I once read, UK was the first in the industrial revolution and the first to get out of it. Maybe Europe has just gone post-hardware. Not sure it will work though...
It's defensive language for sure, i don't know how much it adds of protection in reality, but i nonethelesss sympathize with the author if he feels the need to protect himself that way or signaling the risk he takes.
Nvidia has a strong interest in open source AI being a strong contender to proprietary models. They don't want a single AI company to win, as that company would then have enormous leverage over Nvidia, and could perhaps even erode the Cuda moat with their own chip spending.
They want the AI market to be hypercompetitive, with AI companies focusing on competing amongst themselves instead of with Nvidia on one side, and many self-hosters / small inference providers buying Nvidia GPUs for large open models on the other.
It's in Nvidia's business interest to be a good steward of Huggingface, while being a good steward of Github is at best incidental to the interests of Microsoft.
NVidia has a strong interest in profit. The only reason we are allowed to live in chip shangri-la is because they can make a profit out of it, nothing else.
All the big boy AI stuff runs on servers, which certainly aren't going to be running on Windows or Mac anytime soon. Linux _is_ what all this NVIDIA hardware is going to run on until... what exactly? FreeBSD overtakes Linux in the server space?
> Who knows what i sthe next big thing after AI. Maybe something that doesn't need Linux?
And Nvidia hardware was running on Linux before AI as well...
> And I'm not so sure that Mac is out of the equation
Mac servers exist but anyone serious about running at scale isn't using them for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Apple simply doesn't make real servers anymore...
They have the money they have the capability design and engineering in house and they are vertical. The question is whether or not they have the will, one thing that might help them come to a decision is that they now have an engineer CEO from the Apple Silicon, part of the company and not a bean counter.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on a vendor-agnostic inference library. Have 3 backends so far: legacy D3D11 for compatibility, D3D12, and Vulkan 1.3. I have reasons to believe nVidia deliberately crippling Vulkan API for their consumer GPUs. Couple examples to be specific.
nVidia driver sets quite low number for VkPhysicalDeviceLimits::maxTexelBufferElements. I don’t think that’s a hardware limit because I have D3D12 backend doing the same thing on the same hardware.
Vulkan performance is not great on nVidia. On all AMD cards I am testing, Vulkan 1.3 is the fastest backend. On nVidia however, D3D12 is faster despite tensor cores (WMMA / wave matrix multiply accumulate / cooperative matrices) are only available through Vulkan, D3D12 is using shader cores exclusively.
Yes, they could just say they're taking it towards prioritizing models that only run on one kind of equipment and making it harder to find, support or list models that run on different hardware.
The acquisition sets up corporate interests to be able to increasingly drive it.
I hope better for Nvidia and hopefully it can be cleared up, and maintained.
HF CEO keeps posting about how great local models are running in his Mac, it would be funny to see if he replaces his MacBook with a 500W Nvidia laptop after the deal gets through.
But more importantly for business, if HF fails to use the upcoming ASIC inference chips for their ZeroGPU after the acquisition, their competitors using them might have an advantage.
Context: Liz Lemon has been buying two products together because one of them creates a need for the other.
Jack Donaghy: The only thing I will be discussing with the House Subcommittee on Baseball, Quiz Shows, Terrorism, and Media is vertical integration.
Liz Lemon: What's vertical integration?
Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication.
Liz Lemon: That'd be great, 'cause then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.
Jack Donaghy: Keep thinking.
Liz Lemon: [beat] Except then they might be tempted to make the corn chips give you...
Jack Donaghy: Vertical integration.
That's not vertical integration though. Vertical integration would be the corn chip maker buying corn farms for example. I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".
> I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".
That's still vertical integration, you're just looking down the tube from the wrong end.
Suppose a company that sells PCs also makes CPUs. That's obviously vertical integration, right? CPUs are part of the supply chain for PCs. Likewise if they make SSDs.
But CPUs and SSDs are also complementary goods. They're both sold to PC OEMs in order to produce the downstream product, or end customers when they build their own PC or want to upgrade a component or two.
Entering both of the complementary markets is vertical integration because the obvious reason for a company to do it is to integrate the separate goods into a single offering:
> then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.
But then they have a perverse incentive. You get a bag with five servings of chips and one serving of medication -- the first hit is free. And you shouldn't need the drug to begin with.
That's because they are the same thing. Integrating the complementary goods into a single offering is obviously vertical integration. Not integrating them would make the acquisition pointless -- or even more nakedly anti-competitive, when the purpose is to inhibit integration with competitors rather than improve integration with the company's own products.
"In microeconomics, management and international political economy, vertical integration, also referred to as vertical consolidation, is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is integrated and owned by that company." [emphasis mine]
"Horizontal integration is the process of a company increasing production of goods or services at the same level of the value chain, in the same industry. A company may do this via internal expansion or through mergers and acquisition" [emphasis mine]
Anything else you care to throw at the wall to see if it sticks, just go ahead and assume I disagree with you given how our interaction has gone so far.
To be fair Microsoft haven’t done as much integration with their eco system; such as integrating it with Azure DevOps as they could. And long may it continue.
Not a fan of defending GitHub, but TBH them launching GithubActions made me abandon all other CI platforms I was using in the past, I even left GitLab just for that.
A 99.5 means over one year you will need to wait about 40 hours total for the issue to be solved. What kind of high pressure crud app are you making where this is a problem?
Oh yes I can totally believe they use public and private repos for their model training. It is surprising they aren’t ahead of the curve for AI coding like Claude code, codex or cursor because of this.
I very much doubt that. Imagine the PR nightmare and potential liability if someone managed to extract from the model credentials in a private repository.
Explain to me how using OPEN source for training is theft? I've (admittedly skimmed) quite a few licenses, but I really dont remember anyone restricting reading/indexing source code?
MIT license includes: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The argument is that AI models trained on open source should include the copyright info for all projects blended into the weights. And since they don’t, it violates the terms of the license.
It was 2018. As someone who worked at GitHub during the Microsoft era, I think Microsoft was a pretty reasonable steward of GitHub right up until Copilot started getting popular. After that, leadership stopped investing in the core product and infrastructure and either incentivized people moving into the Copilot org or just fully reorged teams into it regardless.
The load increase from AI is definitely significant, but I think with proper investment they would not be having this many issues.
What's the point of Android if not of being open?!! I don't see any value for them to be closed or combative. It's sad to see Google, once the greatest company on earth, lose absolutely everything of what they made them great in just a matter of a couple of years.
The purpose of Android for Google is to push users into paid services, Google search, collect some play store fees and some data. None of that actually requires Android to be really open. Just saying something about "open" works as advertisement though...
