| ▲ | HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago |
| Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards. HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e. Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?! |
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| ▲ | philjohn an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| > but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?! It depends how good the US labs get at stopping distillation of their models. |
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| ▲ | HarHarVeryFunny an hour ago | parent [-] | | So the Chinese can land a rover on Mars, are beating us back to the Moon, but can't figure out how to generate some reasoning data to train on - that's your theory ?! |
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| ▲ | actionfromafar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Aren't the controls meant to funnel money to his bank or crypto accounts? |
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| ▲ | enraged_camel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years). |
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| ▲ | stdgy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the question we need to be asking, in order to measure success, is whether export controls on China have encouraged China to invest more money than they would have otherwise invested in these technologies and whether those investments will materially change China's long term trajectory in relation to the United States. I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation. And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack. I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling. | |
| ▲ | HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both things can be true simultaneously - China would no doubt prefer to have access to things like NVIDIA chips and ASML EUV machines, but at the same time having to do without they are accelerating their independence from US-controlled supply chain. It's hard to say that any US AI companies have benefited from these sanctions (or that this was the goal). Who has benefited, and how? US companies are still having to compete with them, with no restriction on Chinese AI being used in the US (e.g. GLM available via Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, etc). NVIDIA is losing sales and CUDA lock-in. Other supply chain vendors losing sales too. | |
| ▲ | themgt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? I mean, I remember listening to the Biden people back in 2022 talking how they were going to cripple China's semis and therefore AI industry and keep them 5+ years behind the curve as Team America accelerates ahead. That was the pitch. You've now got Huawei Ascend 950, GLM-5.2 at Opus 4.8 levels, China dominating OSS models, and Z.ai saying they'll have a Fable-level model by EOY. I would say the export controls have utterly, utterly failed. https://www.csis.org/analysis/understanding-biden-administra... | | |
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