Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?
This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?
In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?
Most of the hardware functionality from a GPU that models need is generic and used every time you use a GPU for any compute. You can implement language models in a GLSL shader; modern GPUs have been programmable for 20 years, that's the point of their existence. The best thing they could do is just literally nerf the consumer hardware substantially to make tokens unusable or stop selling consumer hardware. They don't need spyware to do that.
More broadly, "Compute" is basically a resource that our economy relies on to a large degree, it has been that way for decades. And it turns out it's very bad when you just destroy the thing your economy relies on. And doing so doesn't solve problems like "Current computers exist today" or "Other people make computers". So who gives a shit about Jensen? Comments here talking about "taking him out"? What's actually more likely is just that really powerful people today are often corrupt and also really fucking stupid. He played a stupid game and lost.
Nothing is putting the current open weights genie back in the bottle IMO, maybe except Amodei using RoboStormtrooperGruppen9000 bots and going door to door to take peoples GPUs at gunpoint.
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips