This is one of those cases where you can sue all you want, but it's working as designed.
Selling or not selling tech to China is the least of the US problems.
Banana republic stuff.
Make the speed limit 25 if you want them to go 25. This is a simple case of a lack of leadership.
Regulation is always like this. I work in a lot of highly regulated spaces and my work deals with it an awful lot as it’s sensitive stuff. This is how it works. They always try to do the less restrictive language first and once some jackass starts trying to do literalist stuff to circumvent the intent the thumb screws come out.
Why do we end up with absurd overly restrictive regulations? Jackasses who fully knowingly try to circumvent the intent by cutlining the edges of the language. Most regulators try to make the rules loose enough to allow for things they didn’t intend to squash that are in line with the intent not being squashed.
In this case it was obvious what the intent was. They had no intention of punishing gamers in China or whatever other edges. Right or wrong they didn’t want.high end AI enabling GPUs sold to China, so they tried to propose something that captured a looser definition and held it up and said “ok folks this isn’t overly restrictive just remember why we did this and don’t be a jackass.”
Then, of course, they went and were a flagrant jackass thumbing their nose st their regulator. First, that’s just a stupid idea. Second, it’s why we can’t have nice stuff.
Beacuse instead of making the law, "go 3 mph beacuse I'm fearful of what will happen" fearful people install a speed bump so they don't get called a totalitarian. Then they get mad when people don't go 3 mph, even though that isn't the law, beacuse you know, they are totalitarian.
Classic banana republic stuff.
What I’m describing is how well functioning regulation occurs in practice. It’s messy and it does depend on people listening to the intent, conforming to the specifics, and not trying to get away with the opposite of the intent by minimally conforming. The fact that it’s not some idealized system escapes no one as undesirable, but at least in the 10,000 years we’ve been working on laws and regulation and governance this is as good as it’s gotten.
Continuing the traffic analogy: The goal is to prevent accidents. To do this you enact speed limits and then someone causes an accident while obeying the speed limit.
The goal is to not strengthen China's military. To do this you enact limits on GPU tensor cores and then China uses these to improve their military.
I think the solution might be to err on the side of extreme caution. I'd export only what is necessary for inference but retain the hardware to train models while also releasing free "Made in America" models to the world.
AI as a technology isn't inherently military regardless of whether it has military applications - just like the computer isn't inherently military. At most it is an intensely dual-use technology, and honestly just like the computer that is completely underplaying just how radical a shift it's going to bring. It is a neutral tech that has broad applications across all areas of computing, the framing of it as being a "military technology" is kinda inherently and deliberately misleading, other than it being a box that the USG is notionally allowed to regulate.
And you can't just arbitrarily decide who "gets access to the computer" (or some other foundationally-disruptive technology) and who doesn't, in a global interconnected economy. This isn't the iron curtain where you have spheres of influence with no interdependence and you can bar the gates, that ship sailed with globalization and the 90s neoliberal "end of history" consensus. China has pushed through to multipatterned 7nm DUV nodes already, which is quite sufficient for solving the military side of the problem, if the US insists on making it a military problem.
Again though the real problem is this is an undeclared trade war, and the USG could not legally do the things it's trying to do if it just came out and admitted the de-facto regulatory standard it was actually applying, or the overall motives. Putting one over on a trade partner is not a valid reason for denying access to a foundationally-changing technology, according to the treaties the US has signed.
On the other hand... try and stop us. But the rest of the world is not deceived either, just like they're not deceived about any of the US's other realpolitik moves. we're doing it because we can, and because we think it's strategically desirable to stomp down at this moment of foundationally disruptive change.
In the eyes of the court, there's no "minimally compliant". If they are compliant, they are compliant.
If the agency keeps moving the goalposts to "clarify" intent because it was not sufficiently clear initially, that's on them, but it's also not a failing of Nvidia.
Right, so if there is a new export ban then nvidia will be in violation and the agency just clarified that it will create such a ban if nvidia makes it necessary.
The cost of trying to play cat and mouse would be on nvidia loosing lots of R&D time and money and not the agency that only has to copy paste the product details into what is probably a preexisting form.
That seems ridiculous at first glance? I'm assuming a "cutline" here is what the maximum performance is allowed to be, and asking companies to add in a fuzzy "extra" bit there, instead of building right to the line is bizarre?
Another example is anti-money laundering laws. They drew a cutline at $10k cash per deposit, so of course criminals started depositing $9,999 at a time. The legislative answer was to say that avoiding the $10k limit is a new crime called "structuring". So what's the actual limit then? There isn't one, you just have to not seem too suspicious. Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime.
The other fun one is the suspicious activity reports banks are required to file if a customer does something, er, suspicious. What that means isn't defined anywhere. But eventually the regulators advised that knowing SARs exist is itself suspicious, so merely asking if the bank has filed a SAR on you can trigger the filing of a SAR on you.
The intended way to follow the law is to deposit large sums of cash and report them, which is not a crime.
Can you imagine tencent standing up to PRC like that? Their entire board would have been replaced, imprisoned or worse.
Isn’t this exactly how democracy is supposed to work?
What we don’t understand is why someone would spend so much time on HN complaining about “westerners” and lobbing ad hominems at anyone critical of China.
There is criticism and then there is ignorant xenophobia. The latter must be called out. If you've read about "ad hominem" then you must also be aware that it has its valid use cases.
Also, "complaining about X" is a kind of an ironic choice of words for this thread.
If you have an idea how to argue about something on the other side of a cultural barier without exposing biases, I am actually all ears.
Also, please don't post flamewar comments. You went way over the line here, even apart from the personal attack. You're as welcome here as anyone else is, but we need you to follow the rules and post in the intended spirit. I realize that's harder when representing a minority view, but there's not much we can do about that—we have to apply the rules more or less evenly.
Who can? There are plenty of things people around the world hold against the US. It's not like anyone can actually do something about it and that's all that really matters.
In the long term they can, by using the US dollar less and less. Which is already happening. One day the US government will wake up unable to print money to pay for things from other countries, and the economy will collapse.
I don't like assuming that someone is an idiot, but besides "shitting where you eat" the only explanation I can think of is that someone is betting on WWIII and that it will end as profitability as WWI and WWII.
A lot of people in the US view the US as the heroic peace keeper, and that all actions the US takes against China are for "world security" rather then an attempt to keep the top spot as the #1 economic and military super power.
It's weird because while there is freedom of the press in the US, many US citizens are still strangely misinformed and irrationally patriotic.
I'm not even clear about the mechanism at work here but there is a sort of strange form of control of information at play here. You can sort of sense it in US news. It's genius really how the media can be controlled despite amendments in place ensuring freedom of the press.
Anyway, I am aware of the whole bubble thing, although I don't think its unique for the US, at least no entirely.
It's quite similar to countries with their own sovereign media. That's why people often think that those other guys hand out talking points to their journalists, when it's actually all about hiring people with good political sense, who feel "the flow" and know what is politically correct.
The difference is that people with 3 digit IQ typically know how dive into foreign media (or even passively exposed to it), while people in the US dominated part of the world just kinda don't even care.
I wonder if it was different when the Fairness Doctrine was in place - probably not, cross-cultural fairness seems like something too complicated to scale well.
It's well known that advertising dollars influence decisions, and it's also well known that western news media is owned by only a few huge companies that often are advertising subsidiary companies on the same platform.
Litigation and defamation is probably one aspect of the control.
How do you figure it's not empty propaganda and that it's actually more massive compared to the US "well that's just life" incidents?
Because it's definitely propaganda (even if not an empty one). It's no coincidence that it ramped up when China became an economic competitor to the US. Even the "Uyghurs camps" narrative surged in media just right along with ICE detention camps scandal. And given how muslims were treated by the US after 9/11, there is definitely zero moral high-ground.
Cracking down on dissidents? Capitol riots challenge was failed miserably and was hardly handled any differently than what gets so criticized in "authoritarian" countries.
> cannot hold a candle to what the U.S.A achieves on the world stage.
Jokes about participating in wars all over the planet aside, what did the US actually achieve on the WORLD stage? Not it's influence on European neighborhood and the small corner of North Atlantics, but the WORLD. Cuz IMO, the world is totally burning right now.
It's really hard to figure out what you're implying specifically when you talk in slogans and manifestos, instead of like a normal down to earth person. But I can't shake the feeling that you kinda treat the rest of the world as ochlos to American demos, with an inherent supremacism similar to how 20 century commies went about their global revolution that no one had asked them for.
For one, you can call literal propaganda for what it is, but propaganda isn't necessarily wrong on the facts. Pointing out that 'you didn't care about issue X until you did' is not going to get the self-reflection you hope for, because at the end of the day, the propaganda is pointing out a message that cannot be countered since what it points out is true.
Second, anything to do with 'one of your parties did a bad thing' is counterproductive and contrasting the legal ramifications of the riots is not even close to being on par -- the USA has a functioning (if sometimes overhanded and racist) justice system and the fact that the offending parties were prosecuted publicly and not taken to a secret camp and shot shows that even if the perps didn't get their just deserts, it was all above board and it was effective.
'The world' is, again, a dead end. You absolutely cannot win an argument that the USA was somehow not the stabilizing military factor in the west and didn't provide a large portion of the major world stage level achievements since the end of WWII. If it weren't for the $$$trillions/yr on patrolling oceans in carriers, flying sorties, launching sats, and just generally being the hall monitor and the bully, then a whole lot of things would be incredibly different. You can argue for better or worse, but hardly any American would argue that it is for worse, if they honestly accept that they like their modern lifestyle.
I suggest going the Socratic way next time.
It's not far off from what the US did in Guantanamo.
https://www.weather.gov/safety/fog-driving says:
“
• Use fog lights if you have them.
• Never use your high-beam lights. Using high beam lights causes
glare, making it more difficult for you to see what’s ahead of
you on the road.
”In your metaphor the town wants safe roads -- they don't care if someone is going 54 or 56, and the enforcement should reflect that. If you really think that anyone going over 55.1 should be pulled over no matter what, and that people driving with a blindfold on going 54.9 should not, then I don't know what to say .
I would fully support a speed limit system based on driving skill. However, since we have a purely speed based system those driving the limit should not get tickets.
If you really believe in only 'the letter of the law' then why do we have courts? It isn't just to determine guilt or innocence, since only some of the courts do that and only some of the time.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/36Kr-KrASIA/Semiconductor-f...
They can already build functional smartphones without relying on Taiwan at all. It's not a huge technology leap from a smartphone CPU to a consumer GPU. Design and engineering leap, sure but nothing a dozen PhDs can't solve in a few years.
But of course things started to fall apart from there. As the true nature of the USSR became clear to westerners, ideologically motivated spies started to dry up and the KGB was forced to pay large bribes to get information. They focused on military info, and so their economy started to fall behind in other areas. By the end of the 1980s the gap in quality of life became so huge that Yeltsin famously put his head in his hands and cried after visiting an American supermarket.
China is somewhat centrally planned but more capitalist than the USSR was, and doesn't suffer so badly from the underproduction of consumer goods. Some people claim China is really just a capitalist dictatorship that cosplays as communist by this point, which isn't quite right; it's somewhere in the middle.
But the idea that they won't be able to catch up in advanced tech is just wrong. There are tons of patriotic Chinese people with access to high tech firms in the USA and these days you don't even need them, it's sufficient to just hack networks and steal documents in bulk. Sooner or later they will be the only country in the world that's technologically fully self sufficient. It will just have involved making enemies of everyone else.
There are two areas where they could really start to suffer after that:
1. Erratic decision making from the top that screw things up. Already a big problem for them.
2. If the west is able to properly tighten up corporate opsec and the flow of stealable ideas dries up.
Of course, China has lots of smart people who could come up with great ideas and firms if allowed, the prevalence of hard working Chinese in western companies shows that. But that involves taking risks in the expectation of reward. Look at what happened to Jack Ma. China doesn't reward success, it punishes it. The Great Firewall also makes everything way harder for them.
Every other country in the world will be mad at China because they stole tech to further build their own?
Anything that senator does won't change the trendline of the inevitable.
I'm sure that if we give them the finger, they'll invest a lot more and just make their own. It'll take some time and a lot of $$$, but they'll do it.
But that won't last.
See an article from the press with details here: https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/groq_ai_dev_kit/
But I don't see any selling numbers or independent performance conformations.
Groq has just been added to the LLMPerf Leaderboard:
https://github.com/ray-project/llmperf-leaderboard#output-to...
(Disclosure: I work for Groq)
>U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications."
>"What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added.
>Raimondo said she spoke a week ago to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and he was "crystal clear. We don't want to break the rules. Tell us the rules, we'll work with you."
In plain English, that means Nvidia can, will, and should sell products to China below the arbitrary line the US and China have set for the kabuki theater.
Anyone who expects these sanctions to actually damage Chinese ambitions or progress or expects the US to win this cold war are either ignorant or delusional. China won this conflict before it even began.
Sad China mythos propaganda. They haven't won much, and are quickly following suit of other past economies like Japan. Conversion from pure industrialization to advanced economy is hard and the slow down is practically inevitable, especially when China started trying to push antiAmerican geopolitical aspirations againsts their neighbors in the China Sea.
Th only winner here is Mexico who looks to be the onshore of choice out of China supply chains.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou...
> "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day."