Let’s steelman instead of strawman. The CIA likely cares little about Ant and OpenAI.

What they care about is the US leading China on every militarily and economically relevant technology.

The hawks have long chafed at Huang’s position that we need to sell our best chips to China to keep them on the US tech stack. It’s very obviously giving them the ability to catch up.

And it’s also very obvious that restricting exports will only help in the short term, and in the long term, gives China reason to develop their own tech.

The biggest constraint in AI is energy, not hardware. You can always throw slower hardware at the problem, just have more of it.

Energy is the hard part, and US is deeply behind on that.

I’d say EUV lithography is the hard part; China doesn’t have DUV in production yet from what I can tell, so their FLOPs / MW is going to be terrible.

China already has reason to develop their own tech, and is actively trying to do so. Availability of US chips will not change that.

Huang said that, and then sold billions worth of chips to Megaspeed, a company funded by Alibaba. And he regularly went on tours of Megaspeed, where he met not only Alison Huang, but Alibaba executives.

Megaspeed being Nvidia's largest customer in the region... And when it raised suspicions causing the US to investigate, Jensen vouched for the company, saying Nvidia already investigated them and found nothing.

I thought I was supposed to believe that OpenAI & Anthropic's methods are so much more advanced than any potential capabilities of Chinese competitors that OpenAI & Anthropic must each be trillion dollar companies.

If I ignore the words, and instead observe behaviour, all of the actions I observe indicate the opposite;potential competitors are treated as very credible threats, even existential ones; and actions indicate that 'maintaining special access to hardware' and 'vying for regulatory capture to shut out competition' are major strategic goals.