Export controls now a key factor in AI chip development – adding risk for the whole industry Few of us would have imagined that national security would play such a key role in AI hardware, even dictating its development, but here we are – in a new era of export controls. Trade restrictions on advanced AI chips are reshaping the entire semiconductor industry in unprecedented ways. Where previously the design and …
A good summary of the situation Abhishek.
Nothing is going to change the flow of high end LLM crunchers to China or anywhere else prepared to pay for them. Even hare brained schemes like putting a GPS tracker in the silicon.
All these export controls have achieved so far is to accelerate the speed at which China is developing its own fabrication capabilities and make a lot of smugglers and middle men very rich indeed. That anyone could describe these consequences as "unforseen" is clearly indicative of them not having thought about things in the first place - or maybe some more "under the table" agreements...
The other risk here is that export controls push China closer to taking over Taiwan, and that could be a planet ending problem.
If anyone wants to see exactly how banned graphics cards and LLM accelerators still flow to China in quantity and will most likely continue to, see the excellent documentary that Steve at Gamers Nexus produced:
THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments
You know it's a good video when you learn that Bloomberg immediately moved with a copyright strike against it shortly after it was first released. (Which they decided not to follow on with after knocking the video off line for its first ten days.)
You know when I was a kid, we didn't have all these fancy chip things, it wasn't even possible in those days, but we had vacuum tubes in our radios and our phonographs and our TVs. And they were some very fine vacuum tubes, you know, you could just unplug one from your radio or your TV or your toaster, or whatever you had that didn't seem to be working and take it to some store, the drug store, back in the days before there were so many dangerous drugs around, like all these vaccines, or Tylenol, or all the horrible drugs that are killing the babies now, it's terrible, the drugs they pump into little babies, you know, I watched a woman with a baby, and she took it to the hospital for a shot, and they put so much liquid into that little baby, you could see its head swelling, it was horrible, so horrible, but the doctor, she didn't notice, it's horrible, women shouldn't be doctors, they're too delicate to be round the blood, and the body parts, but anyway her eyes just aren't as good as mine, I've got the best eyesight of any President there's ever been, they all said so at the clinic, they said "Sir, Mr President, sir, you have the best eyesight of anyone, they're going to have to invent a new measuring scale just to fit you in, did you know that? Or you could test your radio tubes at the hardware store, back in the days when there were hardware stores, or department stores, did you know they used to have department stores in the cities that were the size of a small village, they sold absolutely anything, and I mean anything, if you know what I mean, and all the salespeople were always polite and immaculately dressed? Well, you would pull the tube out of your radio and take it somewhere like that, and they'd have a machine there in the store that would tell you if the tube was any good or not, and the very fine people in the store would sell you a nice shiny new one. And you could take that new tube home and put it in your radio and it would play again and sound better than it ever sounded, or if it wasn't a radio, say it was a television, you'd get a fine picture again, with bolder colours, sometimes even made the screen bigger, I don't know how they do that, but they did, and it was magic, this machine they had in the store, and you could put your foot in it and see on the screen, it could see right through your shoes and your socks, a picture of your bones in your foot, imagine that, right there on this magical machine they had in the store that tests the tubes and gets your radio playing loud enough again, or makes your toast pop up higher, people took a real pride in their jobs in those days. It's tragic how there's just no pride a job well done anymore. And I remember the people in the vacuum tube factory in my town, and there was a huge protest, they were trying to shut the factory down, and I remember saying to all the marchers, look, I get your concerns that all the air they have to suck out the tubes to put the vacuum in them, it's very dangerous, air, specially clean air, but I said, look, these vacuum tubes, they're what makes all the magic happen in your home, your TV set, your radio, your hot water heater, now no-one wants to turn on the faucet in the bathroom and the water comes out cold, that could really ruin your day! And never mind all the other good stuff that had the vacuum tubes in it. But I told them, I have an idea, and it's a real good idea, what we do is, this nasty air, with all the dangerous oxygen in it, you know oxygen causes fires and makes metal go rusty, all we have to do is draw it up a tall enough chimney, and the factory managers were stunned, because they'd never heard an idea so good, it was the first time they ever heard of directing waste air up a chimney, and they said they were going to hang my picture up in the boardroom. But I honestly never had a radio that sounded half as good as those old tube sets. And the kids, they're misbehaving, well, maybe that's something to do with the fact that they never heard a proper radio? But I found out, you can actually make computers with vacuum tubes! Some of the first computers were made out of vacuum tubes, they were huge things, real impressive, you know the computer used to fill up a whole room! And the mouse must have been the size of a Japanese car! And I think we should go back and make our own vacuum tube computers again, we could make them all the biggest, the most impressive computers, all vacuum tubes and not a single chip anywhere in sight, wouldn't that be beautiful? Big, beautiful computers, with none of those horrible chips inside them, you know the chips, they're real bad for you? And we could put my picture on the tubes. And a beautiful vacuum tube testing machine in every single retail store, where you could test the tubes from your radio, or your TV set, or your coffee maker, and see the bones in your feet even through your shoes while you're testing the tubes, and you'd get the best sound on your radio, and the boldest, brightest picture on your TV, and the best tasting coffee, and everything, all thanks to the magic of vacuum tubes!
