HN

Comments (51)

• Menu

  flowerlad
  Chinese AI companies are free to use any Nvidia GPU they want as long as the GPU is not physically located within China. It is entirely consistent with US export controls for Chinese AI companies to remotely use GPUs located in Singapore or Malaysia.“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.” See [1].[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/beyond-the-spy-sc...
• Menu

  x313
  The author of this piece is a SWE-turned-influencer "China hawk" from OpenAI (i.e. the primary advocate of export bans along with Anthropic), and this isn't an academic paper despite the theming.I have no idea whether this is legit or not (there's no link to any code), I'm mentioning this because all the comments here are assuming truth without verifying the contents.
• Menu

  martinwright
  I definitely care about this much less than it seems I'm supposed to.I think the frontier models are definitely in a healthy dynamic where it seems the near-but-not-quite performance of open-weight models are what is pushing the most innovation and price competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and co
• int32_64
  I have run some large open models on neoclouds and the KYC has been minimal, even if the USG stops all GPU exports it will be extremely difficult to crack down on Chinese renting GPUs on Western servers.There will be a black market of renting IDs to KYC and gain access to the chips, and then the hosts will monitor their servers for what is being trained, it will be a cat and mouse game.We are headed for an increasingly unfree computation landscape and the politicians are going to make demands that will be hard to deliver.
• Menu

  basiccalendar74
  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.
• Menu

  cadamsdotcom
  What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose?Black & grey market devices marked up many times cost buyers heavily, while still suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty.If nvidia selling to China tolerated for the realpolitik and gets undone by incoming powers to create an appearance of change, is it really the right thing to do? Is it the smart thing to do?It's an interesting thought experiment, though, we will probably never know.
• Menu

  saidnooneever
  i dont know what is expected of export controls... they are never effective. they also find western chips in iranian drones etc. there is a huge gray area of resellers who resel to resellers etc. its pretty much uncontrollable....
• Menu

  yumraj
  Not doubting that they have access to these.But, could the fingerprints be due to distillation from Blackwell trained models rather than training?
• sam0x17
  Just further proof that export controls rarely restrict the ones they are designed to restrict
• Menu

  GenerWork
  It's insane how many articles have dropped in the past 24 hours that all have a similar tone. At this point it's hard to see this as anything other than a broad coordination from someone who wants to destroy Jensen/Nvidia.
• Alien1Being
  Not too many years before the headline reads"Western AI models using GPUs export controlled by China"The decline of the USA and the West has been precipitous.
• glennfiedler
  Ladies and gentlemen, we are now officially in Huang-gate.
• nullc
  Cute trick but it's not exactly a secret, e.g. deepseek recently published their own inference engine -- and it only has kernels for SM100 (blackwell) and Huawei Ascend 950, and all its published performance results using blackwell.And these were completely openly disclosed as headline properties of the software: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/tree/main/#performa...No one found it remarkable a couple weeks ago, ... but now the fact that DS is using blackwell is apparently some super secret requiring clever RNG init stats???
• Menu

  Cameri
  So export controls are more like export friction
• flakiness
  Such a great domain name by the way.
• elonfboy
  WAIT! Are you saying the giant plagiarism machine was built with…stolen IP?!?!
• Menu

  netvarun
  @dang curious, is this post getting heavily downvoted or flagged?I get that the geopolitical angle is sensitive, especially with the backdrop of today's big news - but I thought this was a really well-researched technical deep dive, right up HN's alley. (TIL: you could fingerprint gpu hardware just from an llm weights!)
• brcmthrowaway
  Are (ex-)OpenAI/Anthropic employees leading the charge here to protect their portfolios?
• ftchd
  Well, d'uh...
• apishare_api
  [flagged]
• exabrial
  I guarantee you this isn't an "accident". Whatever is being sent over there is loaded with its own special spyware lol
• Menu

  fibonacci112358
  [flagged]