as the post mentions, the models could have been trained on 1. GPUs within China or 2. GPUs outside China for example datacenters in Singapore.

The 2nd option is perfectly legal and allowed by US government.

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cowlevel 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The 1st option is also perfectly legal and allowed by the US government. Only the export of GPUs is illegal, and only sometimes.

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dcrazy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Is the U.S. government OK with this if the money to buy those GPUs and run inference on them comes from Chinese companies?

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seanmcdirmid a day ago | parent [-]

yes. The USA hasn't force an embargo on China to other countries (e.g. by threatening to cut off Swift access). We aren't technically at war either, so its highly unlikely that the US would go that far.

What is surprising, I guess, is that the US allows GPUs to be exported at all to most countries. Since...as long as they are exported to a country that is friendly to china (which is basically most countries on the planet), China has access to GPUs on which to train with, making GPU purchasing restrictions mainly symbolic.

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HDThoreaun a day ago | parent [-]

They dont need to threaten other countries, they can just pass a law saying that anyone anywhere in the world selling or renting gpus to chinese companies is committing a crime. Then they can sanction any company that does it anyway and that makes it a crime for any american company to sell gpus to that company. There have already been quite a few criminal cases around the export ban.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That would be unenforceable though knowing American arrogance they would definitely try. It’s like China trying to stop their rare earths from going to American uses by requiring all companies that import them to track their usage.
	▲	LtWorf 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then china stops selling goods to USA for a couple of weeks until they realise there's more in life than GPUs.