The main reason "Nvidia chips control" doesn’t work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining Nvidia chips nor breaking laws.
DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
121–130 of 331 posts
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah? Tried Ebay Singpore as a first try, seems like there is plenty of stuff: https://www.ebay.com.sg/sch/i.html?_nkw=gpu+blackwell
Edit: just for fun (and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too, seems not-impossible: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=blackwell+gpu&_sacat=0&...
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#123I 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
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country. So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turne…
> So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop
Cool, though. Where can I buy one? :p
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#124Sanctions 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…
> many people speak negatively of the CCP
Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#125> chips that are banned in the country > The US bans the sale of these advanced semiconductors to China Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
I believe it is very much a two-way ban, depending on the specific chips [0].
[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/17/china-bans-tech-...
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#126I 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
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country. So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turne…
I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.
Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else.
You can investigate buyers who have anomalous purchase patterns for sanction violations and convict them. DEA commonly looks at narcotic purchases by legal buyers for indications they might be funneling it to illegal market and investigates. NVidia could report "Hey, we are seeing massive purchases from entities we didn't expect so you might want to look into that"
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#128I 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 tr…
> Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems,
This is just model distillation.
Anyone with the expertise to build a model from scratch (which DeepSeek certainly can) can do this in a careful manner.
> but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators.
Bingo.
I have no problem with pirates pirating other pirates.
Screw OpenAI and Anthropic closed source models built from public data. The law should be that weights trained from non-owned sources should be public domain, or that any copyright holder can sue them and demand model takedown.
Google and Meta are probably the only two AI companies that have a right to license massive amounts of training data from social media and user file uploads given that their ToSes grant them these rights. But even Meta is pirating stuff.
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic continue pirating training data and keeping the results closed, China's open source strategy will win out in the end. It erodes the crust of value that is carefully guarded by the American giants. Everyone else will be integrating open models and hacking them apart, splicing them in new ways.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down." acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way
If I don't make the world worse then someone else will is such a depressing state of affairs. If that's the mentality, then what's worth fighting over? We should give up because we don't even deserve the rewards.
we shouldn't give up securing resources for ourselves, our loved ones, and our nations
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#130I 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 tr…
Singapore is where it happens.