It's becoming less of one. Previously I would have shied away from buying an AMD card because of CUDA, but with local LLMs getting good enough to be usable and frontier models becoming as good as they have, I bit the bullet and got an R9700 for local inference. Dealing with working around CUDA used to be more of a manual process, but when you can point an agent at it and get stuff working, it's dramatically less painful and scary than it used to be. Plus, at least in ComfyUI and local LLMs I'm finding support for AMD has gotten really good. Lately I've been witnessing a lot of people using agents to write custom kernels for RDNA4 and improving performance dramatically.

IMO, yes a lot of the "nvidia pays lots of people to make non-portable, tightly coupled backends to open source projects" is potentially going to be less of a moat?

(Though it could turn into "nvidia pay lots of people to use LLMs to make non-portable, tightly coupled backends to _even more_ open source projects")

It turns out the moat is “writing drivers that work”; Nvidia drivers simply work, and Intel’s are poor quality. So if I want stuff that works I need to buy Nvidia gear.

I ran across this a few days ago: https://zluda.org/