[HN Gopher] Nvidia and Salesforce double down on AI startup Cohe...
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Nvidia and Salesforce double down on AI startup Cohere in $450M
round
Author : iam_a_user
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-06-04 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| behnamoh wrote:
| Man I hate Nvidia and their monopolistic behavior. Making 800%
| margins on H100s is just absolute greed imo. They make good GPUs
| but they don't deserve to be an almost $3T company...
| talldayo wrote:
| I hate the industry for never learning how to get along and
| make a real CUDA competitor. Nvidia can make 1600% margins for
| all I care, this is exactly the sort of future we deserve when
| nobody can agree on a common GPU API.
|
| You want competition, you want vertical integration? Here it
| is. Compete.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > I hate the industry for never learning how to get along and
| make a real CUDA competitor.
|
| there are google TPUs. Do they provide better
| pefrormance/dollar, or google also charges high margin, or
| Nvidia is doing some unique optimizations?
| betaby wrote:
| Our company can buy NVIDIA gear. Google TPU, well, is
| google's property I have no control over. This site is
| overrepresented by clod folks. In reality ~90% of the
| workloads are NOT cloud based. Unless one can buy
| Google/Amazon/Meta T/N/AI/PUs that unique optimizations are
| irrelevant for the most of the workloads.
| debbiedowner wrote:
| Why 90%? Why don't you go on the cloud for training at
| least if it's not healthcare data?
|
| Is it because you don't need to buy many gpus to do your
| workload?
| betaby wrote:
| Reasons why people don't go on the cloud were outlined
| many times, i.e. https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-
| the-cloud-251760fb was discussed on HN many times.
|
| I could have written almost the same reasons for GPU
| workloads.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Who would go with google for anything? No support and the
| product cancelled when they get distracted with something
| else.
| talldayo wrote:
| The TPU is basically an ASIC as far as I know; it competes
| against CUDA in a very small subset of it's featureset.
| CUDA is essentially a composition layer on top of multiple
| GPU features that optimizes them for general-purpose
| compute. In essence, nothing is stopping Apple or Google
| from making an Open Source CUDA replacement and undermining
| the demand for specialized GPGPU compute. The problem is
| that CUDA is massive, and nobody wants to re-implement it
| (especially not for free).
|
| So now Nvidia is in the privileged position of having both
| highly-flexible GPGPU compute hardware, as well as a
| highly-advanced software layer to use it with. TPUs and
| NPUs are neat, but fundamentally they are neither of these
| things; they have an extremely limited processing pipeline
| exposed by a high-level library, and that's usually it.
| CUDA is comparatively flexible, to the point that it
| doesn't even rely on AI to sell it's product.
|
| To me, hating on Nvidia feels like being mad that a well-
| bred horse with great odds beat out the jockey you were
| betting on. Why should we hate them, for their "monopoly"
| on features that Apple and Khronos gave up developing?
| Because they're blocking-out their competitors by... not
| having working MacOS drivers per Apple's request? This is
| the causal and obvious outcome of letting businesses
| commoditize specialized compute. This is what the industry
| wanted, and it's rich watching the customers protest like
| they were fooled into thinking everything was fine.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > The TPU is basically an ASIC as far as I know; it
| competes against CUDA in a very small subset of it's
| featureset. CUDA is essentially a composition layer on
| top of multiple GPU features that optimizes them for
| general-purpose compute.
|
| my understanding is that compilers can compile some
| straighforward JAX, TF, Pytorch programs to both Cuda and
| TPU, so they in direct competition in current hot topics
| (LLM, deep learning).
| talldayo wrote:
| Right; but you can't cross-compile _everything_. This is
| really common in AI libraries, especially multi-target
| projects like ONNX: https://onnx.ai/
|
| The math probably adds up in Google's favor with the
| TPUs, even if they end up being less efficient and slower
| per-unit than Nvidia hardware. They don't need to pay for
| the margins, and they can run them 24/7 for their
| intended purpose. The previous-generation TPUs can't be
| reused or resold for other purposes though, and if/when
| AI blows over as a trend you probably can't easily start
| mining crypto or doing HPC calculations like an Nvidia
| cluster would.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| If they are selling something that everyone wants and there
| aren't enough GPUs to around, how else do you suggest
| allocating those GPUs to the public except by increasing the
| price?
| rodiger wrote:
| "Your margin is my opportunity"
|
| A ton of companies are dumping R&D into designing their own
| chips with seeming success. Nvidia will be in tough company
| quite soon, but for now demand greatly outstrips supply.
| asadm wrote:
| AMD had a chance, they dropped the ball and still won't fix
| their ways (on devexp, drivers, etc). I think Nvidia deserves
| the success.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| So say they mark them down to some reasonable level -- they are
| still supply constrained and now the line just gets longer. It
| doesn't really fix anything.
|
| Pricing allows them to prioritize their customers, which seems
| reasonable.
| pie420 wrote:
| if the line gets long enough, it allows other companies to
| compete with Nvidia and creates a healthier, more competitive
| market, in the same way AMD has made intel a more honest,
| fairer, less price-gouging company. Competition is the entire
| thesis of american capitalism
| talldayo wrote:
| > Competition is the entire thesis of american capitalism
|
| Then why aren't people competing with Nvidia? Why is OpenCL
| on life support and unsupported on major operating systems?
| Why are we doing this song-and-dance routine refusing to
| adopt certain GPU APIs but embracing closed ones instead?
|
| I'd like to believe that a tipping point will be reached,
| but if not now then when? People have talked about upending
| Nvidia's GPGPU compute empire for years, but besides
| application-specific replacements and proofs-of-concept, we
| don't have a real CUDA-killer. Apple does not ship one,
| Google does not ship one, Microsoft does not ship one and
| AMD doesn't either.
|
| So... when? If we continue along the current path, I
| suspect Nvidia will continue to find markets where CUDA is
| demanded and OEMS will continue to chase them down with
| half-measure solutions. Unless OpenCL is revived or someone
| commits to a proprietary CUDA-like platform, I suspect
| we'll be spinning our wheels and digging ourselves deeper.
| thorncorona wrote:
| > Then why aren't people competing with Nvidia? Why is
| OpenCL on life support and unsupported on major operating
| systems? Why are we doing this song-and-dance routine
| refusing to adopt certain GPU APIs but embracing closed
| ones instead?
|
| Because Nvidia invested 20 years into its API platform,
| and this advantage is slowly getting realized.
| talldayo wrote:
| Well therein lies my confusion; why did their competitors
| get 10 years into making a competing API, and then give
| up?
|
| If the reason that OpenCL died is because Apple decided
| that they'd rather draw blood than work with the
| community, then yeah, this is a well-deserved failure on
| their part. Even _Nvidia_ was willing to contribute to
| OpenCL; the only thing stopping us from living in a CUDA-
| agnostic world is the pointless and childish aggression
| between device manufacturers.
|
| It feels less like we're slowly realizing things, and
| more like the persistent failure of Nvidia's competitors
| is forcing them back to the negotiations table. It's
| pathetic that American businesses are this willing to
| throw each other under the bus before they consider
| working together for the common good.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Because Nvidia is run by a founder who has been playing
| the long game for the entire history of the company. Its
| competitors are run by non-founders who aren't interested
| in the long game they're interested in next quarter's
| earnings.
| prng2021 wrote:
| Nvidia's founder isn't a fortune teller. He didn't create
| his company to become the world leader in running AI
| workloads. CUDA has been around for a long time and it
| didn't give them any significant advantage over AMD. If
| generative AI hadn't exploded very recently, NVIDIA and
| AMD would just be battling it out with their GPUs for
| gaming as before.
| dcgudeman wrote:
| Here is the definition of monopoly:
|
| "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade
| in a commodity or service."
|
| There are other huge players: AMD and Intel.
|
| Additionally Google and Amazon are producing their own AI
| hardware.
|
| Now can you explain to me how Nvidia has a monopoly?
| Spivak wrote:
| Because monopoly means "wields monopoly power and engages in
| anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers." Having
| competition or not, having large market share or not doesn't
| matter one bit.
|
| One of ways of wielding monopoly power is no longer being a
| price taker and being able to set prices at in practice to
| whatever you want.
| dcgudeman wrote:
| Your definition of monopoly contains a reference to
| "monopoly", so I am still not sure what your definition of
| monopoly is. It sounds like it is something like "big
| company that charges a price you think is high". Why do you
| think you know what the "right" price is. Isn't it a good
| thing the company delivering the most value is capturing
| the most profits? They will likely continue to deliver
| breakthroughs with the profits they are generating. Why
| would you want to kneecap a company generating so much
| value?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| If they sold them at 30% margins or whatever you think is
| reasonable, then scalpers would just pocket the 770%. Not sure
| how that is better for the ultimate purchasers or Nvidia.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| Tech hardware companies are the only people where I'm not
| annoyed at their prices.
|
| Want a fence built for you? $3000 for 2 days work with 96
| pieces of wood.
|
| Want a basic android phone with 4 gb of memory, 128 gb of
| storage, a camera, speakers, touch screen, wifi, cell tower
| connection, GPS, battery, charger and cable? $60 on sale at
| Walmart for a Moto G Power Stylus edition. (My current phone
| and that's what I paid a few months ago)
| mrweasel wrote:
| Best description ever of what AI companies produce: "software
| systems that are trained on large amounts of data and can
| generate text".
|
| No further explanation of what Cohere might provide to it's
| customer of value, just the ability to generate text.
| eamsen wrote:
| Yet, here we are, generating text. Some of which has value.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| But often it's hard to know which.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| If we're going to waste electricity, I'd rather we waste it on
| AI than on mining Bitcoin. At least AI is providing some
| utility to its consumers and there's reason to believe it will
| provide even more in the future.
| tuttyboy wrote:
| There are so many LLMs that they're starting to feel cheap.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| The shark will be completely jumped once McDonald's offers a
| Happy Meal prize that's a virtual pet powered by an LLM.
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