NVIDIA's CUDA moat is quickly losing its primacy, at least as per a very interesting slide within Anthropic's IPO roadshow material, which shows GPUs as fungible compute resources, especially as highly capable models are now able to figure out how to port other models to new platforms with relative ease.
Anthropic's IPO roadshow material has one very interesting nugget: a slide that shows it took its Claude Mythos Preview model just around three days to figure out how to run another model on AMD's MI355X GPUs vs. the 6-12 months that it typically takes to prepare a new compute platform for inference-related operations.
Basically, Anthropic is now treating GPUs as fungible units of compute, with a significantly reduced barrier to switch from one platform to another. This is predictably leading some to declare that NVIDIA's CUDA moat might well be dead for all practical intents and purposes.
Even so, it might be quite premature to declare the demise of NVIDIA's CUDA, especially as it still consists of a massive ecosystem of libraries, tools, and years of progressive optimization, not to mention the large number of developers who continue to build on it.
Of course, NVIDIA has done all it can over the past few years to ensure that its CUDA moat remains resilient, from providing free GPUs and training to university researchers, to coupling NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) - a handy tool/library for connecting multiple GPUs - with proprietary hardware like NVLink and InfiniBand.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is now apparently trying to eat Microsoft's Office-related lunch as well by launching:
Who knows what else Anthropic might come after tomorrow?
About the author: Rohail Saleem reports on the business of AI and semiconductors for Wccftech: the chips, data centers and compute deals behind companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, TSMC, OpenAI and Anthropic, and what those deals mean for the hardware people buy.
He has written more than 2200 articles for Wccftech since 2019, often reading earnings reports, supply-chain data and analyst notes to explain where the money and the hardware are going. He holds a commerce degree from the University of Toronto's Rotman Commerce program.
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