Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

japantimes.co.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 645 posts

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#141

Post by wslh »

vslira wrote: post #36
solid_fuel wrote: post #24

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.

They learn really fast. I will not take the past as a prediction of the future.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#142

Post by oytis »

solid_fuel wrote: post #24

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

Is AMD abandoning consumer market though? They seem to be much less in demand by AI industry.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#143

Post by notepad0x90 »

Good for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).

Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.

I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#144

Post by renewiltord »

saubeidl wrote: post #115
renewiltord wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML develops and ships their machines at the pleasure of Uncle Sam because the USA licensed them the tech and remains a crucial part of the supply chain intentionally. It's not a lever. It's a partnership that is mutually beneficial and neither side can really ruin the other without damaging themselves.

If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.

ASML will instantly stall at that point. The EUV light sources are built in the US under US export control regulation. No EUV light source means no ASML EUV machine. I get that some European chest-beating sounds good because there's not very much tech in Europe, but this is an intentional transnational supply chain. It's no accident that the US chose ASML to develop this tech rather than Canon or Nikon. Close ally deep within the US military shield from nearby air bases.

The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.

I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#145

Post by selectodude »

m4rtink wrote: post #127
wincy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.

But will you still be able to afford using it once you have to pay the real price ? Once the venture capital dries up and the dumping stops ?

I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs.

If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#146

Post by crote »

saubeidl wrote: post #113
XorNot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the average paranoid person who is wasting their life on it, sure But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world. Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and…

What if my high level political and military leadership are the threat scenario? Remember Snowden.

You're screwed. An individual is completely powerless against the combined might of the entire country they live in. Nothing you touch and nobody you talk to can be trusted.

But realistically, they'll just bring out the wrench[0].

[0]: https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#147

Post by decafninja »

mistercheph wrote: post #123
decafninja wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too. While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the w…

Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies...…

But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.

I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.

Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.

But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#148

Post by warkdarrior »

jokoon wrote: post #109
georgeburdell wrote: post #13

The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.

They were under NDA, probably But the science was probably not I don't think this is classified technology, although asml would like it if they were punished. And even if it's patented, China has been stealing everything with little consequence

Patent system is an abomination anyway.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#149

Post by tsunamifury »

exceptione wrote: post #131
roenxi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NASDAQ line go up model is why the AI boom is happening and a major factor in why it is Western companies leading the charge. The more bigger issue is that the west refused to sell chips to China so they had to figure out how to make their own. And margin compression is what free markets do. That is one of the big motivators to putting free markets everywhere, the freer the market the more compressed the margins…

> There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, The problem is not regulation, it is the lack of it: anti-monopolist practices and deregulation of the finance industry has led us to insane bubbles, dead markets and extreme wealth concentration. Any competition gets bought, crushed, or undercut via bankrolling. This is what you get when the 0.0001% gets to pull…

I think you have no idea how a command economy works. Haha.

It’s literally state sponsored monopolies.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#150

Post by maxglute »

spwa4 wrote: post #135
maxglute wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets suppose to compress margins, perfect market theoretically drive profits down to zero (aka involution). But you compress margin and you lose current western semi business model that is functionally monopoly suppliers/producers who can sustain 50%+ margins to keep their monopoly. Shed those margins down to 20% because competitor enters market, harder to fund R&D to keep lead, it's still "enough" to be prof…

Free markets? No, competition does that. Competition requires free markets but free markets don't guarantee competition.

I poorly paraphrased profits converge to zero under perfect competitive market. Yes real world not perfect competitive markets. Oligor/duo/monopolies form, sometimes subsidies other shenanigans pick winner(s), winners extract huge margins/rents to build moats lock out new competition. Sometimes they collude / settle on business model with higher margins, i.e. 10-20% being normal/commodity, 50% for software and semi is top end of luxury goods. New state backed competitor enters and decides they can live on 10% margin, and then incumbants business model falls apart unless state also steps in to match.

E: And state can, but I don't know if state generally willing/able to backstop companies to 50% margin long term. I can't think of any, maybe some major state oil. Nvidia/TSMC with $$$ margins getting some CHIPs injection really meant for bailing out broke ass Intel was already anomalous, and it was basically to bribe them to onshore production.

Post reply on HN