341–350 of 645 posts
Sign of a coming AI arms race? If the image generation market is getting too saturated, maybe OpenAI can sell something to the government. No one has deeper pockets.
I've always hoped that the US would restrict hardware exports under ITAR, as AI is absolutely a military weapon. I doubt, though, that they will restrict the export of the raw material for creating AI: data.
This doesn't just ban A100s. It bans those and "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100." It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3…
The US government has been setting the ceiling on performance that can be exported since the beginning of the computer industry. This is not really new but NVidia was caught by a surprise change in the limits.
Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...
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It really depends on circumstances which are always complicated. An example: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule... ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions. It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that hav…
> It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in…
Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison.
Who's got tens or hundreds of million dollars and wants to risk it evading export controls for a percentage profit?
Perhaps you don't understand, your Kazakstan bank would freeze your funds for the Americans because they didn't want to lose the ability to transact with any bank attached to the US or any bank attached to any bank attached to the US. The financial reach of US courts is long and not many people with lots of resources want to be blacklisted from ever traveling, spending money, or doing any transactions with the west.
And do you think the CIA isn't watching some random ex-soviet satellite state startup with sketchy funding sources buying enough A100s to build a supercomputer and then producing nothing with them? It's their whole job to look for interesting things, and they find them more than is imagined. If you hear about it, they're doing a bad job.
Everybody's entire phone records and so much more are part of an NSA dragnet. Do you really think large transactions for high potency computer equipment is being ignored?
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When was this done previously?
You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647... You'll probably have to dig quite a bit to find the latest rules and regulations. These regulations go back to at least the Export Control Act of 1968. Every CPU/GPU maker would have a le…
And so then Russia buys them via Armenia or Kazakstan for a 30% markup... The only way to really do this is to geo-fence disable the chips.
Depends on what you're really trying to do. Having to pay that putative 30% markup on hardware is going to be a crippling disadvantage for a China-based AI product, for example.
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When was this done previously?
There are all kinds of things subject to export restrictions: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-adminis... For example, high resolution analog to digital converters have restrictions. In the past strong cryptography even had restrictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... Even travel for US citizens was restricted. I have relatives who were in the semiconductor and aer…
I guess I don't understand what the point is? A100s are extremely powerful and generally used for ML or mining, right? But mining is already illegal in China and if the PRC wants to do military AI, I'm sure they're capable of building their own super computer without A100s. This isn't banning weaponized ai. It just seems like a minor annoyance to a couple of China's bigger companies who will quickly produce alternati…
> I'm sure they're capable of building their own super computer without A100s They are most certainly not capable of doing this without silicon imports. Chinese manufacturing is hopelessly behind for the next decade at least.
So this GPU export ban has come much too late, exactly when it no longer matters.
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When was this done previously?
There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
Although this seems to only affect the Chinese and Russian governments (as opposed to researchers), I'm generally against economic brinkmanship of this variety. It just festers resentment, and doesn't seem to achieve much: of what little I could find and scan in an hour, it appears that Nvidia GPUs strong-scale pretty well for neural networks ([1], [2]). Although this depends heavily on the NN architecture and traini…