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DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#111

Post by dialectical »

xadhominemx wrote: post #107
Shin-- wrote: post #10

Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.

China has promised to wage war and forcibly subjugate Taiwan, a democratic ally and critical trade partner. If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.

>If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.

Total historical illiteracy. if only there was an island nation immediately southeast of the US we could look to for information on how America treats countries that try the whole "back off" thing

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#112

Post by dlisboa »

pembrook wrote: post #46
Shin-- wrote: post #10

Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.

I agree that a fair playing field for everyone would be the ideal state. But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either. The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.

The US sanctions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. I thought that was quite obvious historically and specially now. They've imposed tariffs on literally every country on the planet.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#114

Post by mcdow »

codedokode wrote: post #14

Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything. Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example,…

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#115

Post by whimsicalism »

embedding-shape wrote: post #24
mongrelion wrote: post #6

I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.

I think you are overestimating the ease of getting hopper/blackwell from alibaba or ebay.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#116

Post by int32_64 »

sneak wrote: post #83
int32_64 wrote: post #58

What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand. I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.

You can’t really spend $500k on AWS without doing some form of identity disclosure.

That's fair, I'm also not accessing these resources from Russia or North Korea so I imagine there's different precautions for different countries.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#117

Post by whimsicalism »

mcdow wrote: post #114
codedokode wrote: post #14

Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything. Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example,…

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many p…

A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident.

If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#118

Post by hinkley »

Hmm. I’ve been out of the loop too long. When did China start getting munitions laws thrown at it? When I cared to know, Boeing could sell to everyone except NK, Syria, Iran, and two others I’m now blanking on. It didn’t matter we were using cryptography that couldn’t ship there because it was illegal for them to have our hardware in the first place.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#119

Post by nostrademons »

I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.

I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.

Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

#120

Post by hinkley »

mongrelion wrote: post #6

I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

Where does nvidia manufacture those chips?
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