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From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

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Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#21

Post by enraged_camel »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #12

Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung a…

>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.

This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years).

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#22

Post by kccqzy »

The article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#23

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

enraged_camel wrote: post #21
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #12

Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung a…

>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That…

Both things can be true simultaneously - China would no doubt prefer to have access to things like NVIDIA chips and ASML EUV machines, but at the same time having to do without they are accelerating their independence from US-controlled supply chain.

It's hard to say that any US AI companies have benefited from these sanctions (or that this was the goal). Who has benefited, and how? US companies are still having to compete with them, with no restriction on Chinese AI being used in the US (e.g. GLM available via Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, etc). NVIDIA is losing sales and CUDA lock-in. Other supply chain vendors losing sales too.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#24

Post by themgt »

enraged_camel wrote: post #21
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #12

Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung a…

>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That…

This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage?

I mean, I remember listening to the Biden people back in 2022 talking how they were going to cripple China's semis and therefore AI industry and keep them 5+ years behind the curve as Team America accelerates ahead. That was the pitch.

You've now got Huawei Ascend 950, GLM-5.2 at Opus 4.8 levels, China dominating OSS models, and Z.ai saying they'll have a Fable-level model by EOY. I would say the export controls have utterly, utterly failed.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/understanding-biden-administra...

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#25

Post by inigyou »

Sanzig wrote: post #14
zerobees wrote: post #5

It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy…

Agreed that you can export-control the closed source models pretty well (although I think the administration is gravely underestimating the long-term damage that will do to the US economy). The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going…

Isn't GLM5.2 already Mythos class?

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#26

Post by inigyou »

epolanski wrote: post #8
zerobees wrote: post #5

It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy…

There's no way US can keep that export control as it is for the frontier models in the long term. This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run. Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US. Let alone the fact that these res…

When has the USA ever shied away from destroying its own financial markets?

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#27

Post by inigyou »

moffkalast wrote: post #11
braiamp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NoScript is a layer that makes my experience on the internet so much better.

How do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.

You either whitelist them or stop using them. Whitelist is by script domain, so the ads usually still don't load. Until you have to whitelist *.cloudfront.net

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#28

Post by stdgy »

enraged_camel wrote: post #21
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #12

Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung a…

>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That…

I think the question we need to be asking, in order to measure success, is whether export controls on China have encouraged China to invest more money than they would have otherwise invested in these technologies and whether those investments will materially change China's long term trajectory in relation to the United States.

I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation.

And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack.

I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#29

Post by adrian_b »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #15
zerobees wrote: post #5

It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy…

> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own weren't chinese labs training on US Ai outputs? a looot of ai power is in correct data to train for - that's pretty much like inviting workers to your factories, they won't take machines with them, but will see and consume all the processes

I doubt that it has ever been possible to obtain enough output tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic to be useful for training other LLMs.

In any case, had that been possible in the beginning, it stopped being possible long ago, because any suspicious accounts would be banned and the cost would be prohibitive even if they were not banned.

On the other hand, anyone can train new LLMs using the open weights Chinese LLMs, or the much fewer open weights LLMs with other origins, like the NVIDIA LLMs.

So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.

Re: From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

#30

Post by zerobees »

vb-8448 wrote: post #17
zerobees wrote: post #5

It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy…

> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company ... So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues Do you think AWS or Microsoft would be so dominant in cloud services and office productivity if the previous administrations had banned them for non-us firms? In my opinion no, and all across the world we would be using non-us tech. Precisely because it's a service, the US have the interest mak…

OK, but that's tangential to what the article is about. The article says "export controls can't work", not "export controls are not in our best interest".
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