The method seems sound and the findings correct. But I think many are missing that (as the research itself says) this doesn't prove any illegal behavior. It's perfectly legal for Chinese companies to train models on GPUs that they rent outside of China. It's also legal for companies to buy GPUs and install them in Malaysia with the intention of renting them to Chinese companies.

There isn't even an allegation that the Chinese companies lied about this. They simply didn't disclose which chips were used. In all cases where they did disclose the training chips, this research found the disclosures to be accurate.

The small print in TFA states the many limitations of their method, i.e. that it actually provides no evidence about which GPUs were really used for training, and much less about who was their owner and where they were located.

The method just strongly suggests that the initial values of the weights, before starting training, were generated with the NVIDIA cuRAND library on a Blackwell GPU (or on an AMD GPU, where the NVIDIA library is emulated for compatibility).

The training might have been done with thousands of GPUs of other types. It is plausible that the GPUs used for training or at least a part of them may have been of the same type with the one used for initializing the model, but it is not proven in any way.

A scenario that matches what is reported in the article, but in which there is only a single Blackwell GPU involved, is if the LLM was intialized on the workstation of some lead developer, who had the privilege to use the best GPU they had, and then it was transferred to a server cluster for training, where other kinds of GPUs were used.

Now that this has been published, it would be very simple in the future for any Chinese AI company to avoid this "fingerprinting", by just using a different PRNG, instead of cuRAND.

Does 'legal' an 'illegal' apply here? Surely, the USA legal system only apply in the USA?