I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commenting on.

Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.

On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.

And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.

In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

> > NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

> Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement

Then why don't they sell consumer GPUs with tons of memory. They clearly segment the market into consumer versus server/business.

While nvidia 's drivers are closed source there's enough interest in running LLM's that you are not locked in using nvidia. Strix Halo chips have been around before dgx spark came out and deliver very similar performance.

You do own the hardware. Nvidia GPUs have FOSS driver alternatives (Nouveau, NOVA) and have supported OpenCL on the proprietary drivers since 2009.

If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...

nothing stopping you from doing that

"lab" vs "company as a whole"

They might be right w.r.t. openness about LLM at the moment, but w.r.t. general software openness they are definitely the opposite of open.

Because making new AI models is a research activity, so the group within Nvidia (or other companies) that does that activity is called a research lab, or just "lab" for short. I don't think anyone is saying that all of Nvidia is a lab (that's just shorthand I guess).

Because they are mostly research departments (aka a lab) turned into a corp structure. It’s not a new phenomenon, just that until recently labs didn’t get $1T valuations so you see it more now

Because it sounds cool/sciency.

Just like everything AI is a "model". It's actually not, but it sounds cool/sciency.

Not with the help of the models!

"Labs" here specifically means "AI/LLM model lab", which that part of Nvidia is unquestionably one of the most open.

Nvidia is also one of the most closed hardware developers around. Two things can be true.

/s I thought AI can now give us the source of any binary? What happened to all the vibe coded Nvidia/CUDA drivers?

> They are sharing stuff that makes you consume their stuff

No shit Sherlock. Name one company that shared their code to make you NOT to consume their stuff?

CUDA is proprietary for a pretty understandable reason. There's no good way for Nvidia to standardize it.

They supported OpenCL when Khronos floated the idea of a GPGPU standard to manufacturers, but OEMs didn't want to design scalable hardware or sponsor the software.