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This is again a big win on the red team at least for me. They developed a “fully open” 3B parameters model family trained from scratch on AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPUs.
AMD is excited to announce Instella, a family of fully open state-of-the-art 3-billion-parameter language models (LMs) […]. Instella models outperform existing fully open models of similar sizes and achieve competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art open-weight models such as Llama-3.2-3B, Gemma-2-2B, and Qwen-2.5-3B […].
As shown in this image (https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/_images/scaling_perf_instruct.png) this model outperforms current other “fully open” models, coming next to open weight only models.
A step further, thank you AMD.
PS : not doing AMD propaganda but thanks them to help and contribute to the Open Source World.
Why open themselves up to a massive copyright violation lawsuit?
Copyright isn’t what protects that.
But it is. Look at Google v Oracle, which was an incredibly similar case that looked at whether Google using Oracle’s API documentation fell under copyright’s notion of “fair use.” If AMD tries to copy CUDA, they’ll likely run into a similar court case, especially if AMD uses anything past surface-level documentation. Whether they win or lose is sort of irrelevant since Nvidia will most likely be granted a stay, which will impact AMD.
And this doesn’t even get into the issues around AMD always having to play catch-up, since Nvidia is in full control of the “standard” and can make changes at any time.
The proper approach is for this type of thing to be an open standard so everyone is competing on a fair playing field w/o any concerns about copyright violations. ROCm is open source, so much closer to that ideal. Intel’s OneAPI is also open source, but unfortunately AMD and Intel aren’t really collaborating here, and they kind of need to in order to cut into Nvidia’s marketshare.
The case that didn’t reach a decision on whether APIs fall under copyright, because re-implementing an API wouldn’t count as infringement anyway?
Underlining and bolding how Nvidia has a monopoly and engages in anti-competitive practices.
It sort of did:
The Supreme Court decision explicitly cites the Fair Use doctrine of copyright law in its decision about Google’s use.
My concern is that CUDA is different enough from the Google v Oracle case that the precedent isn’t as clear-cut.
That’s not anti-competitive, at least not under what I understand from anti-trust law. It would be anti-competitive if Nvidia, for example, competitor drivers from running on the same machine or something, or having something in the contract that forbids using other GPU vendors products in a datacenter.
Nvidia has to go out of their way to prevent competition to trigger anti-trust, just having a popular product and not warning competitors when you make a change to a format you 100% control doesn’t trigger that. Maybe there’s an argument that they should once their marketshare goes above a certain amount, but AFAIK that’s not a violation of anti-trust as it stands.
Does may mean are?
Fair use makes the question irrelevant. Oracle failed twice: if they’d proved beyond question that their API is copyrighted, Google was still free to replicate it. So copyrightability wasn’t worth considering.
‘Actively preventing compatibility isn’t preventing competition’ is quite a fucking take.
Their market share of the AI bubble is all of it. Because as people in this thread will tell you: AMD cards are actively prevented from competing with Nvidia cards, specifically and entirely because of CUDA.
Yes, because the result would be the same whether it is or isn’t. That means the precedent is murky, which leaves future cases open to consideration.
How so? There’s no assumption of compatibility between devices. If Microsoft changes some APIs on Windows, WINE developers on Linux have no room to claim anti-competitive behavior, they just need to adapt. Assuming that APIs are frozen just because some competitor is basing a product them is bonkers.
The Windows v US anti-trust issue was because was intentionally making performance worse for competition while opening up APIs for only internal use. That’s not what’s happening w/ Nvidia at all, they’re just pushing an API, much like Windows pushes DirectX, and application developers are free to use it, or not. If AMD wants to copy that API, they would have to adapt to any compatibility issues, much like WINE does with Windows APIs.
Other vendors not building compatibility for AMD’s products isn’t “preventing competition.” AMD is free to create a better product, but Nvidia is currently wiping the floor with them hardware-wise, and they’re trying to lock people in on the software side. AMD’s approach should be to:
They’re finally doing #3 for the consumer market with the 9070/9070XT cards. I haven’t been tracking their enterprise offerings, so I don’t know if they’re trying to make inroads there, or just want to expand in consumer first and deal w/ AI later.
AMD is actively prevented from creating a directly competing product. Because Nvidia locks people in… on the software side.
The precedent on copyrightability is that copyright doesn’t even matter. Re-implementing an API is fine, either way.
This hair-splitting over Microsoft’s secret exclusion, versus Nvidia’s in-your-face exclusion, as if that makes Nvidia’s bullshit better, is beyond comprehension.
I am so tired of arguments where I’m just tapping part of someone else’s comment and going, did you read what you just wrote?
Steam isn’t a monopoly because users are free to go elsewhere, they just choose to stay because the experience is better. EGS or GOG could get more market share if they improve their products, but they don’t, so Steam stays dominant.
It’s the same deal with Nvidia. They were first to market, and even today they have a better product. People don’t use Nvidia because they’re locked in, they use Nvidia because their offering is better. That’s why CUDA is dominant and ROCm isn’t.
Here’s a quick comparison:
CUDA:
ROCm:
Maybe. If AMD merely sticks to the published API, they’d probably be fine. However, they’ll always be playing catch-up because they’re not in control of the API.
That’s why they make their own. They get their own form of lockin, control over the API, and they currently can force people to buy the higher end cards since they don’t support ROCm on lower end cards.
The difference is that Microsoft controlled the platform and used better APIs for their own products so they could always win in performance. As in, they knowingly made the competition perform worse on their platform by abusing their control of the platform.
Nvidia isn’t doing anything like that. They just aren’t releasing their API as an open standard, but instead a library. That’s not anti-competitive. AMD can make their own API (they have), or they can try to reverse engineer Nvidia’s (potential legal fight).
Yes.
Copyright isn’t what protects that.
And the motivation is the shitload of money Nvidia stole from them by making computation proprietary.
edit: Whoops, server said it didn’t get that.