Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests. Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of…
Models like Llama 3 are trained on sixteen thousand GPUs, OpenAI probably 25k-100k GPUs. This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve.
If you follow the news, several people (bankers) will trade with Iran despite the repercussions (jail) of doing so. There is a premium but at the right price someone will execute.