alt Hacker NewsI think OP is overstating it a bit tbh. So Nvidia has the market for the hardware, which helps, but there is literally no alternative to CUDA. Nvidia keeps it a scalpel for skilled users, its not super easy to use, but unlocks orders of more magnitudes of power for the use cases it excels at vs CPUs. I don't have access to anything like it in the Apple ecosystem.
AMD has had years to try and counter it, but just has not. Google is kinda trying to do an end run around it with TPUs but they are still niche high end stuff with limited availability.
Its really just CUDA, and CUDA can be seen as somewhat akin to C for assembly used by Nvidia's gpus- In many ways a wrapper around the low level hardware that often has those details bleed through.
I think there is a misconception here: CUDA is not even close to being C for assembly used by Nvidia's GPUs, PTX is, and it uses JIT to compile to Nvidia's GPU assembly, SASS. It honestly easier just to have LLMs write PTX directly than to go through CUDA C/C++ at all.
Again, "CUDA" isn't a programming language, it stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture; "C/C++ for CUDA" are the high-level languages that compiles to PTX and then SASS as well CPU orchestration code via NVCC.
And to be honest, pretty much everything you can do in CUDA C/C++, you can also do in HLSL/GLSL compiled to SPIR-V, as long as the Vulkan hardware extension is available.