Hacker News Reader

Companies of the size of Microsoft usually function more like a country with various companies within, rather than one company with a unified view and unified goals.

So probably, the group wasn't even aware of that technology because it's far away by either professional connection, or by personal/relationship connections, or they knew about it but had another goal than "maximize use of own stuff" and made the call that the tradeoffs wasn't worth it.

View on HN

I don’t work for Microsoft, and I don’t care whether people are using Microsoft’s technologies. As a consumer, I’m not happy with nVidia’s monopoly in the field. I find it disappointing that Microsoft chose to play along, instead of disrupting the landscape.

I think the only reason for that monopoly is the mental inertia of everyone involved. The complexity of these AI models is contained within the data in the models (gigabytes of numbers in these tensors), the GPU-running code is rather simple, most of that code is basic BLAS stuff. Unlike traditional GPGPU applications (FEM, numerical simulations, fluid dynamics), the compute kernels used in AI are easily portable across GPU APIs.

Maybe when I have some free time, I should port my library to Linux + Vulkan, just to prove the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com