The sanctions only “prevent” them from directly buying NVidia’s latest and greatest in the sense that NVidia can’t sell directly to them. Essentially, there are companies now who are in a country without the sanctions, they buy from NVidia (or a partner), and then ship them off to China. For the orgs in China doing this, there’s zero legal risk besides having foreign customs service intercept the shipment and losing the goods. For NVidia there is zero incentive to care, as long as they look like they do, because sales are sales. You can bet Jensen ain’t losing sleep over it.
GamersNexus had a really good investigative piece (~3hrs long) on this where they went to China and met with grey market sellers. That piece absolutely pissed off NVidia and resulted in a fight with Bloomberg too.
Deepseek may be also be running inference on oodles of Chinese hardware but it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if they just acquired Blackwell chips through the grey market. The original Deepseek models were all trained using NVidia chips if I remember right.
That wouldn't explain why Deepseek is fast relative to other Chinese providers, especially considering that they're reportedly ahead of the curve among Chinese companies in moving off Nvidia. I think their quant fund background has more to do with it. Their models are clearly designed with performant inference clearly in mind.
Yes, it's performant, and esp performant at non-trivial context depths. DeepSeek-V4 DS4 (and Flash - DS4F) drop tok/s speed much less than the rest. On my M2 Max it took context depths of 768K to drop tok/s to ~10 tok/s.
Other local models I've checked drop to unusable speeds way sooner. Only other model with similarity favourable curve I've tried is nemotron-cascade-2-30b-a3b. But it's a small model, way dumber than DS4F.
Coding agents use cases have large context depths. The rate of decline is as important as the headline number.
GamersNexus had a really good investigative piece (~3hrs long) on this where they went to China and met with grey market sellers. That piece absolutely pissed off NVidia and resulted in a fight with Bloomberg too.
Deepseek may be also be running inference on oodles of Chinese hardware but it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if they just acquired Blackwell chips through the grey market. The original Deepseek models were all trained using NVidia chips if I remember right.