At first I thought this was the 48GB card that had been rumored for a while, but it turns out it's just a sanctions-compliant RTX 6000 Ada for export to China.
> "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day."
So basically she's saying "if you do exactly as much as the rules allow, I'll change the rules to not allow that". That sounds like the general sort of thing that tends to end up with whichever government agency did that being on the losing end of a lawsuit?
Well what she is saying is if you intentionally attempt to circumvent the intent of the regulation they will adjust the regulation to continue to bring about the intent. An awful lot of law and regulation isn’t cut and dry like a computer program but is intent driven. Sounds like Nvidia understood the intent but is trying to knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.
I thought the performance thresholds they put in the law were supposed to express just that intent (i.e sell only second rate GPUs to China). If the real intent was to stop all GPU sales to China, why doesn't the law say so?
> knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.
In the eyes of the court, there's no "minimally compliant". If they are compliant, they are compliant.
If the agency keeps moving the goalposts to "clarify" intent because it was not sufficiently clear initially, that's on them, but it's also not a failing of Nvidia.
> In the eyes of the court, there's no "minimally compliant". If they are compliant, they are compliant.
Right, so if there is a new export ban then nvidia will be in violation and the agency just clarified that it will create such a ban if nvidia makes it necessary.
The cost of trying to play cat and mouse would be on nvidia loosing lots of R&D time and money and not the agency that only has to copy paste the product details into what is probably a preexisting form.
I’d also note a lot of regulation is not enforced at court, but by the regulator. They get to decide. You can appeal it to a court, but courts also grant the regulators pretty good latitude to interpret behavior as willful non compliance even when it’s done literally compliant but to the extent it enables and facilitates the specific outcome the regulation is intended to prevent. Technologists always have a hard time accepting the idea laws and regulations aren’t absolute or formulaic. Judgement and common sense can also be used and often is in situations where there is an intentional evasiveness.
"We put a speed bump at the dangerous crossing to prevent accidents, but they made a car that has more suspension so that they can still cross it at almost the same speed."
The federal government foreign policy is giving full bright scholarships to the best of the best Chinese students so that they get PhDs fully paid at the best US tech universities. And then kicking them out for loosing a lottery 3 times and sending them back to China so that they have no choice but working in products and companies that directly compete to the US.
Selling or not selling tech to China is the least of the US problems.
it's weird because the business purpose already streamlines products for capitalism and not some hard limit on resources and regulations try to do the same but with different inputs but the same artificial boundaries.
> She said traditionally Commerce drew a "cutline" and companies like Nvidia would create a new chip "just below" that line ... "That's not productive," Raimondo said
That seems ridiculous at first glance? I'm assuming a "cutline" here is what the maximum performance is allowed to be, and asking companies to add in a fuzzy "extra" bit there, instead of building right to the line is bizarre?
They want them to self-enforce the administrations decision to not enable Chinese AI work. I don’t think they want them to be taking the Chinese professional market into account at all, thus the snarky statement.
This kind of lawmaking seems obvious insane to logical programmer types, but it happens regularly in government. They don't have to implement anything in code, right?
Another example is anti-money laundering laws. They drew a cutline at $10k cash per deposit, so of course criminals started depositing $9,999 at a time. The legislative answer was to say that avoiding the $10k limit is a new crime called "structuring". So what's the actual limit then? There isn't one, you just have to not seem too suspicious. Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime.
The other fun one is the suspicious activity reports banks are required to file if a customer does something, er, suspicious. What that means isn't defined anywhere. But eventually the regulators advised that knowing SARs exist is itself suspicious, so merely asking if the bank has filed a SAR on you can trigger the filing of a SAR on you.
This is already inevitable. China is on a mad rush to gain technological independence. They've already succeeded with in most industries and semiconductors and aviation are two of a small amount that remain temporarily out of China's grasp.
Anything that senator does won't change the trendline of the inevitable.
They are already succeeding, it's a matter of time.
They can already build functional smartphones without relying on Taiwan at all. It's not a huge technology leap from a smartphone CPU to a consumer GPU. Design and engineering leap, sure but nothing a dozen PhDs can't solve in a few years.
Centrally planned economies don't suffer too badly in Strategic Industries, especially not when trying to catch up to the free countries, as long as there's at least some level of capitalism involved. The goals are very clear and they can steal tech quite easily, so the lack of incentives to take risks and innovate don't matter. The USSR went from agricultural backwater to nuclear power with its own space station quite fast, largely by stealing tech using ideological true believers.
But of course things started to fall apart from there. As the true nature of the USSR became clear to westerners, ideologically motivated spies started to dry up and the KGB was forced to pay large bribes to get information. They focused on military info, and so their economy started to fall behind in other areas. By the end of the 1980s the gap in quality of life became so huge that Yeltsin famously put his head in his hands and cried after visiting an American supermarket.
China is somewhat centrally planned but more capitalist than the USSR was, and doesn't suffer so badly from the underproduction of consumer goods. Some people claim China is really just a capitalist dictatorship that cosplays as communist by this point, which isn't quite right; it's somewhere in the middle.
But the idea that they won't be able to catch up in advanced tech is just wrong. There are tons of patriotic Chinese people with access to high tech firms in the USA and these days you don't even need them, it's sufficient to just hack networks and steal documents in bulk. Sooner or later they will be the only country in the world that's technologically fully self sufficient. It will just have involved making enemies of everyone else.
There are two areas where they could really start to suffer after that:
1. Erratic decision making from the top that screw things up. Already a big problem for them.
2. If the west is able to properly tighten up corporate opsec and the flow of stealable ideas dries up.
Of course, China has lots of smart people who could come up with great ideas and firms if allowed, the prevalence of hard working Chinese in western companies shows that. But that involves taking risks in the expectation of reward. Look at what happened to Jack Ma. China doesn't reward success, it punishes it. The Great Firewall also makes everything way harder for them.
>U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications."
>"What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added.
>Raimondo said she spoke a week ago to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and he was "crystal clear. We don't want to break the rules. Tell us the rules, we'll work with you."
In plain English, that means Nvidia can, will, and should sell products to China below the arbitrary line the US and China have set for the kabuki theater.
Anyone who expects these sanctions to actually damage Chinese ambitions or progress or expects the US to win this cold war are either ignorant or delusional. China won this conflict before it even began.
Sad China mythos propaganda. They haven't won much, and are quickly following suit of other past economies like Japan. Conversion from pure industrialization to advanced economy is hard and the slow down is practically inevitable, especially when China started trying to push antiAmerican geopolitical aspirations againsts their neighbors in the China Sea.
Th only winner here is Mexico who looks to be the onshore of choice out of China supply chains.
I find it fascinating that the US government is being openly hostile like that. Surely they just realize that this will be held against the US for a long time?
> Surely they just realize that this will be held against the US for a long time?
Who can? There are plenty of things people around the world hold against the US. It's not like anyone can actually do something about it and that's all that really matters.
> It's not like anyone can actually do something about it and that's all that really matters.
In the long term they can, by using the US dollar less and less. Which is already happening. One day the US government will wake up unable to print money to pay for things from other countries, and the economy will collapse.
Many of these countries though, finance theirs debts and pay them back in USD, simply because the USD is still the de facto currency in global financial markets.
I believe that's an entirely different issue, tbh. There is no grand strategy or conspiracy behind dedollarization, just a path of least resistance for free and open trade.
I don't like assuming that someone is an idiot, but besides "shitting where you eat" the only explanation I can think of is that someone is betting on WWIII and that it will end as profitability as WWI and WWII.
People who live in the US are usually less aware of how a lot of the international community perceives them as a bully. His view is very common and he finds it completely foreign that the US is even perceived this way.
A lot of people in the US view the US as the heroic peace keeper, and that all actions the US takes against China are for "world security" rather then an attempt to keep the top spot as the #1 economic and military super power.
It's weird because while there is freedom of the press in the US, many US citizens are still strangely misinformed and irrationally patriotic.
I'm not even clear about the mechanism at work here but there is a sort of strange form of control of information at play here. You can sort of sense it in US news. It's genius really how the media can be controlled despite amendments in place ensuring freedom of the press.
If you create a rule to accomplish a broader goal then this is a terrible argument because you end up getting rules lawyered and then you have to add sub-rules and sub-sub-rules and then exceptions to those and etc. Eventually you end up enforcing things that are non-sensical just because someone used a loop-hole once and you have to plug it. No one thinks this is a good outcome.
In your metaphor the town wants safe roads -- they don't care if someone is going 54 or 56, and the enforcement should reflect that. If you really think that anyone going over 55.1 should be pulled over no matter what, and that people driving with a blindfold on going 54.9 should not, then I don't know what to say .
Statistics show the least accidents occur at up to 15% over the speed limit, because that is the speed the good drivers go.
I would fully support a speed limit system based on driving skill. However, since we have a purely speed based system those driving the limit should not get tickets.
First of all, I was disagreeing with the metaphor on premise, and thus that it is a 'purely speed based system', because it is not. Emergency vehicles can drive faster, and you can argue with a cop or in court that you had a good reason to drive faster and be relieved of the offense.
If you really believe in only 'the letter of the law' then why do we have courts? It isn't just to determine guilt or innocence, since only some of the courts do that and only some of the time.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou...
> "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day."