You shouldn’t be doubtful. China executes the exact same strategy with manufactured goods exported to the US.

Exporting their extremely cheap and relatively good quality products to the US destroys any incentive to invest in domestic manufacturing and production.

If the Chinese were to stop exporting those goods to us, there would be massive incentives to make those products domestically. Given a few years we would be producing everything we previously bought from China after a painful adjustment period.

The incentive effects are identical for chip producers in China. Give it a few years and they’ll be at parity with any western producer.

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” -Charlie Munger

> the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers.

OT but one thing I didn't realize until reading this comment:

Those used CMP 170HX 8GB were advertised in front of crypto server rigs. Those were probably spread across South Asian scam malls(shopping mall buildings built in literal sovereignty contested areas of non-China/Japan/Korea/Russia non-India non-African non-Muslim Asia, under guises of Chinese tourist destinations, that are literally rented out to local Chinese-speaking gangs engaging in all sorts of gang crimes from tech support scams to human and organ trafficking, straight out of the fictitious Chiba in Neuromancer), and they would happily sell or rent compute to Chinese AI firms if only those were more valuable than 8GB VRAM they have, which they all had all along.

GPU export to China must have become significantly less meaningful since the 170HX unlock became a thing. That alone must have provided petaflops of unsanctioned untraced junks for parts priced compute to Chinese AI startups.

> If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers.

There are. A lot of Nvidia chips are still stuck in Hong Kong.

What the government does is not always what corporations follow.

You mean the exact thing China has been doing?

https://nationaltechnology.co.uk/Nvidia_GPUs_Sitting_Unused_...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secr...

> If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions

"About 600,000 of Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite demand from tech firms" [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...

> "If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers."

I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.

To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.

Giving them chips now will no longer change anything because it is too late. Now they know that they must not depend on US-controlled imports.

Before the US "sanctions", China did not make any serious efforts to develop EUV lithography, because the government did not believe that this is a priority.

After US blackmailed everybody, including TSMC and ASML, to stop providing products and services to China, the Chinese government understood the importance of being able to make up-to-date integrated circuits, so they started providing incentives for all companies willing to work in this direction.

The result is that now China claims to have working prototypes for EUV lithography and they estimate that they will begin to use EUV lithography in mass production some time between 2030 and 2032, which is a very plausible estimate.

Supposedly, one of those half-billion-dollar ASML EUV machines has found its way to China somehow.

The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.

This would work in a fully capitalist economy where supplying them with chips would remove funding/investment from the local alternatives. This is not China. China has been and will continue to pour billions upon billions of dollars into their native industry because they too believe that having their own chips is important, so they will take all the cutting edge chips they can get and they will continue to develop their own at the exact same rate.

They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.

You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.

Some people argue that it is indeed a moral responsibility to break an unjust law.

The US had put an export ban, and he clearly skirted it while at the same time banging a suspected Chinese spy. The company he ran like a fiefdom broke the rules set in place by the same country for which he's supposedly a loss.

I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.

I am curious which questions you found poorly informed? Jensen Huang started with "China could have trained a Mythos level model" because the resources needed for that were "mundane". Maybe you believe him on that or you know that to be true but maybe mundane is not the right word. Also the rest of his answer did not age well. I think Dwarkesh genuinely wanted to have a deep conversation and not to be a troll.

The questions weren't poorly informed just because you agree with what Jensen was saying. He seems pretty obviously to have made drastically poor judgement decisions that potentially affect national security of the US. I don't know if I would consider that to be a huge loss to the US.

Replaced by a CFO… this is what they always do. And that sign the slow death of the any company.

He clearly made some very bad decisions or we wouldn't be having this discussion

Replaced for like 10 minutes until the new CEO comes in. This isn't the time to announce the permanent next-20-years CEO.

It's the type of old man heated, when you have a nuanced perspective and take on a complex subject, and someone younger is trying to reduce it to overly simple narratives and metaphors.

It's a good time to be heated and remind the other side they're acting childish.

> replaced by a ex-CFO.

Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.

I'm not sure what to make of the idol worshipping going on here. He was an average CEO and the train will continue right along. NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.

There are so many people who could fill his position. Not such a big loss

> He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US

Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.

Its about his push for China. No intention of posting the other interview.

there's a good analysis that says Alice was a fixer and/or white-glove. those are common-in-China roles that have to do with obfuscating big financial operations, not necessarily with any political (CCP) involvement. obviously, CCP approves, if tacitly, everything that happens in China.

I find this hard to believe. Covid made it clear the CCP is very much in charge and in control.

My favourite honey trap story comes from the cold war. A Russian diplomat in Denmark was the target of Danish intelligence. They tried to honey trap him at a party, but he didn't respond to their agent's advances. So, the Danes supposed that he might be gay, and sent a male honey trap to the next party, but again got no response from the Russian. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it up.

Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.

He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.

> honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely.

WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.

also, men are redickulous. And they can go in any number of beneficial direction from turning informant, selling GPUs to the chinese, or just a pee tape, etc. Just like a lottery of fun ways to screw with an adversary.

Over the last 40-50 years they haven’t had the try that hard to get that technology, the overwhelming majority was served up on a plate.

If they don't need NVIDIA then why are they attempting so hard to bypass export controls.

If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.

And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.

No it's not the case because if they could do it they would already have done it. Selling them Nvidia chips doesn't change that.

But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang

People are bending over backwards to come to try to find some deep reason, but I think the reason is simple - the people in charge are not particularly farsighted nor insightful. It's simply short-term thinking without consideration of long-term consequences - it's not limited to just businesses.

For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.

And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.

It's just myopia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.

> Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.

Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?

Davidson Window...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson_window

"The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA."

And therefore, much better for the world. Look at what the US has done with its dominance: maintained a petrodollar empire while steadfastly denying that such an empire exists, attacking countries that step out of line, murdering at will. Trump just made it obvious what the US did, and was blatant in his evil, but he was just continuing what other presidents did before him.

This. And this happened before, see the China Sovjet split

AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.

NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.

End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.

Why wouldn’t they have done that by now then? Where is their ASML or TSMC? They’ve had decades to catch up already.

Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?

Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?

Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.

If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.

This is what people miss.

Their view of China is decades out of date, and they aren't paying attention to the recent history of industries where China has gone from playing catch-up to outright dominance.

It's not just about the end product (GPUs or whatever). It's about the entire supply chain, manufacturing capacity, and industrial ecosystem behind it.

And the dangerous assumption is that being technologically ahead today guarantees you'll stay ahead tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if China's products are "only" 80–90% as good as their non-Chinese alternatives if those alternatives eventually go out of business because they've lost the market.

Once the customers, manufacturing capacity, suppliers, and expertise have migrated elsewhere, being technically superior doesn't mean much. And rebuilding that ecosystem is vastly harder than losing it.

We've seen versions of this play out in solar panels, batteries, consumer electronics, and increasingly automobiles. There's no reason to assume GPUs or CUDA-like software stacks are somehow immune.

That's what Jensen is (and was) trying to protect. Not just Nvidia's chip sales, but an entire ecosystem of expertise, manufacturing, suppliers, and supporting industries.

Otherwise, you risk repeating what happened with telecom equipment. Everyone buys the cheaper Chinese alternatives, non-Chinese suppliers lose market share or go out of business, and Chinese technology becomes embedded in critical infrastructure everywhere.

Then, SURPRISE, everyone suddenly realizes the security and geopolitical implications, worries about espionage, and starts demanding that it all be ripped out and replaced.

Except by then, you've already hollowed out the industries that could have supplied the replacements.

> Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.

There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.