No. of Recommendations: 4
Jim's last sentence is a dramatic philosophical question for a business. It borders on the question of whether, say Microsoft, is a hardware company or a software company (similar arguments could be made for any of the players). Whether a product is more profitable if kept proprietary, fostered, by direct manufacturing relationships, keeping the profits in-house or by licensing to make it an industry standard.
These decisions are non-trivial. Xerox is the poster child of getting it wrong when they didn't exploit the developments at PAEC because they felt they felt they were protecting their photocopy business. Kodak, similarly, lagged when it came to digital photography to protect their film business.
On the other hand, IBM took a stab at developing a PC and found the tail was somewhat wagging the dog for a while.
But being THE industry standard or one of two has benefitted Google (Chromium and Android), Apple, Microsoft and numerous industry-wide standards covered by DIN, NEMA and so on (long list of alphabet soup here).
So, we now have a single ecosystem built around software designed to run on Nvidia chips. And every car company working on autonomous cars is selecting from a large number of software choices. In the first case, there is an argument for forming an open industry standard which will both increase competition between chip designers (I am assuming, given a reasonable time frame, if this is not created in the US, China will provide an alternative) as well as vastly reduce costs. In the case of autonomous cars, the use of standards (such as transponders on parking signs, fire hydrants, built into traffic signals, rail crossing etc., etc. as well into each car, which are readable by car-borne receivers will promote efficacy and safety. That requires standards. It would also allow municipalities to assist/command load balancing. As with GPS and electric windows, at some point, the control software becomes as common in cars as radios - and at some point will likely be mandated as being safer than manual control compared to cars attached to a municipal traffic control system.
As it stands now, there are a plethora of AI's which all funnel down to a common hardware/software architecture. My guess is, as the number of primary contenders narrows, the physical platforms they run on will become more divers.
Jeff
