[GodelNumbering]

In the first paragraph,

> Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure,

Later (on banning chip sales to china)

> we should crack down on the rampant smuggling and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips.

If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.

Furthermore, Dario says later "To address these concerns, I do support the following three measures...": 1. ban chip sales to China 2. crack down on distillation 3. all capable models should go through mandatory safety testing

Just so happens that all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic. If Dario really wanted to make a point, it would land a lot better had Anthropic released a single open-weights model

[erwald]

Bans on Chinese open weight models being used in the US and bans on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment being exported to China are two extremely different things, and it's not inconsistent in any way to oppose one and endorse another.

[anonzzzies]

Banning hardware is helping China in the long run though. And long is not actually very long. They will beat 'the west' (even though they are all made in the east now) in semiconductors because of this nonsense within 50 years. And also in AI capabilities. Making capable adversaries more competitive and angry is often not really a great strategy.

[ozgung]

Nvidia CEO had a viral rant about this, implying they don’t really have a moat against China other than Chinese researchers _prefer_ to stay in the CUDA ecosystem. If you force them out then they are capable of building their own chips and ecosystem which may become the new industry standard outside America. He didn’t say this explicitly due to his role but implied that it can be easier than it looks and it’s more of a resource allocation problem.

[kaon_2]

Yes of course but the Nvidia CEO is hardly an unbiased observer. He wants to sell to China and is looking for arguments to build his case. Similarly to how Dario isn't an unbiased observer either. So who is? And who has the knowledge to say something meaningful? Universities? Professors?

[hnfong]

Jensen Huang is biased but if his interests align with yours (i.e. not wanting to concede the Chinese chip market by banning western exports) then maybe you should listen to him.

[doom2]

> bans on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment being exported

In some ways, a ban on semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports is also a good way to keep the price of consumer electronics and other goods that depends on memory high because of the potentially decade+ long shortage of RAM we're looking at. I wonder how people here would explain to someone outside the tech bubble how it's good, actually, that those prices keep rising because it means we're preventing China from getting better at AI.

[Paria_Stark]

It's good because I have not written a line of code nor thought for myself in a whole year man. And yet I can still get YC money don't you see?

[basch]

is it export if they take control of the entire island manufacturing it.

banning export is short sighted and doesnt address any problem at a scale longer than months or maybe at most a few years.

[ianm218]

The export controls on chips have been in place for many years at this point.

And China has invested immensely in sovereign chip industry for a long time and is still incredibly behind.

[adrian_b]

Unfortunately "incredibly behind" can be said about most countries of the world, many of which had electronics industries that have been destroyed during the nineties of the last century, but not about China.

China is already able to design and fabricate good enough CPUs, GPUs, DDR5 memories and flash memories.

For now, their fabrication costs are significantly higher than those of TSMC, Intel or Samsung, because they have to use expensive workarounds for not having access to EUV lithography.

Nonetheless, where the price does not matter much, like for supercomputers or military technology, China can afford to match or exceed the US capabilities with their internal production. With the high current prices for memories, the Chinese memory companies can obtain excellent profits with their products. Which is why the US congressmen John Moolenaar (R-MI) and George Whitesides (D-CA) have requested a ban on Chinese memories, presumably at the request of Micron, who is scared of the competition.

For now, China is even ahead of Japan, though hopefully that will change soon if the Japanese Rapidus meets its targets.

While Europe is the best in a few niche domains, it has a lot of things that cannot be done within its borders, so it is much less self-sufficient than China in electronics technology.

[ianm218]

> Nonetheless, where the price does not matter much, like for supercomputers or military technology, China can afford to match or exceed the US capabilities with their internal production

No they can’t. They are seriously compute constrained and no amount of money will close the gap in the short term. The chip export controls have been incredibly effective in that regard.

I don’t have much input on US companies buying Chinese memory but there are more bottleknecks than just memory.

[adrian_b]

Their production capacity is constrained, but not so constrained as to prevent them to demonstrate a supercomputer faster than any US supercomputer, made with custom CPUs designed and fabricated in China.

The limited production capacity means that they will not become exporters of CPUs or GPUs any time soon, but it does not mean that they cannot satisfy their internal necessities in any critical sectors. The technology that they use for CPUs and GPUs is about at the level that TSMC was 5 years ago. That may seem much, but there are a lot of people who are quite satisfied with computers older than that, and do not intend to upgrade them soon.

The main consequence of the older technology is a higher power consumption, because otherwise their designs are quite up-to-date in the attainable throughput. Therefore their datacenters must consume more energy, but that is hardly a problem in China.

The chip export controls have only forced them to design and fabricate their own CPUs and GPUs, instead of buying them from USA, and now they have become able to do this.

Without USA forcing them to do this, they might have remained dependent on imports from USA for decades, but now USA has lost the opportunity to ever play this card again. Thus USA has lost a leverage that could have been useful in a real conflict.

Such export controls are effective only for a short time, so they must be used only when there is a clear immediate goal.

[Marha01]

> is it export if they take control of the entire island manufacturing it.

If.

[theptip]

> If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.

No, software and hardware are different. You can very plausibly prevent smuggling of physical objects, and you very obviously cannot prevent smuggling/diffusion of open source bits-on-disk.

[pczy]

Exactly, compare banning books to banning guns.

[throwaw12]

> software and hardware are different

No, because both can be banned using laws and Dario is against banning. It doesn't matter if you smuggle or not, law can outright ban it.

[chorizo]

At this point, Anthropic releasing a sonnet 4.x class open weights model would be a positive PR move that doesn’t affect their bottom line.

[tesnorindian]

+1 and this will really be a good move. Open weights models are not going anywhere the focus should now shift to hardware and compute. Compute needs to be optimized for LLMs, currently they are inefficient. Analog computing like ReRAM should get more focus.

[anthonypasq]

They will never do this because it will reveal way more about their other model architectures than they would ever be willing to do. I mean really why the hell are we mad at a company for not wanting to open source their IP? do you think Meta is going to release their ad targeting algorithms? Or google is going to release their search rank algorithms. i mean these things are multi trillion dollar pieces of IP.

I get Anthropic is being really sleazy and annoying here, but being mad at them for not releasing an open weight model i think is unreasonable.

[chorizo]

Certainly not demanding they open source any IP that might give their competitors an edge. Rather I’m saying that pulling a gpt-oss-120b would a good PR move right about now.

[dgellow]

That would go against the narrative they built over the years, that open weight models are dangerous because they will end up telling you how to create a biological weapon that will destroy the world

[MiSeRyDeee]

Exactly, the letter will make much more sense if they are releasing open weight models and China is distilling their models and keep them in secrets for evil purpose

[usef-]

Banning software/data from being put on the internet vs banning GPU hardware is fundamentally different though, isn't it?

[niklasrde]

How so?

[usef-]

There are many possible international producers, it doesn't need to be physically transported, every household could near-instantly have a copy, it puts local business at a disadvantage if they can't use the same tools as international, etc.

[cortesoft]

You don’t see how it is easier to regulate physical objects than it is to regulate bits of information?

[robot_jesus]

Some real "You wouldn't download a car" vibes at points in this thread.

[irenaeus]

Banning hardware and banning software are very different things, and the latter is orders of magnitude easier than the former. Physical and non-physical things are different!

[axegon_]

Carl Wheezer from Temu, what a clown...

[fuzzfactor]

>all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic.

From a new "fast" company arising, you can sometimes see the way that before it started up there was nothing but "narrative" and that is what established the initial business model since there was nothing else yet. After some momentum is gained whether there is a pivot or not then the narrative going forward has to be aligned with the now more-well-proven business model.

From his leadership standpoint there are 3 big recommendations right now. That's what this message is all about.

>We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China

Well you and who else?

If there's not already somebody who is compromising the well-being of a nation in exchange for a handful of gold, with the ever-incresing glorification of greed & dishonesty at all costs it's only a matter of time for this one.

>We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations. Distillation is a much more compute-efficient process

Wait a minute, what's always been needed by everybody are more compute-efficient processes for everything. I've mentioned this before and it's been a while but back in 1980 it took less than a year to figure out I was going to need other chips that were not regular CPUs if I was going to get the most intelligent response from the silicon on a single square-foot of PCB. At the same time it was obvious you were never going to get far without what they now call "distillation", especially with only kilobytes of memory. Otherwise you would be wasting such stupidly large amounts of memory & storage there was no way you could really call it "intelligent". Now with ML & AI on the rise again there are so many people more deeply immersed than ever, and nothing has really contradicted these basic concepts yet, which have been easily recognizable since like forever.

>All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing. The best way to address threat #2 is to just directly test models for cyber, biological, and alignment risks before release.

Righteous concept, and I'm always in favor of 100x the amount of testing in general normally done.

But "just" test says it pretty well, and those who are gifted enough to "draw the rest of the owl" freehand can test things the most skillfully until they are blue in the face. It's not going to help if an adversary decides not to test, or to enhance these exact things so it can have some kind of competitive advantage. Amodei does not ignore this and there is a footnote about it.

People realize that some of the elements that are coming to mind were expressed in some fairly early "science-fiction" so all this is nothing new

Still looking for the most intelligent responses I can get, since way before 1980 ;)

[ASalazarMX]

TL;DR: We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.

[combobyte]

> We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.

In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.

Even without China eating their lunch, there's zero reason to believe Anthropic will ever be profitable.

[throwaway63467]

They might just merge with OpenAI. Right now it seems they are still working out who might come out on top but they are both burning tons of money and essentially offer the exact same product up to some minor differences, economically it makes much more sense for them to collude instead of compete for the same market. They might be colluding already for all we know. If they manage to push out foreign competitors they can probably divvy up the Western market quite profitably as their domestic competitors would have less than 20 % (?) market share together?

[combobyte]

I don't see how merging or colluding fixes their problems, though. Both companies burn cash at historic rates because inference costs a lot more than people want to pay for it. Even if they somehow manage to crowd out any competitors and fix the price of AI, that price can't be much higher than it is today or people will just decide to stop paying for it.

No amount of collusion can solve the core economics problem of compute.

[bizzletk]

They could ~halve their training costs with collusion.

Instead of each paying full price to generate a SOTA model in competition, they could share the result and split the cost. This gets even simpler if they merge.

[dgellow]

OpenAI is in a way worth situation financially speaking, with a ridiculous amount of spending commitment, would be really strange to merge with it

[blitzar]

> In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.

you can say you're pre-revenue and you're a potential pure play

[dgellow]

(Link to the reference for those who don’t know: https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=dJDP6BRiZwqd5mcW)

[blitzar]

I hope there is a lucky one in ten thousand out there https://xkcd.com/1053/

[a34729t]

The hammer is open weight models, and the anvil is Apple's m7 chips with higher memory bandwidth

[lenerdenator]

That's more or less how China has historically treated its competition. The CCP has routinely intervened to give their country's corporate interests an advantage.

Up until a few years ago, if you wanted to sell a car as a non-Chinese company in China, you had to hand over pretty much everything to a local company and go into business with them.

When Google wanted to operate an uncensored search engine in China, they found themselves hacked.

It's not altogether unusual for IP to be transferred to Chinese manufacturers for production under a license agreement, then to find goods made with that IP to be for sale for far cheaper without payment made through the licensing agreement. Or maybe they just don't bother with a licensing agreement at all and do counterfeit products straight-up.

There are more examples but turnabout is ultimately fair play.

[calgoo]

I mean so has the US... look at all the trade deals that has happened over the last 20, 30... 50 years between the US and the rest of the world. There has always been pressure to help the American corporations, be it copyright law, banning encryption, or outright pressuring other countries not to invest in their own tech and instead use US companies. Look at the current state of Europe for example; lots of people blame the governments, and while its true they take the decisions, a lot of them where encouraged by the US.