I'd been assuming that the Chinese AI labs producing excellent LLMs despite the NVIDIA export restrictions was due to them finding new optimizations for training against the hardware they had access to.

I wonder if any of those $2.5B of smuggled chips ended up being used for those training runs.

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segmondy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

combination of both, they published papers so we can clearly see they are not just duplicating old methods but coming up with new optimizations. ... yet we can't rule out that they used Nvidia. I don't even see how the export restrictions work, it's stupid. A Chinese company can go to another country, say France or Canada, setup a business buy a bunch of GPUs then make it available to their subsidiary in China. The export restrictions doesn't restrict usage/sharing/renting as far as I know...

	▲	monocasa 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They definitely are using Nvidia. Part of deepseek's special sauce was using an "undocumented" ptx instruction to get a cute microoptimization with the memory hierarchy. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iEda8_Mvvo4
	▲	whatevaa 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They don't work. Chinese are skilled enough to desolder and smuggle just the ships themselves. They make the rest of GPU in-house. With more VRAM than the nvidia offers, comically, in case of 4090.

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John23832 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The answer is, of course lol?

Gamers Nexus did a whole deep dive which basically proved that Chinese researchers had access to whatever they wanted.

https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI?si=ojlxOC7uiPqZxv0N

edit: not sure if this was sarcasm

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Some of the big LLM labs have written about their training hardware.

DeepSeek v3 was trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437

MiniMax M1 used 512 H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585

The H800 wasn't banned in the first round of export controls - but was after October 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-ch...

Z.ai say they used Huawei hardware: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawe...

Qwen and Kimi haven't disclosed their hardware as far as I can tell.

	▲	tyre 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If they were using banned chips they wouldn't declare them in public papers. There have been multiple documented/alleged cases of chips being routed through Singaporean shell companies. For example: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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tcdent 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm kindof surprised by this take.

Did you think the hesitancy of westerners engaging and relying on Chinese labs was due to vibes? There are fundamental cultural differences at play, wether we are comfortable admitting that or not.

	▲	platinumrad 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you're so brave, you should state what these fundamental cultural differences are.

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peyton 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Simon, love your work. Hope this is sarcasm. If not, imagine the opposite: Sam Altman and co suddenly started producing tons of content about how smart they are in Mandarin. Why do they even need a story to begin with, let alone one they push halfway around the world?

The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.

	▲	platinumrad 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Of course they're using the best chips they can get, but this is a bizarre theory. English is the lingua franca of scientific publishing.