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United States Microsoft

US Regulators To Open Antitrust Inquiries of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia (reuters.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have reached a deal that allows them to proceed with antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence industry, Reuters reported Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter. From the report: Under the deal, the U.S. Department of Justice will take the lead in investigating whether Nvidia violated antitrust laws, while the FTC will examine the conduct of OpenAI and Microsoft. While OpenAI's parent is a nonprofit, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in a for-profit subsidiary, for what would be a 49% stake. The Microsoft-OpenAI partnership is also under informal scrutiny in other regions.

The regulators struck the deal over the past week and it is expected to be completed in the coming days, the person said. The FTC is also looking into Microsoft's $650 million deal with AI startup Inflection AI, a person familiar with the matter said.
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US Regulators To Open Antitrust Inquiries of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia More

US Regulators To Open Antitrust Inquiries of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia

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  • In any bubble you have some high risers, not sure why anyone would care who that is as they will stumble and fall at some point.

    OpenAI is not the only nor best option when it comes to AI models and services and especially not Microsoft. nVIDIA is winning in the hardware market only because their hardware is good, AMD and Intel both gave up on the pro graphics market, not because they can't compete, but they don't know how to compete. All AMD has to do is hire some people and develop open source solutions fo

    • nVIDIA is winning in the hardware market only because their hardware is good

      Hardware? Or software? I think a big part of it is because CUDA is good and that was the easiest thing to write for. I think AMD's hardware is probably close to par with NVIDIA but their ROCm is way behind, where CUDA had been at the top end of performance for a while. There's also ZLUDA but it's not exactly ready to drop in either.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Both, the low-end hardware may be comparable but there is nothing compared to an A100 GPU for example (at least not for sale to the general public).

  • Alphabet must have been lobbying their asses off for this one.

  • What did NVIDIA do? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Thursday June 06, 2024 @11:19AM (#64527609)

    Other than booking obscene amounts of capacity at TSMC and insane markups I'm not sure what NVIDIA is doing.

    I think NVIDIA's position is likely in the next few years to slip as custom hardware replaces GPUs and abstractions / competing stacks erode CUDAs value.

    • Other than booking obscene amounts of capacity at TSMC and insane markups I'm not sure what NVIDIA is doing.

      I think NVIDIA's position is likely in the next few years to slip as custom hardware replaces GPUs and abstractions / competing stacks erode CUDAs value.

      Google's TPU's (custom ASICs) can outperform NVIDIA's GPUs for at least some AI models today (as with all else, your specific model will vary). Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft have all previously announced custom AI accelerator chips. OpenAI was looking at custom chips. The capability/availability/volumes of those custom chips will certainly scale up going forward by the hyperscalers now that AI is seen (or at least believed by some) to be substantially transformative for some businesses and the demand e

    • Assuming for the moment that we're not in a bubble, NVIDIA will have a target on their back simply because of their market capitalization. Especially with Kahn at the helm of the FTC, the government seems ready to play whack-a-mole with whoever the largest companies are. And as of yesterday, evening, NVIDIA was #2.

      Realistically here, I could see regulators attempting to force the company to split its software and hardware operations. NVIDIA's software stack is a very good - and very proprietary. So an argum

    • Nvidia has a history of limiting software compatibility to give themselves an unfair advantage (havoc buyout, etc.). It's not hard to argue that they have probably done that again with the compute APIs that most AI software is using.

      The reality is that antitrust regulation has been lacking for 20 years. Now that we have an AG who is actually paying attention, lots of antitrust cases that have been ignored in the recent past could be brought now. I'm just surprised this was the breaking point for Microso
    • If I took this seriously, the only thing I could point to might be CUDA. Realistically, they just haven't paid the appropriate lobbying fees, so it's time for a shakedown.

    • Other than booking obscene amounts of capacity at TSMC and insane markups I'm not sure what NVIDIA is doing.

      I think NVIDIA's position is likely in the next few years to slip as custom hardware replaces GPUs and abstractions / competing stacks erode CUDAs value.

      From what I read (and there isn't much to read), the DOJ might be going after Nvidia for bundling software with their hardware. The big question is whether customers are choosing to buy the software or it is required for jumping to the front of the supply-limited line for Nvidia GPUs. My guess is that there is a bit of both factors. Customers are willing to pay the Nvidia premium because it supposedly "just works" and in today's climate of a mad dash to be first to market for emerging workloads, time is

  • so anyone can download it and make their own build or fork it into a derivative of their own, so how can anyone have a monopoly on FOSS software? this all sounds like government overreach and a waste of money but wait, wasting money is the one thing the government is good at

  • Shades of the Microsoft anti-trust trial where Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly.

    But then...new president, new conservative Republican, pro-business with the graft, grease and kickbacks (president in bed with Enron...), and then Microsoft just signs a consent decree pledging not to do it...and then they are engaging in monopolistic practices again with Chairman Bill's consent. Progress!

    JoshK.

  • The one thing that regulators know how to do is kill whatever is successful. The depth of envy is staggering.

    • The one thing that regulators know how to do is kill whatever is successful. The depth of envy is staggering.

      Really? Regulators kill anything successful? Regulators have let a *LOT* of shady business shit slide over the last few decades. To the point that it wouldn't be obscene to point out that this is happening during an election cycle when government officials want to be seen as "doing something." I look for this scrutiny to quietly disappear once the voting cycle completes. There's no way this amount of money being tossed around will be cracked down on. There's too much graft to be made.

  • The timing is fishy as hell, every government official involved should publicly open up their stock portfolio.

  • In general, I think regulators file too FEW antitrust lawsuits. But AI is so immature right now that it's hard to see how such a lawsuit is warranted *now*. No one in this group is making money on AI, other than NVidia, which is raking it in. There are still lots of AI competitors asserting themselves: Gemini, Claude, and Llama to name three, plus, Apple and Facebooks are jumping into this space. There's a lot of shaking out to be done yet.

    Antitrust lawsuits should come, but maybe we should let the dust set

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