[xmprt]

Relatives vs absolutes. America will spend $500B and because of leaky pipes that's effectively 100B going directly to what's needed. China gets a lot of bang for their buck so even if they're spending a fraction of the US, they make it worth their money.

[boc]

That's true for domestic labor and manufacturing, like shipbuilding, but the bleeding edge chips only come from one place and the US labs get the best while Chinese labs do not (unless they smuggle them). China gets creative, sure, but it can't overcome the fundamental issue that the US labs have more magic rocks that do math faster than their magic rocks. And the current state of the art is to just "do more math".

[bel8]

Nvidia GPUs aren't even the absolute SOTA for LLM inference anymore. Some labs are moving to ASICs and Huawei already have their own custom chips running DeepSeek as we speak.

There's enough money and scale on the line that software affinity like CUDA is no longer the deciding factor and there's margin for custom stacks.

Even more so after the USA GPU exports ban which is proving to have backfired by speeding up China's tech growth.

[aspenmartin]

Definitely hasn’t backfired. Exporting would have just sped up their progress. Instead they had to get clever and lean into the bottleneck which for them, now, is compute efficiency. This is temporary and they’ll figure out competitive chip design and production but not for several more years. It’s incredibly hard to match the quality of NVidia and TSMC, as China has found throughout years of trying.

[skeptic_ai]

I’m worried if west gets to ahead the best thing for C is to destroy the factories to slow down the ai.

If west ai is too advanced can take over the world. So better go to war now on a same level playing field than later when you need to fight against a SGI

[aspenmartin]

That is exactly the scenario that I believe and invest in. I peg trouble in Taiwan in the next 2 years at about 30%, which is waaaay higher than is priced into the market right now. If you think intel has gone up in price a lot now, it will absolutely skyrocket if TSMC fabs suddenly disappear. After adjusting to a domestic fab pipeline, we will have built up again an industry with a good talent pool (which we don't have now, Arizona TSMC fab needed to ship people in from Taiwan). At that point, why go back to a TSMC model? Hence we will have a booming domestic production pipeline, though still with complex international dependencies for various components.

[zrn900]

Nope. If China were not banned from US-controlled chips, it would be importing chips at much higher prices, therefore getting less bang for its buck while strengthening competitors with its money in the process.

Instead, the US banned China from chips and lithography machines, giving China the legal excuse to start producing them domestically without violating WTO rules. Now China produces cheap chips and uses them with cheap electricity.

This was a dumb move by the US. Brought upon it by dumbf*ck aristocratic elites who grew up in isolated mansions and then received law degrees, with absolutely no understanding of technology and technology ecosystems. They thought they'd just make the rules and everybody would have to obey. It turns out in technology, they don't have to...

[aspenmartin]

> Nope. If China were not banned from US-controlled chips, it would be importing chips at much higher prices, therefore getting less bang for its buck while strengthening competitors with its money in the process.

Nowhere near the value of having access to chips, at any cost. They have extremely deep pockets. They already pay 6x the cost per FLOP.

> Instead, the US banned China from chips and lithography machines, giving China the legal excuse to start producing them domestically without violating WTO rules. Now China produces cheap chips and uses them with cheap electricity.

You think without export restrictions China wouldn't be doing the exact same thing? China needs absolutely zero legal excuse. I mean sure they have compute available on grey market / domestically but at 6x the cost per FLOP. Access to NVIDIA chips would make it dramatically cheaper for them. Yes you get chip income but that is not even close to what you lose. The strategy is doing what it was always supposed to do: slow them down, bleed their resources to force them to spin their wheels catching up. China is doing a great job with this but they are fundamentally constrained by these export controls.

You are right that this greases the wheels, they are further along than they would have been without export restrictions, but they are still delayed even with the reduced friction. The alternative is that they move slightly slower _while having the same compute infrastructure available_ and at dramatically lower energy costs. That is a far worse position for the US to be in.

> This was a dumb move by the US. Brought upon it by dumbf-ck aristocratic elites who grew up in isolated mansions and then received law degrees, with absolutely no understanding of technology and technology ecosystems. They thought they'd just make the rules and everybody would have to obey. It turns out in technology, they don't have to...

I think this is too cynical. Neither one of us is in the room to actually observe the real decision making, but export restrictions as a strategy are not some "dumbf-ck aristocratic elite" thing. They are perfectly rational from a strategic standpoint and arguably doing what they're supposed to do.

[zrn900]

> Nowhere near the value of having access to chips, at any cost. T

Disagree. Anything produced in the Eu or other US satellites is priced as high as possible. One could say that allowing China to buy those chips would have been a bigger drain on the Chinese AI budget.

> You think without export restrictions China wouldn't be doing the exact same thing?

I dont think it. China did not do it and stuck by the WTO rules after going through so many hoops to get in. Then the US decided that China was too competitive and started ignoring WTO rules.

> You are right that this greases the wheels, they are further along than they would have been without export restrictions, but they are still delayed even with the reduced friction

Disagree. Restrictions might have hampered them somewhat at the start, but setting up their own infrastructure as fast as China does and scaling it up as big and as fast as China does would eliminate any delay in a flash.

> I think this is too cynical. Neither one of us is in the room to actually observe the real decision making, but export restrictions as a strategy are not some "dumbf-ck aristocratic elite" thing. They are perfectly rational from a strategic standpoint and arguably doing what they're supposed to do.

Nope. The narcissism and aristocracy of the US elite is well documented all the way since the 60s since the biggest ongoing social study on the matter (from UCSC) literally mapped it:

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/class_domination.html

Below is a more street-speak version of all of this if you wouldn't prefer to read the full study above:

https://makesenseworld.substack.com/p/narcissists-are-destro...

[lukan]

I believe China has leaky pipes as well.

[throwa356262]

China has a big corruption problem.