IMO "put LLM everywhere" does look like a bubble. More fundamental things like what OpenAI is doing is probably not, the hype will fade if the progress will slow down, but nobody can tell if it will.
Rheinmetall has been increasing production though. It's just a) getting into this business is hard, so it has limited effect on the rest of the economy b) arming oneself to teeth costs money, which is German budget is pretty low on at the monent
I live in Germany, and while I never used fax as well, I did use paper mail a lot, and I don't know how I would live without a printer and a scanner. It gets better, e.g. taxes have been completely digitized in the recent years, but still a lot of paper there.
It wasn't, but also Germany's strategic options are limited. US, being its strategic ally, is also its economic rival, and will not hesitate using its advantage of having own energy source. Self-sufficiency solely on renewables is also not an option, at least short and middle term.
Leaving nuclear energy aside, European countries have massive reserves of shale gas. They decided not to exploit them and to be dependent on foreign powers instead. We read about Russia but now Germany imports from the US (shale gas!) and Qatar. The US have won the jackpot with the war in Ukraine: split Russia and Germany, and reaps the dollars as well.
The only problem with gas is that Germany does not have its own gas. After Russian supply stopped it has to buy it from Azerbaijan, which not only has its own trail of human and civil rights abuse as well as ongoing military aggression, but also is plausibly suspected in reselling the same Russian gas.
Germany got about 43% of its natgas from Norway in 2023.
And 0% from Azerbaijan, as far as I can tell, though other EU countries did -- very little, although there may be plans for this to increase in the future.
The alternative is being a single-issue party which people will only vote for when there is nothing more important on their minds. IMO it is good for a party to have a clear profile on most important issues, and digital rights fit into the overall progressive ideology. Another possible direction would probably be libertarian profile for techbros, but that would be a different party.
Except there are already other much bigger progressive parties here. Really most major parties tend to err on the progressive side these days. So they both alienated people that don't agree on their new focus whiile failing to convince the progressives to vote for them instead of the larger parties.
The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.
OpenCL is an alternative to CUDA just like Legos are an alternative to bricks. The problem with OpenCL isn't even the performance, it's everything. If OpenCL were any good, people could use it to build similarly powerful applications on cheaper AMD GPUs.
OpenCL is just a spec. It's up to companies to implement it in a successful way or not. There is no reason in and of itself that OpenCL can't compete with CUDA on performance. The fact that Apple's Metal, which is pretty good, is actually implemented with a private OpenCL system is proof that the spec is not to blame.
Well, performance isn't the issue. Like the parent said, the problem is mostly that CUDA is such a radically mature API and everything else isn't. You might be able to reimplement all the PCIe operations using OpenCL, but how long would that take and who would sponsor the work? Nvidia simply does it, because they know the work is valuable to their customers and will add to their vertical integration.
OpenCL isn't bad, and I'd love to see it get to the point where it competes with CUDA as originally intended. The peaceable sentiment of "let's work together to kill the big bad demon" seems to be dead today, though. Everyone would rather sell their own CUDA-killer than work together to defeat it.
For similar reasons why Microsoft created DirectX. It allows them to have a system where the software and hardware are more tightly integrated than using a cross-platform spec. It also allows them to situate the API within the context of the operating system and other languages that are used on Apple platforms, making things easier on developers. And at least in that regard, they certainly succeeded. Metal is probably the easiest GPU API offered on any platform. Not necessarily the most powerful, but it’s almost trivial to hand write a compute kernel and spin it off.
AMD’s first attempt at displacing CUDA-as-a-runtime was called AMD APP (advanced parallel processing) so this layer did indeed exist. It just sucked as badly as the rest of AMD’s slop.
Bonus points: the rest of the software libraries intended to compete with the CUDA ecosystem are still online in the “HSA Toolkit” GitHub repo. Here’s their counterpart to the Thrust library (last updated 10 years ago):
That theory doesn't really make sense. Nvidia didn't need AMD's permission to write a high-quality compute interface. Why would AMD need Nvidia's? AMD has their own internal opinions for how well they want compute to work; if OpenCL isn't doing it for them they should have figured that out quickly and then built their own layer as a stopgap. But we've seen what happens when they do that; ROCm. The problem is that they don't really know how and it is a glaring capability gap (didn't know I suppose - I expect they're learning fast).
If anything, the situation with OpenCL suggests AMD and friends were the ones dragging their feet. Nvidia correctly identified that being led by the OpenCL committee would lock them out of billions (trillions, if you believe the stock market) of profit and routed around the blockage rather than compromise their engineering standards.
And much more importantly for ooencl's success, poor compatibility of OpenCL implementations on Nvidia hardware by Nvidia + Microsoft platform-level software
Eg, opencl on Nvidia GPUs for windows is/was missing (I have a many-year GitHub issue with them + Microsoft), which matters for individuals, and Nvidia does not support OpenCL for its core convenience analytics libraries like the RAPIDS Python ecosystem, which is core to its massive data center market. We initially built for compatibility/distribution, but it didn't matter: That gap closed a lot of doors for us as a small ISV choosing what & how to build, and in turn, ultimately prevents our customers from buying AMD, Intel, etc
I'm not up to snuff on whether that qualifies as using its position anti-competitively anywhere, but it's a real market issue
