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USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

bluewin.ch

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Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#81
post #8
post #2

Do the Swiss want to be considered someone's ally or neutral?

Being from Denmark I have always been puzzled by how US/UK media portray us as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of MENA immigration than our neighbors. Meanwhile Switzerland has been doing what almost amounts to white-only immigration to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from Albanaia and Serbia. Neutrality is good for PR.

The US media doesn't portray Denmark this way. The only European countries whose immigration policies I've even heard of are Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and even those were only a couple of times (e.g. I vaguely remember something about Brexit).

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#82
post #18
post #11

This restriction makes no sense. The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips". China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US. Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming…

[deleted]

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#84
post #4

> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax. Corporations are the legal structure that enables, creates and sustains modern life. Taxes reduce the amount of money that will be pushed through that structure. There are people who's entire worldly possessions were made by companies. It is a little more qualitative, but the people with the most and best corporatio…

> It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work This is exactly how it works in many European countries. By law, you can transfer a few vacation days to the next year (or have them paid out in some scenarios) but most of the time you’ll be strongly encouraged to simply use them all.

Which is dumb as hell. I didn't want to take more than 15 vacation days in 2024 and wanted to take much more/longer in 2025. Not possible because fucking eu politicians know what is better for me. Reasons like this are why EU is on a free fall.

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#85
post #4

> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax. Corporations are the legal structure that enables, creates and sustains modern life. Taxes reduce the amount of money that will be pushed through that structure. There are people who's entire worldly possessions were made by companies. It is a little more qualitative, but the people with the most and best corporatio…

Corporations aren't the whole deal. You need governments too. Without governments COVID kills a billion people not a few million. Also without governments you don't have the structure to have corporations. You would have effectively flotillas of pirate ships shooting at each other, not the modern economy.

Covid kills a billion people without government?

Covid response is still one of yhe dumbest most cruel over reactions done in modern time. And the response and its after effect ( including the increase in vax mistrust and inflation ) probably killed and will continue to kill more than the virus ever would.

Polio or smallpox response is a much better description for government necessity.

Covid response is why the extreme libertans are gaining so much support.

Without government response we would still have smallpox and our children would still face paralyzation by polio. Those are much bettet examples of how critical good healthcare and vaccines are and they are provided via governments.

All covid response has done is ruin trust and split us up. O credits to any government exeot Sweden. 1 country on the whole planet kept reasonably sane.

The governmental over reach nutcracker covid response, backed by hysterical reddit, twitter and facebook users, has brought the danger of preventable lethal diseases back on the table.

I have never seen so much mistrust in authorities, healthcare and safety information since the utterly incompetent c19 response and media coverage.

I still cant get over how MAGA rallies killed people but BLM rallies a week later somehow did not.

  I even saw an article in Nature defending BLM rallies.   



If democracy ultimetly fails Id day the covid response was the first step its demise .

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#86
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have gotten the sentiment at all. How did you get from what I wrote to seeing taxes as a form of punishment?

> It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on Sounds like you think that’s a bad thing (aka punishment). By the way, the former is called “holidays” and is regulated by law in the majority of the world, the US is the odd one out. Even China has a 11-day minimum vacation policy.

Ah, fair enough. If you read the entire paragraph you will note that that was as out of stupidity and ignorance of the damages, not as a punishment. Nobody is trying to punish companies. I mean, case in point. Do you think holidays are an attempt to punish people? Obviously not.

And nobody forces people to take holidays. There are people who work two jobs, work on weekends, work over Christmas and founders that work 30 day months. All legal.

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(This is not a comment on what you said but something for the whole thread) May I kindly ask that we do not say "white" and "non-white" as if it has a global definition? I think all people here mean "European" when they say "white". There are many Europeans with dark skin color and being "white" is very context dependent, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Turks I mean I, as someone non-European althoug…

What would be really considerate, is not bucketing people by the color of their skin at all. Seems like a radical call these days…

I fully agree, I just wanted to keep it on a single topic.

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#88
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article makes it seem like the Swiss have been somehow singled out, but the same restriction applies to a number of countries, many of which are firmly US allies.

It applies to everyone except 18 countries. Gonna post them here as many articles mention "18 key alies" without naming all of them: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

I'm stunned they put Korea on the list, given this is dressed up as an anti-China measure, and Korean leaderships flipflops between anti-China and pro-China every ~4 years when the opposition replaces the government. There's also lots of cases of e.g. Korean Samsung employees happily moving to Chinese companies to leak IP for a boatload of cash.

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#89
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain to me why AI chips don't matters anymore because of DeepSeek? I thought it was just a better model, but perhaps I didn't get it?

Deepseek used older generation chips and developed a model that takes significantly less compute. Making having access to tons of the latest nvidia hardware unnecessary.

Being forced to live with more HW restrictions usually results in more reliance on SW creativity and better optimizations instead of lazy developers bloating SW to fill all available resources.

Just like how it's no surprise that websites developed where everyone has the latest and grates fully loaded M silicon MacBooks also sufferer from horrible lack of optimizations because "it works on my machine" while being a stuttery mess everywhere else.

Re: USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

#90

This is odd, ETH Zurich is one of the top ML research labs in the world. They routinely work with Disney! Are they going to block Germany and Max Planck Institute as well? (who commonly work with ETH Zurich) https://studios.disneyresearch.com/researchlab/disney-resear... https://www.youtube.com/disneyresearchhub

Let's be realistic EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either, reality is more complex then a dump black and white world few a lot of fictional stories love to have).

Meta, OpenAI and similar have made it through their action very clear that they:

- Want to abuse legislation to make sure no future competition can rise to rival them (When it comes to foundational models, close to all AI startups use fundational models from tech startups even if they speak of "having their own model" (which nearly always is just a minimal domain adaption of a foundation model from a US tech giant). OpenAI was very well open okay, or lets better say visible, about that

- Are not okay and will penalize any country with legislation which states you can't just train on copyrighted content without getting a license which allows training (i.e. it's not fair use, which it theoretically shouldn't be either in the US as it's in general trying to replace the people of which content they train on). E.g. various "open source" models from Meta aren't available in the EU and that was before export restrictions.

- Both have no access to influence US government decisions, so removing access from a Uni or even Country which tries to create their own foundation models. Which much less legal copyright issues. Is just kind of the natural consequence of giving tech giants which try to make sure they stay quasi monopolies to much governmental influence.

So I think if the US wouldn't be worried of EU then teaming up with China for ML compute ships the EU might already have been on the "reduced access" list. Or at least some key EU states which have understood how important it is to have a non US foundational model.

Through also to be fair Swiss "neutrality" is complex, and involves having decent political and trade relationships which any super power as far as relevant for them and viable (e.g. not really Russia anymore). Which includes China. This didn't prevent them to criticize China e.g. about Honkong but they are in discussions to improve trade agreements between them and China since last year (see Wikipedia).

So my guess is the main reason is to put pressure on Swiss wrt. future "improvements" of trade agreements with China.

But I think the points listed first still are something the EU has to highly worry about and they might have very well played a secondary role for this decision. You know like testing out the waters how exuding alleys from free chip access will be treated by other alleys.

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