[thorncorona]

> Then why aren't people competing with Nvidia? Why is OpenCL on life support and unsupported on major operating systems? Why are we doing this song-and-dance routine refusing to adopt certain GPU APIs but embracing closed ones instead?

Because Nvidia invested 20 years into its API platform, and this advantage is slowly getting realized.

[talldayo]

Well therein lies my confusion; why did their competitors get 10 years into making a competing API, and then give up?

If the reason that OpenCL died is because Apple decided that they'd rather draw blood than work with the community, then yeah, this is a well-deserved failure on their part. Even Nvidia was willing to contribute to OpenCL; the only thing stopping us from living in a CUDA-agnostic world is the pointless and childish aggression between device manufacturers.

It feels less like we're slowly realizing things, and more like the persistent failure of Nvidia's competitors is forcing them back to the negotiations table. It's pathetic that American businesses are this willing to throw each other under the bus before they consider working together for the common good.

[ralph84]

Because Nvidia is run by a founder who has been playing the long game for the entire history of the company. Its competitors are run by non-founders who aren’t interested in the long game they’re interested in next quarter’s earnings.

[prng2021]

Nvidia’s founder isn’t a fortune teller. He didn’t create his company to become the world leader in running AI workloads. CUDA has been around for a long time and it didn’t give them any significant advantage over AMD. If generative AI hadn’t exploded very recently, NVIDIA and AMD would just be battling it out with their GPUs for gaming as before.

[kaliqt]

Founder-led companies always beat non-founder-led companies, on average.