argument.
If you argue Nvidia is deliberately not producing as many GPUs to keep prices high, first you'll have to see if they're just not getting bottlenecked by TSMC and second you will also have to bring in AMD and possibly Intel along for price fixing which by definition isn't a monopoly.
there are other aspects to look at, its any anticompetitive behavior, or action that reduces competition.
Exclusive or privileged contracts regarding supply could be the lowest hanging fruit here.
Has nothing to do with the market simply choosing Nvidia if that's the criteria. The antitrust violation wouldn't look at that at all.
but I agree in that it makes it hard to do normal business. smaller businesses do all these anticompetitive things and its the most rational thing to do. when does it flip to being sanctionable? when does it move away from "hey you didn't maximize shareholder value so you're the problem and a judge will agree" to "hey, now you maximized shareholder value and the government thinks you're the problem and a judge will agree"
Monopolies aren't illegal. Only abusing a monopoly is illegal. Nvidia has 95% market share. It's probably a monopoly.
But the trillion dollar question is whether they are abusing that monopoly: which are behaviors like tying, price discrimination, exclusive dealing, etc.
There is succeeding, then there is your company being overvalued to insane levels because of some hype boom. It also doesn't mean that just because you outcompete, then you can artificially reduce supply and only support a select few OS's (ie. windows) while producing modest performance gains in your GPU's.
It's a modern day Tesla in waiting more than likely.
A company raking in incredible profit is a pretty good sign they are not doing anything special to maintain a monopoly, they just made a really good product and everyone else sucks.
Nvidia has a de facto monopoly on AI hardware and software. The gross margins are clear telltale sign. The real question is are they doing anything anti competitive to unjustly create/maintain their monopoly which on the surface there does not seem to be any evidence of.
Well, we know a couple of things that Nvidia is uniquely positioned to be able to use to prevent others from competing:
* they're taking action to prevent others from making other GPUs compatible with CUDA
* they're buying up foundry and packaging capacity
It's probably likely that there's execs at Nvidia who know these things are good for them and bad for their competitions and have explained it in some internal emails...
This is a very weird take. In 1998, MSFT announced a 28% increase in revenue with EPS increasing by 35% and ~4B in revenue. MSFT was making incredible revenue and profits for that time and were 100% engaged in practices to maintain their monopoly and extend it to unrelated areas (e.g. internet browsers).
For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did:
1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition.
2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones.
3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do.
4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.
Citation needed. https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html is a contemporaneous article that suggests the browsers were pretty equal in terms of stability and speed. The monopoly position Microsoft exploited in their OS to push IE and then business deals and mind share to solidify it by extending web standards in MS-only ways (eg activex) seems to really be the difference.
That's not how economics works, the very sign of a monopoly is that companies have market power and can set prices, that's why companies want to have one. Under monopoly conditions profits say precisely nothing about the quality of a product.
So apparently the caveat is antitrust are ‘reportedly’ looking at NVIDIA.
But from what I’ve seen they haven’t really done anything anti-competitive. They seem like the same company as they were years ago: selling devices, software for the devices and support for the software.
Compare to the tech megacorps who have evolved via acquisition, data brokerage and enshittification and always seem to find new ways to pop up and make you roll your eyes.
It doesn't immediately ruin Nvidia and its moat, but it paves the way for competition that isn't thwarted simply because the leader in the space has proprietary software that everyone uses as the de-facto standard.
This would make it possible for AMD and other competitors to compete on hardware and how well they can integrate the software. It would also diversify providers and in all likelihood accelerate AI development as having the same software work across different hardware means there is more total compute available (one of the current bottlenecks as I understand it)
[0]: Kind of like how anti-trust with Microsoft ended up accelerating the market space for alternatives to their products as they started maintaining official documentation for their file formats used across Office products, as part of their strategy to stave off further issues of anti-trust. Same reason they open sourced C# by all accounts.