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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Google got a patent on transfomers but didn't enforce it.

If it wasn't for patents you'd never get a moat from technology. Google, Facebook, Apple and all have a moat because of two sided markets: advertisers go where the audience is, app makers go where the users are.

(There's another kind of "tech" company that is wrongly lumped in with the others, this is an overcapitalized company that looks like it has a moat because it is overcapitalized and able to lose money to win market share. This includes Amazon, Uber and Netflix.)

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I don't think this is strictly true, though it's rare. The easiest example is the semiconductor industry. ASML's high end lithography machines are basically alien and cannot be reproduced by anyone else. China has spent billions trying. I don't even think there's a way to make the IP public because of how much of it is in people's heads and in the processes in place. I wonder how much money, time and ASML resources it would take to stand up a completely separate company that can do what ASML does assuming that ASML could dedicate 100% of their time in assisting in training the personnel at said company.

Yeah, this is probably also true for TSMC, Intel and ARM. Look how slow progress is on RISC-V on the high end despite RISC-V having the best academic talent.

I would also add Samsung semi to that list. As I understand, for the small nodes, everyone is using ASML. That's a bit scary to me.

About RISC-V: What does you think is different about RISC-V vs ARM? I can only think that ARM has been used in the wild for longer, so there is a meaningful feedback loop. Designers can incorporate this feedback into future designs. Don't give up hope on RISC-V too soon! It might have a place in IoT which needs more diverse compute.

>despite RISC-V having the best academic talent.

academic performance is a bad predictor for real world performance

It's a decent predictor of real world performance just not a perfect one.

Unfortunately, RISC-V, despite the "open source" marketing, is still basically dominated by one company (SiFive) that designs all the commercial cores. They also employ everyone who writes the spec, so the current "compiled" spec document is about 5 years behind the actual production ISA. Intel and others are trying to break this monopoly right now.

Compare this to the AI ecosystem and you get a huge difference. The architecture of these AI systems is pretty well-known despite not being "open," and there is a tremendous amount of competition.

> the current "compiled" spec document is about 5 years behind the actual production ISA

How could I verify this information?

That was my question, too. What instructions have been undocumented for five years? What non-standardized extensions exist in SiFive cores?

Read the RISC-V foundation website. There are numerous "ratified" parts of the RISC-V instruction set that are not in the latest "compiled" spec document.

Saying a "compiled" spec is out of date may be technically accurate (or not, I don't have any idea) but if open, published documentation of the ratified extensions is on the web site, it's misleading to cite it as evidence that the spec is not open. And I know that the draft specifications are open for public comment prior to being ratified, so it's not a secret what's under development, either.

I never said that it wasn't actually open source. I just said that the openness hasn't actually created meaningful competition, because there is a single company in control of the specs that abuses that control to create a moat.

For a concrete example, the bitmanip extensions (which provide significant increases in MIPS/MHz) were used by SiFive in commercial cores before ratification and finalization. No other company could do that because SiFive employees could just change the spec if they did. They're doing the same thing with vector/SIMD instructions now to support their machine learning ambitions.

It's kind of hilarious how complex some "reduced" instruction sets have become.

The semiconductor industry is only tangentially or partially a tech company. They're producing physical goods that require complex physical manufacturing processes. The means of production are expensive, complex, and require significant expertise to operate once set up. The whole thing involves multiple levels of complex engineering challenges. Even if you wanted to make a small handful of chips, you'd still have to go through all that.

Most modern tech companies are software companies. To them, the means of production are a commodity server in a rack. It might be an expensive server, but that's actually dependent on scale. It might even be a personal computer on a desk, or a smartphone in a pocket. Further, while creating software is highly technical, duplicating it is probably the most trivial computing operation that exists. Not that distribution is trivial (although it certainly can be) just that if you have one copy of software or data, you have enough software or data for 8 billion people.

So you mean "Software" not "tech".

That's the comment you should have responded with instead of the one that you did.

Upthread used the term "tech" when the thread is very clearly talking about AI. AI is software, but because they used the term "tech" you cherry-picked non-software tech as a counter example. It doesn't fit because the type of tech that GPT-4 represents doesn't have the manufacturing cost like a chip fab does. It's totally different in kind regardless of the fact that they're both termed "tech".

That is literally technology. It just isn’t as software heavy as you like?

No, I think it's very clear that upthread is talking about how software is difficult to build a moat around.

Chip fabs are literally one of the most expensive facilities ever created. Saying that because they don't need a special moat so therefore nothing in tech ever needs a special moat is so willfully blind that it borders on disingenuity.

I don't think it's at all clear that upthread is exclusively talking about software.

The first use of "moat" upthread:

> Curious why even companies at the very edge of innovation are unable to build moats?

> Google got a patent on transfomers but didn't enforce it.

Google's Transformer patent isn't relevant to GPT at all. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en

They patented the original Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. But most modern models are built either only out of encoders (the BERT family) or only out of decoders (the GPT family).

Even if they wanted to enforce their patent, they couldn't. It's a classic problem with patenting things that every lawyer warns you about "what if someone could make a change to circumvent your patent".

You can't tell unless you read the claims thoroughly. Degenerate use cases can be covered by general claims.

Indeed. I read the claims. You can too. They're short.

Are you kidding? There are 30 claims, it's an hours' work to make complete sense of how these work together and what they possibly do/do not cover. I've filed my own patents so have read thru enough of prior art and am not doing it for a pointless internet argument.

IANAL. I looked through the patent, not just the Claims. I certainly didn't read all of it. But while it leaves open many possible variations, it's a patent for sequence transduction and it's quite explicit everywhere that the system comprises a decoder and an encoder (see Claim 1, the most vague) and nowhere did I see any hint that you could leave out one or the other or that you could leave out the encoder-decoder attention submodule (the "degenerate use-case" you suggested). The patent is only about sequence transduction (e.g. in translation).

Now an encoder+decoder is very similar to a decoder-only transformer, but it's certainly an inventive step to make that modification and I'm pretty sure the patent doesn't contain it. It does describe all the other pieces of a decoder/encoder-only transformer though, despite not being covered by any of the claims, and I have no idea what a court would think about that since IANAL.

Wait until Google goes down inevitably, then they will apply all their legal force just to save their sinking ship.

Or, Amazon, Uber, and Netflix have access to so much capital based on investors' judgment that they will be able to win and protect market share by effective execution, thereby creating a defensible moat.

I think his point was that If that moat doesn't exist without the ongoing context of more money being thrown at it then it isn't a moat.

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