Comment by rvz
4 hours ago
Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.
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.
> 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:
https://www.thediff.co/archive/ad-supported-platforms-are-a-...
Perhaps not relevant to huggingface, sorry.
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.
I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that.
Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.
I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
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.
> no-one cares anymore.
possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.
Just say you don't know.
Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway.
Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
> they were going to do open source it anyway.
uh huh.
> Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.