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

183 points spacebanana7 | 3 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.75s | source

I appreciate developing ROCm into something competitive with CUDA would require a lot of work, both internally within AMD and with external contributions to the relevant open source libraries.

However the amount of resources at stake is incredible. The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain. Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each, it'd still be a good investment.

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johnnyjeans ◴[01 Apr 25 14:53 UTC] No.43547510[source]▶
> The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain.

Nvidia is massively overvalued right now. AI has rocketed them into absolute absurdity, and it's not sustainable. Put aside the actual technology for a second and realize that public image of AI is at rock bottom. Every single time a company puts out AI-generated materials, they receive immense public backlash. That's not going away any time soon and it's only likely to get worse.

Speaking as someone that's not even remotely anti-AI, I wouldn't touch the shit with a 10 foot pole because of how bad the public image is. The moment that capital realizes this, that bubble is going to pop and it's going to pop hard.

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spacebanana7 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:08 UTC] No.43547711[source]▶
> AI has rocketed them into absolute absurdity, and it's not sustainable

Why isn't it sustainable? Their biggest customers all have strong finances and legitimate demand. Google and Facebook would happily run every piece of user generated content through an LLM if they had enough GPUs. Same with Microsoft and every enterprise document.

The VC backed companies and Open AI are more fragile, but they're comparatively small customers.

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1. pjc50 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:15 UTC] No.43547801[source]▶
> Google and Facebook would happily run every piece of user generated content through an LLM if they had enough GPUs. Same with Microsoft and every enterprise document.

.. But how much actual value derives from this?

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2. spacebanana7 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:24 UTC] No.43547917[source]▶
Youtube could conceivably put multi language subtitles on every video. Potentially even dub them.

But the "real value" would come from making adverts better targeted and more interactive. It's hard to quantity as a person outside of the companies, but the intuition for a positive value is pretty strong.

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3. johnnyjeans ◴[01 Apr 25 15:38 UTC] No.43548093[source]▶
> Youtube could conceivably put multi language subtitles on every video.

They already do this, it's opt-in.

> But the "real value" would come from making adverts better targeted and more interactive.

Is there any evidence to suggest that a transformer would be better at collaborative filtering than the current deep learning system that was custom engineered and built for this?