> as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.
this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector.
It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.
If you don't own the customer relationship, you don't own the profit. See App store, FB.
NVidia is delivering commodity hardware to the hyperscalers, and would eventually get commodity margins (when hyperscalers make their models work on their own hardware).
Amazing article on relevant economics of squeezing vendors - actually about antitrust ad-models but:
The answer is that [advertising based] companies are an ideal test case for an increasingly common business meta-model, where companies try to create a consumer surplus at one end in order to maximize their negotiating leverage for capturing the producer surplus everywhere else in their supply chain.
It's a clever move if that's what they're doing. They're restricted in China, and are likely to face stiff competition from Chinese chipmakers in the coming years. Acquiring the largest repository of trainable models and ensuring they run better on Nvidia hardware is probably one of the few moves they have for keeping ahead of the competition. I mean, it would be terrible for the consumer, but it does make me think that NVDA is a decent investment.
Well now that they own it, they can do whatever they like. They don't necessarily have to be optimizing the models for their hardware, they could just setup preferential pipelines to funnel users to their ecosystem. That seems fairly prudent given the challenges coming their way.
We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux.
Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest.
Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source).
So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.
I'll give credit to Intel, they've always been open source friendly and I prefer to buy them because I'm not a gamer, so don't need the best.
AMD is another story. Their binary closed source blobs were even worse than nvidias for many years. So much so people used terrible performance open source tries just to avoid the headache. That they finally slopped together an open source version after they'd lost the GPU race isn't exactly noble. But as an open source supporter in general, I commend the effort still.
I care, I just don't believe you in that statement. There were "confidential nda" notes embedded in the release that Chris didn't remove until afterwards. That doesn't scream: "we're going to open source this some day!"
If it was going to "eventually" be made open source, why not do it from the start? Why not do it a year in?
From what I was told, your speculation is incorrect. I can't say anything more than that, sorry.
I don't know why you're so aggressive in tone towards me, chill out.
> If it was going to "eventually" be made open source, why not do it from the start? Why not do it a year in?
That isn't how open sourcing software works. It gets released when it is ready or gradually.
But of course as I predicted that you would ask that question. Why didn't Linus release Linux immediately? Why did he wait 29 days to do it instead of the day when he announced it? Why didn't Rust release 4 years early as soon as is was eventually open sourced?
> From what I was told, your speculation is incorrect. I can't say anything more than that, sorry.
Who told you? Nvidia directly?
The correct answer is that you do NOT know the reason yourself because there was NO discussion at all.
It took about a week to get Sun Microsystems to open source Tomcat and Ant, which became massively distributed and used software. So yea... it happens quickly.
I'm going to skip past all of your asinine aggressive response and just answer one thing again since you missed it the first time...
> It took about a week to get Sun Microsystems to open source Tomcat and Ant, which became massively distributed and used software.
So that was not even open sourced “from the start” either.
You understand that you just undermined your own point? It was released when it was ready, rather than from the start.
The entire point is one company gave a gradual open source release over several months to a year, verses another company that has open sourced close to nothing related around CUDA or nvcc for decades.
nvcc remains completely closed source despite it even using Lattner’s LLVM (which he open sourced) as a dependency! (shocker)
> I'm going to skip past…
Exactly. Skip it because you seem to be struggling to answer those basic questions.
Nothing was missed as I already responded to your last sentence by asking you to post exactly what Nvidia just told you verbatim since you claimed to know the true reason. You failed to answer.
If that is too difficult then a paraphrasing is far better than: “I can’t for just reasons.”
Or just be honest and say: “I do not know the reason”.
> It was released when it was ready, rather than from the start.
Nope. It was released when they realized we were building something that was going to be competitive with theirs. It was viewed as better to join forces than do it separately because we were already helping them design the servlet spec.
> you seem to be struggling to answer those basic questions
I have yet to see a question, just a bunch of ad hominem. You really have some weird personal beef with me. Seek help and support for your anger issues.
The rest of the details to this are irrelevant. We already know that it was not open-sourced 'from the start' and as you just admitted, it took a week to get it ready and transition it from closed to open source.
So even with your example, it fails your own qualification for a project to "eventually" be made open source.
> I have yet to see a question, just a bunch of ad hominem. You really have some weird personal beef with me. Seek help and support for your anger issues.
I don't think you even know what an 'ad hominem" is or even realize that you just did one in your own comment as a distraction for not answering a basic question. But I'll remind you about what that question was since you missed it:
"Who told you? Nvidia directly?"
These are very basic question(s) that you are really struggling to answer. In this entire thread, you could not even give the real reason why Nvidia never would open source their CUDA or nvcc software when you "claimed" to know.
So again, Repeat exactly what Nvidia told you right here, given you claim to know the "true" reason or just say "I don't know".
> I answered your question. "you ever ask Nvidia why? i did."
No you did not. You are referring to a question that I already answered for you [0]. Your answer was incorrect.
>> The correct answer to my question is "No". CUDA or NVCC was never open sourced during its lifetime.
> The only struggle is your understanding. Maybe english isn't your first language, but that is me saying I asked Nvidia.
Says the person that does not know what an "ad hominem" was nor did you even realize you just did one in a previous reply. The question I am basically asking you is to elaborate on what the true reason was since you claimed to have asked them (Nvidia).
If Nvidia gave you their response, It should be very easy to just say it right here word-for-word or paraphrase what they told you then. Many replies later still, you are struggling to even do that.
Such as basic question to answer and yet you continue pretending to know the reason when you clearly don't know.
I don't have to elaborate on it, nor would I as the matter of the discussion was confidential. If you want to ask them and get the answer, go right ahead.
Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore.
Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.