[twobitshifter]

Right, the export controls are only forcing Chinese AI to innovate, build their own fabs, and make training and inference more efficient. The end game of this will be NVIDIA chips won’t be wanted because you can get a $50 chinese chip running a ternary model that is competitive with claude in English and is much better in Mandarin.

[adrian_b]

The US government has failed to learn from its own history.

60 years ago the US government had forbidden the export of fast computers to France, with the hope that this sanction will prevent the French from developing thermonuclear bombs.

The result was that the French state (which at that time was lead by de Gaulle, not much less autocratically than China) subsidized some of their computer manufacturers, which previously could not compete with the American companies like IBM and CDC, and also their semiconductor manufacturing industry, which had to provide the components for the locally-made computers.

Eventually, the French produced TTL circuits and mainframe computers made with them, and finally they also made thermonuclear bombs.

So the American "sanctions" against France have been a complete failure and have been great for the French industry of semiconductors and computers.

Many years later, when USA no longer had export restrictions towards France and the French state no longer protected their industry, the French industries of integrated circuits and computers have been greatly reduced, their companies either becoming bankrupt or being bought or merged into multinational companies.

[sylware]

"De Gaulle, not much less autocratically"?

When De Gaulle did ask the french via a poll if they wanted him to leave, they said yes, and he left. He is also the guy who did setup the balance between the various political powers, which has been kind of working... until now (currently the government can hardly get laws from the parliament, because few people representatives are on gov side, and they won't die or disappear if they disagree, bugger!). The fact that the president must leave after 10 years is kind of recent though.

France has always been a very strong US ally, in an honest relationship, namely without agreeing or being on board with everything. And France never had the intention to nuke the US... unlike some other country we talk about all the time in news (that said, France is not far from the US on their list...). And compared to the rest of the world, don't forget the 'western world' (which is not 'western' only anymore...) has very, very close core values. A good way to think about it: a big dysfunctional family.

On the software side, aka the 'silicon master control' side: currently, the french are just Big Tech slaves. To be more current, Holland president and Valls prime minister did install a document (2015/2016) which has been "law" since which literaly "pushes" (hard) administration online services to be hardcore dependent on Big Tech (mostly the whatng cartel) without any reasonable technical way out (unless noscript/basic HTML web sites, are brought back in the security infrastructure, like they were a few years back). This document is out of reach of even the parliament, namely only the president and prime minister have control over it, in other words, to interact with this document you need the same level of power required to decide to increase the number of atomic bombs(huh). The following president and prime ministers did nothing and kept increasing french administration dependency, I guess they were/are as guilty OR BRAIN WASHED than Hollande and Valls.

Open source does not matter anymore (look at how big tech controls open source software via often-non-pertinent complexity and size), _LEAN_ open source does, and that includes the SDK (aka the computer languages: if you need a giga huge and complex compiler, you already lost).

On the hardware side, state-of-the-art chip is an international effort with an insane supply chain. This is mostly 'driven'/hogged by US chip designers. State of the art, foundries are currently in TW (the US is working at getting some back), EUV is from EU-ish (the EUV light is from the US), and many, many more high-hech tools are from the US/JP/TW/etc.

What I am wondering: did Holland and Valls "give" France to Big Tech... or "sold" it, if you see what I mean, because it is very easy to setup public money channels using 'Big Tech' which look "clean", aka hidden behind a technologi-blablublo smoke screen, since most people are scared of tech and/or don't understand the fine details.

It is all about simple file formats and network protocols, good enough to do the job and stable in time. A good compromise is to use a strongely and dynamically defined subset of Big Tech stuff, which you know can be locally implemented with reasonable effort (by citizens, small companies, state administrations, etc). That will foster alternatives (good I guess). That's why I am talking about web sites, and not web apps (noscript/basic HTML), and we could talk about a strongely defined subset of PDF.

Ofc, the devil hides in the details, this is a very coarse overview: you have to basically decide in a fine-grained case by case, mistakes will be made and will have to painfully be fixed. You cannot get it all in one shot, it is module per module, back and forth, and probably slowly.

[pitched]

I would order that in a heartbeat. Even if it required proprietary Chinese-government drivers. I would try to segregate in a VM without internet or something. Please make this happen! Tokens cost too much in the current system.