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Comment by nekusar | Hacker News Reader

I seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally.

Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO).

A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets.

Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters.

Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.

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I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying as a possibility (AMD's behavior in many regards over the last 15 years or so is baffling to the point that a family conspiracy feels surprisingly plausible) but Huang isn't Su's uncle.

They are "first cousins once removed" meaning that Su is the child of one of Huang's cousins. Or put another way, one of Huang's grandparents is one of Su's great-grandparents.

Honestly, my mind could never wrap around genealogy and family relations well at all. I thought they were indirect cousin/uncle , or as you say, cousins once removed.

Also my understanding of many Asian cultures is they tend to have a much more tight-knit large family structure. And doubling that is the fact they're 2 heads of world-level hardware tech companies.

And, well, there's no such thing as coincidences. Having all of this line up, and for "some reason" AMD keeps missing when they could have owned a big chunk of the market has a certain family oligopoly smell to me.

Well, but there absolutely are such things as coincidences. It is obvious that coincidences are to be expected.

Combinatorial mathematics actually says certain types of coincidence happen more often than we seem to expect intuitively (eg. the Birthday "Paradox").

I have no particular view on AMD. But any argument that includes "I don't believe in coincidences" should probably be weakened in your estimation.

Adam Smith warns that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices". Book I, Ch. X, Part II; ~p. 54 .

A meteor or some natural phenomenon can be a coincidence. But especially so in industry, especially the same industry... with the respective CEOs as family, i wholeheartedly reject "coincidences".

The C word that should be used instead is "conspiracy".

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