Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative?

They likely haven't put even close to enough money behind it. This isn't a unique situation - you'll see in corporate america a lot of CEOs who say "we are investing in X" and they really believe they are. But the required size is billions (like, hundreds of really insanely talented engineers being paid 500k-1m, lead by a few being paid $3-10m), and they are instead investing low 10's of millions.

They can't bring themselves to put so much money into it that it would be an obvious fail if it didn't work.

Given how the big tech companies are buying hundreds of thousands of GPUs at huge prices, most of which is pure margin, I wonder whether it'd make sense for Microsoft to donate a couple billion to make the market competitive.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-bought-...

The big players are all investing in building chips themselves.

And probably not putting enough money behind it... it takes enormous courage as a CEO to walk into a boardroom and say "I'm going to spend $50 billion, I think it will probably work, I'm... 60% certain".

You're probably correct, but I feel like I have to raise the issue of Zuckerberg spending a comparable amount on VR which was much more speculative.

Zuckerberg owns Facebook though. It’s a lot easier to make bold decisions when you’re the majority shareholder.

Edit: though emphasis should be put on “easIER” because it’s still far from easy.

It amazes me how much these companies make actually gets spent on R&D, you see the funnel charts on reddit and I am like what the hell. Microsoft only spends ~6bn USD on R&D with a total 48bn of revenue and 15bn in profits?

What the hell is going on, they should be able to keep an army of PhDs doing pointless research even if only one paper in 10 years comes to a profitable product. But instead they are cutting down workforce like there is no tomorrow...

(I know, I know, market dynamics, value extraction, stock market returns)

This. Without knowing the guy, he seems to be a) very comfortable taking a lot of risk and b) it's actually not that risky for him to blow $20 billion.

There aren't many cases like this. Larry/Sergey were more than comfortable risking $10 billion here and there.

Zuck is founder and owner. So is Huang (Nvidia CEO). They call all the shots.

Whereas AMD's CEO was appointed, and can be fired. Huge difference in their risk appetite.

I'm reminded of pg's article "founder mode": https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

I think some companies simply aren't capable of taking big risks and innovating in big ways, for this reason.

well, look at Meta... they're spending Billions with a capital B on stuff and they get slaughtered every earnings call because it hasn't paid off yet. if Zuckerberg wasn't the majority share holder it probably wouldn't be sustainable.

R and D in the financial statements I've seen basically covers the entire product, engineering etc org. Lots and lots of people, but not what regular people consider RnD.

aka "Big D, little r"

I know, R&D is like that in every company. It is mostly "development" not research.

What I am pointing out is that they could be doing a shit ton of research, what happened to big companies sponsoring fringe research? That used to be a thing, at Microsoft even.