No, I think it is much more due to AMD absolutely failing to invest heavily in software at all. Honestly, they have had years - it is difficult to see how Nvidia abused their market position in AI when this is effectively a new market.
I find this vague reflexive anti-corpo leftism that seems to have become extremely popular post-2020 really tiresome.
For my part I'm not a leftist, and I'm not so much anti-corpo as pro-free market. I can still acknowledge that Nvidia is persistently pursuing anticompetitive policies and abusing their market position, without holing AMD on a pedestal assuming it would be different if the shoe was on the other foot.
> I find this vague reflexive anti-corpo leftism that seems to have become extremely popular post-2020 really tiresome.
Ah ideology, such a great alternative to actual thinking. Don't investigate or reason, just just blame it on the 'lefties'. Tiresome indeed.
Not sure how me simply stating the obvious makes me a 'lefty'. If you think monopiles, regardless of how they come about, are a good idea, that companies should be allowed to lock up an important market for any reason, then that makes you a corporatist fascist, right? Wow, this mindless name calling is so much fun! I feel like a total genius.
The simple fact is that it is the nature of software, its complexity and dependence on a multitude of fairly arbitrary technical choices makes it a very effective as a moat, even if its not intentional. CUDA, etc is 100% a software compatibility issue, and that's it. There's more than one way to skin a cat but we're stuck with this one. Nvidia isn't interested in interoperability, even though it's critical for the industry in the longer term. I'd wouldn't be either if it was money in my pocket.
The point that is entirely missed here is that we, as a community, are screwing up by not steering the field toward better hardware compatibility, as in anyone being able to produce new hardware. In the rush to improve or or try out the latest model or software we have lost sight of this, and it will be to our great detriment. With the concentration of money in one company we will have a lot less innovation overall. Prices will be higher and resources will be misallocated. Everyone suffers.
It's very possible that AI withers on the vine due to lagging hardware. It's going to need a lot of compute, and maybe a different kind of compute to boot. We may need a million or a billion times what we have to even get close to AGI. But if one company locks that up, and uses that position to squeeze out every dollar from its customers (really, have a look at the almost comical 'upgrades' Nvidia offers in their GPUs other than at the very high end) then it's going to take much longer to progress, and maybe we never get there because some small group of talented maverick researchers were never able to get their hands on the hardware they needed and never produce some critical breakthrough.
>The point that is entirely missed here is that we, as a community, are screwing up by not steering the field toward better hardware compatibility,
No, there is a limit to the mount of handwringing, begging, and crying the community can do that would have forced AMD to take GPGPU computing seriously. CUDA didn't spring out of no where, it's 16 years old and in that time many people have begged AMD to properly support OpenCL or RocM. It's not the communities fault that AMD didn't take this field seriously until it was too late. Seriously, the consumer GPUs don't even get official RocM support, but somehow it's nvidia's fault that AMD didn't care to support RocM.
I'm sure AMD will wake up now that CUDA is a trillion dollar market, but it's unfair to blame users supporting CUDA. nvidia invested in open source for more than a decade now, and there were people who foresaw the current situation and tried to develop more open backends for frameworks like torch. Unfortunately developers don't work for free and nvidia spent the money and AMD did not. It's not users fault that they didn't work, for free, to get tensorflow working on AMD.
Geohot[1] nearly gave up on AMD entirely when their own drivers don't work. This isn't new, AMD is culpable for the current situation, the community didn't end up here due to indifference.
I find this vague reflexive anti-corpo leftism that seems to have become extremely popular post-2020 really tiresome.