Federal Government has jurisdiction over foreign policy.

This is one of those cases where you can sue all you want, but it's working as designed.

The federal government foreign policy is giving full bright scholarships to the best of the best Chinese students so that they get PhDs fully paid at the best US tech universities. And then kicking them out for loosing a lottery 3 times and sending them back to China so that they have no choice but working in products and companies that directly compete to the US.

Selling or not selling tech to China is the least of the US problems.

Well what she is saying is if you intentionally attempt to circumvent the intent of the regulation they will adjust the regulation to continue to bring about the intent. An awful lot of law and regulation isn’t cut and dry like a computer program but is intent driven. Sounds like Nvidia understood the intent but is trying to knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.

I thought the performance thresholds they put in the law were supposed to express just that intent (i.e sell only second rate GPUs to China). If the real intent was to stop all GPU sales to China, why doesn't the law say so?

Maybe it will now.

"He's trying to circumvent the speed limit by driving under it!"

Banana republic stuff.

"We put a speed bump at the dangerous crossing to prevent accidents, but they made a car that has more suspension so that they can still cross it at almost the same speed."

"The speed limit of this intersection is 45, the people who design roads put a bump in it that annoys customers, let's solve that problem."

Make the speed limit 25 if you want them to go 25. This is a simple case of a lack of leadership.

They tried the speed bump, they did the suspension thing, now it’s time to reduce the speed limit and install a traffic camera.

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.

> Why do we end up with absurd overly restrictive regulations?

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.

If you mean banana republic to mean literally every government ever throughout all of history then you’re right. Regulations are imperfect, laws are interpreted, and we don’t live in technopurist nirvana where everything is a literally interpreted smart contract.

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.

We aren't trying to prevent China from having <x> number of CUDA cores but we are trying to prevent an outcome with a fuzzy guess at what hardware specifications would prevent the outcome.

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.

They are so dangerous they can't have video cards, we know beacuse the same people who encouraged western companies to go offshore to China for decades told us so.

The accountants told us to offshore.

The problem USG is dancing around is that this policy is probably not legal if you laid it out in the plain text, regardless of whether it's strategically desirable. If tomorrow the USG came out and said "the goal is to deny china access to these tools, prevent their ability to train their own models, etc" there would be a case in the WTO for an undeclared trade war and they would probably win, followed by retaliatory sanctions from other WTO members against the US.

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.

> knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.

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.

> In the eyes of the court, there's no "minimally compliant". If they are compliant, they are compliant.

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.

I’d also note a lot of regulation is not enforced at court, but by the regulator. They get to decide. You can appeal it to a court, but courts also grant the regulators pretty good latitude to interpret behavior as willful non compliance even when it’s done literally compliant but to the extent it enables and facilitates the specific outcome the regulation is intended to prevent. Technologists always have a hard time accepting the idea laws and regulations aren’t absolute or formulaic. Judgement and common sense can also be used and often is in situations where there is an intentional evasiveness.

it's weird because the business purpose already streamlines products for capitalism and not some hard limit on resources and regulations try to do the same but with different inputs but the same artificial boundaries.