An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPhone Moment

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by ww520 on Saturday March 25, 2023 @05:44PM (#35307755)

It's not just luck but good strategy. In the past 10 to 15 years, Nvidia has been leveraging its core GPU to go beyond gaming video card to expand into different peripheral areas where massive parallel computing is needed, such as super computing, cloud computing, animation farm, CAD, visualization, simulation, car, VR, AI, and Crypto. They have been able to catch/enable one wave or the other because it's part of their roadmap.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by tpmx on Saturday March 25, 2023 @06:58PM (#35308436)

They have been going pretty much everywhere with their CUDA runtime. LLMs was a random hit.

At the same time, it doesn't seem like a great moat - I think AMD should be to able compete pretty well soon.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by Our_Benefactors on Saturday March 25, 2023 @08:03PM (#35308961)

CUDA not a moat? It’s physical hardware combined with extensive software libraries. How much more of a moat could they have?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by tpmx on Saturday March 25, 2023 @08:07PM (#35308992)

In the end it's about who can do the most (probably low precision) FLOPS/$ - CUDA becomes less of a moat the more established the field becomes and the software settles. There's nothing magical about the low-level arithmetics that powers this.

Nvidia will have a first-mover advantage, but AMD will be strongly motivated to win those customers, and they should be able to, eventually.

Anyway, that's my gut instinct based on how these things tend to play out. Now let's hear from e.g. actual experts in the field? :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by ketzo on Saturday March 25, 2023 @08:38PM (#35309252)

There's a winner-take-all dynamic at play, though.

The better CUDA is, the more things get built on top of it.

The more things get built on top of CUDA, the better the CUDA ecosystem of tooling, frameworks, etc. gets.

The better the CUDA ecosystem is, the better CUDA is. GOTO 1.

But you're right -- lots and lots of folks will be motivated to compete.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by CuriouslyC on Saturday March 25, 2023 @09:38PM (#35309736)

Except that CUDA is low level, so it's not hard to shim above it and write interoperable code. There are too many players who don't want to play the Nvidia tax, this will play out like OpenGL vs Direct3d in reverse.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by ethbr0 on Saturday March 25, 2023 @10:12PM (#35309974)

> this will play out like OpenGL vs Direct3d in reverse

Is that also like OpenCL vs CUDA in reverse?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by WanderPanda on Saturday March 25, 2023 @11:29PM (#35310518)

I feel like abstractions don't work if we want to get the maximum performance. Afaik Tensor cores are not usable from opencl and on the other hand even in the CUDA universe cuBLAS (hand optimized) seems to outperform cutlass (using abstractions)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by roenxi on Saturday March 25, 2023 @10:21PM (#35310056)

I dunno; CUDA is a library. How many closed source libraries win winner-takes-all games?

Nvidia is a lonely proprietary ship in a hostile sea of open source packages. It might take 20 years if Intel and AMD fail to do anything useful, but sooner or later they'll either open source CUDA defensively or get ground down by an open library. There are a finite list of features to implement before "Runs on Nvidia" vs "Runs on any graphics card" becomes the only important box left on the bureaucrat's checklist.

The math here is literally 1st & 2nd year university subjects. That is a good short term moat, but not a defensible one long term.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by mastazi on Sunday March 26, 2023 @01:48AM (#35311430)

> I think AMD should be to able compete pretty well soon.

AMD has been trying to catch up in the machine learning space for many years now, and it hasn't happened. For things to finally improve, I guess something needs to change internally at AMD. Even Apple Silicon, in the short time it has existed, has gained better support for ML (e.g. compare running PyTorch on Apple Silicon vs running PyTorch on AMD).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by dharma1 on Sunday March 26, 2023 @06:56AM (#35313091)

100% this. Not seeing AMD make significant progress in ML against CUDA and other proprietary Nvidia libraries for years. The silicon is clearly capable but the software isn’t. Perhaps it’s time for leadership change in this division at AMD

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPho... by enos_feedler on Saturday March 25, 2023 @08:10PM (#35309019)

I worked at NV on compilers when the CUDA toolchain was brand new. Nobody would have saw this magnitude of parallel applications. Maybe some computer vision stuff. At the time it seemed like diversification from gaming to try and break into HPC, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]