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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Part of Nvidia's advantage comes from building the hardware and software side by side. No one was seriously tackling GPGPU until Nvidia created Cuda, and if you look at the rest of the graphics stack Nvidia is the one driving the big innovations.

GPUs are sufficiently specialized in both interface and problem domain that GPU enhanced software is unlikely to appear without a large vendor driving development, and it would be tough for that vendor to fund application development if there is no lock in on the chips.

which leads to the real question. What business model would enable GPU/AI software development without hardware lock-in? Game development has found a viable business by charging game publishers.

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Would you agree that that your observations somewhat imply that a competitive free market is not a fit for all governable domains (and don't mistake governable for government there, we're still talking about shepherding of innovation)?

I think you would need to take a fine tooth comb to the definitions here. I could see a few different options emerge for non-Nvidia software including

- Cloud providers wishing to provide lower CapEx solutions in exchange for increased OpeX and margin. - Large Nvidia customers forming a foundation to shepherd Open implementations of common technology components

From a free market perspective both forms of transaction would be viable and incentivized, but neither option necessarily leads to an open implementation.

Early tech investments are risky, but if your competition has tech 10 years more advanced than yours, there is probably no amount of money that would allow you to catch up, surpass, and make enough profits to recover the investment, mainly because you can't buy time, and your competitor won't stop to innovate, they are making a profit and you aren't, etc.

So to me the main realization here is that in tech, if one competitor ends up with tech that's 10 years more advanced than the competition, it is basically a divergence-type of phenomenon. It isn't worth it for the competition to even invest in trying to catch up, and you end up with a monopoly.

This is a good callout, unlike manufacturing the supply chain is almost universally vertically integrated for large software projects. While it's possible to make a kit car that at least some people would buy, most of the big tech companies have reached the point of requiring hundreds of engineers for years to compete.

Caveat that time has shown that the monopolies tend to decay over time for various reasons, the tech world is littered with companies that grew too confident in their monopoly.

- Cisco - Microsoft Windows - IBM

etc.

The problem with vertically integrated technology is that if a huge advancement appears at the lowest level of the stack that would require a whole re-implementation of the whole stack, a new startup building things from scratch can overthrown a large competitor that would need to "throw" their stack away, or evolve it without breaking backward compatibility, etc.

Once you have put a lot of money into a product, it is very hard to start a new one from scratch and let the old one die.

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