Apple's MLX adding CUDA support

I wonder if Jensen is scared. If this opens up the door to other implementations this could be a real threat to Nvidia. CUDA on AMD, CUDA on Intel, etc. Might we see actual competition?

I think this is the other way around. It won't be cuda on anything except for nvidia.

However, this might make mlx into a much stronger competitor for Pytorch.

Oh bummer. Almost got excited.

If you implement compatible apis, are you prohibited from calling it cuda?

I'm sure I saw this lawsuit somewhere ...

The gist is the API specification in itself is copyright, so it is copyright infringement then.

Considering 100% of the low-level CUDA API headers have the word "CUDA" in them, this would be interesting to know.

Too subtle - was this oracle vs java one? Remind me: java won or lost that one?

> CUDA backend

backend

This instance is the other way around, but that's what this is – CUDA on AMD (or other platforms): https://docs.scale-lang.com/stable/

Oracle sued Google, and Google won, 6-2 (RBG was dead, Barrett had not yet been confirmed when the case was heard).

Supreme Court ruled that by applying the Four Factors of Fair Use, Google stayed within Fair Use.

An API specification ends up being a system of organizing things, like the Dewey Decimal System (and thus not really something that can be copyrighted), which in the end marks the first factor for Google. Because Google limited the Android version of the API to just things that were useful for smart phones it won on the second factor too. Because only 0.4% of the code was reused, and mostly was rewritten, Google won on the third factor. And on the market factor, if they held for Oracle, it would harm the public because then "Oracle alone would hold the key. The result could well prove highly profitable to Oracle (or other firms holding a copyright in computer interfaces) ... [but] the lock would interfere with, not further, copyright's basic creativity objectives." So therefore the fourth factor was also pointing in Google's favor.

Whether "java" won or lost is a question of what is "java"? Android can continue to use the Java API- so it is going to see much more activity. But Oracle didn't get to demand license fees, so they are sad.

Yeah, nice to have MLX-opencl or MLX-amd-whatever

Oh man, thanks for this.

I always thought it was resolved as infringement and they had to license the Java APIs or something ...

Wow.

The district court ruled for Google over patents and copyright- that it was not a copyright at all, the Court of Appeals then reversed and demanded a second court trial on whether Google was doing fair use of Oracle's legitimate copyright, which the district court again held for Google, and then the Court of Appeals reversed the second ruling and held for Oracle that it was not fair use of their copyright, and then Google appealed that to the the Supreme Court ... and won in April 2021, putting an end to this case which was filed in August 2010. But the appeals court in between the district court and the Supreme Court meant that for a long while in the middle Oracle was the winner.

This is part of why patents and copyrights can't be the moat for your company. 11 years, with lots of uncertainty and back-and-forth, to get a final decision.

Yeah this case made me think using llms to clean-room reverse engineer any API exposing SaaS or private codebase would be game

Why, everyone keeps trying to copy CUDA while failing to understand why many of us love it.

Abstraction layers for GPU compute already exist; this is yet another one, so it doesn't change anything substantially. Most of the time code written using such layers ends up running on NVIDIA hardware in prod anyway, so if anything that is a net positive for the company - it means that more people can now develop for its hardware on their devices.