Chinese companies such as Alibaba make Qwen and other popular open source AI models. This new rule will have a big impact on that community. Case in point: Alibaba rents advanced Nvidia chips from Megaspeed’s data centers located in Singapore and Malaysia. Megaspeed is the company ran by Huang’s spy mistress.
Opsec to kill open ai models and make you pay for closed ones!
Steal content from the internet, push “free” AI on your devices, start small subscription for using it, kill the competition and free models… wanna guess what happens next?
anthropoic has being pushing for that.
I don’t see how this is going to work for the US (tech giants). The Asian countries where these data centers are located aren’t going to enforce such a rule. They’re far more dependent on China than on the US, and even if they do agree, they’ll allow another loophole (for example, access from a different country that Alibaba and friends use as a proxy). So the existing compute capacity isn’t going to disappear and Alibaba and friends will keep using it to build new models released for free for at least a few more years. If they need new capacity and can’t get their hands on Nvidia chips, they’ll just start doing what Chairman Xi has been telling them to do all along - use domestic chips, which, from what I read, are already starting to work, even if they’re not as efficient as Nvidia’s. And efficiency isn’t a problem - China has a ton of green energy and 21st-century energy infrastructure. So I don’t see how the US can stop, or even meaningfully slow down, the development of Chinese models.
I think they’re going to run into hard limits in the current American political-economic model that they can’t get around. (The market model where everyone optimizes for maximum margin and doesn’t cooperate with other parts of the economy through the state.) The Chinese model runs on much lower margins and if they can’t stop it physically by limiting resources, the only way to compete would be to drop the margins, and that would cause a massive economic reorg of the US, probably political too.
Obviously the Chinese are going to evade the new rules or find people willing to look the other way. Unless US finds a way to track every data center traffic using advanced Nvidia chips. What this does is it’ll bottle neck the Chinese AI development using Nvidia chips. slows them down so that US can keep the lead (or slow down Chinese lead in some areas).
Aren’t Nvidia’s chips made in China anyway? Couldn’t they just take the specs from the Nvidia factories and start their own factory and start making their own versions? What would happen in practicality if they did that? Like, I get that it’s technically “corporate espionage” but China has been doing that for decades anyway. What would be the difference? Nvidia would get mad at them? It’s not like Nvidia has a choice to move production out of china, right?I’m uniformed. Apparently, Nvidia’s chips are made in Taiwan primarily: https://geekbitz.com/where-are-nvidia-chips-made/
Yup. The chips are made in Taiwan at present. The hardware containing those chips is often made in China.
China used to make their high end chips in Taiwan as well like some of Huawei’s mobile SoC, until Biden pressed Taiwan to cut them off. Now they produce domestically and their domestic high-end chip manufacturing hasn’t caught up to Taiwan’s yet.
Got it. Thanks!
