>America has slowed the speed of Chinese AI development by a tiny number of years, if that, in return for losing total domination of the GPU market.

I'm open to considering the argument that banning exports of a thing creates a market incentive for the people impacted by the ban to build aa better and cheaper thing themselves, but I don't think it's as black and white as you say.

If the only ingredient needed to support massive innovation and cost cutting is banning exports, wouldn't we have tons of examples of that happening already - like in Russia or Korea or Cuba? Additionally, even if the sale of NVIDIA H100s weren't banned in China, doesn't China already have a massive incentive to throw resources behind creating competitive chips?

I actually don't really like export bans, generally, and certainly not long-term ones. But I think you (and many other people in the public) are overstating the direct connection between banning exports of a thing and the affected country generating a competing or better product quickly.

> If the only ingredient needed to support massive innovation and cost cutting is banning exports, wouldn't we have tons of examples of that happening already - like in Russia or Korea or Cuba?

That's just one of the ingredients that could help with chance of it happening, far from being "the only ingredient".

The other (imo even more crucial) ingredients are the actual engineering/research+economical+industrial production capabilities. And it just so happens that none of the countries you listed (Russia, DPRK, and Cuba) have that. That's not a dig at you, it is just really rare in general for a country to have all of those things available in place, and especially for an authoritarian country. Ironically, it feels like being an authoritarian country makes it more difficult to have all those pieces together, but if such a country already has those pieces, then being authoritarian imo only helps (as you can just employ the "shove it down everyone's throat until it reaches critical mass, improves, and succeeds" strategy).

However, it is important to remember that even with all those ingredients available on hand, all it means is that you have a non-zero chance at succeeding, not a guarantee of that happening.

Russia and Cuba? Why not mention Somalia and Afghanistan? They're about equally relevant in this context.

South Korea might have the capability to play this game (North Korea certainly doesn't), but it hasn't really had the incentive to.

Which brings us to the real issue: an export ban on an important product creates an extremely strong incentive, that didn't exist before. Throwing significant national resources at a problem to speculatively improve a country's competitiveness is a very different calculation than doing so when there's very little alternative.

Russia and Korea and Cuba don’t have the economy, manufacturing and competent research scientists that China has

Head of SMIC was ex TSMC IIRC. They were able to poach TSMC engineers because Taiwan didn’t pay as well.

The catch-up would happen one way or another but with the exports ban it definitely accelerated