I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.
I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
> It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?
These export controls increasingly look like "tax".
The White House said the US government would take a 25 percent cut of the chip’s sales, similar to a deal with AMD and Nvidia earlier this year that allowed them to sell lower-powered AI chips to China while paying the US government 15 percent of the proceeds.
> Using them in China is legal in China.
Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
> Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.
I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.
Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
> Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
I highly agree with you - and that’s coming from someone who can’t stand the Democrats[1]. Things like announcing all of a sudden that he opposes a merger when everybody knows Kushner is involved with a rival bid… it’s too obvious how much corruption is his very operating system.
[1] (I didn’t vote for either candidate for President, but I’m not in a swing state so I’m not sorry)
The lesson from Mamdani is that the only way forwards for actual policy based and anticorruption politics is within the Democrat primaries. These are even run by the state in many states, I believe.
Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.
That's Corporatism. It's from the fascist playbook where the state takes partial or complete ownership of private companies. Where does that money go, to some slush fund for the president? The reason for the export controls is to keep our potential adversaries from being on the bleeding edge of frontier AI. It goes against the US's interests to give China a leg up with advanced chips. It's almost laughable, of course, as the Nvidia chips are already manufactured in a country that China claims as their own. If they ever pressed the issue, we could find ourselves without the most advanced chips.
This is not at all what is meant by fascist corporatism, nor corporatism more generally. Corporatism is more about collective bargaining by professional trades, and is not the sense of corporation as used for private companies.
It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership. Many of the things they do are questionable or worse. In the case of the DoD, they do these things at the behest of democratically elected leadership.
Of course US and China will operate in their own best interests. Of course they will both play chess, both name call, both sanction and impede. When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle for each country's total economic, soft, and hard power market share.
This is just "might makes right" but modern. I don't know that this is the consistent, wide-held belief that you seem to think it is. Plenty of people would rather our governments not engage in clandestine disruption and undermining of foreign governments.
Competition is inevitable, especially between geopolitical rivals, but we don't have to engage in Minitrue-style "the enemy has always been our enemy" rhetoric.
We live under economic conditions created by a government that does intervene. And a greater world order established by a hegemon that does intervene.
It would be interesting to see what life would be like today had that not happened. It might be better, it might be worse. Probably a little of both for different groups of people.
As the world returns to multi-polarity, there are signs of increases in violence.
The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
> The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
Citations? Simply saying that World War 1 happened during a time of multi-polarity is just begging the question. Multi-polarity of varying degrees has always been the case throughout human history, and often times single-polarity is achieved only through extreme violence.
American Hegemony or Pax Americana (post WWII until present) is the most peaceful period of human history, despite the myriad atrocities which have occurred during that period, from myriad different parties, including the USA itself
A big reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that if one side has the USA on its side, they're basically unattackable for many places since the USA is so over powered militarily and can project force anywhere
It stands to reason as the USA recedes from the world's stage it will get more violent as more nations stand at parity with their adversaries again. And we're certainly seeing wars cropping up lately as the US continues to undermine its traditional allies, bully adversaries, declare trade wars, and withdraw from agreements.
I do not disagree with that assessment, but maybe one can hope that at some point we evolve past this "us versus them" mentality that we inherited from the savannah? If so, it's worth pushing for it.
I think this is too simplistic of an outlook. The post-Napoleonic balance of powers was not uni-polar, it was a carefully constructed and negotiated settlement by diplomats and politicians who knew the cost of war, and it lasted a remarkable 99 years. There were skirmishes in the interim, but the balance of power ensured that the bloodletting never escalated to the point of continent-spanning "world" war...until it did.
Pax Americana, by contrast, was essentially a standoff between ideological opposites that were equipped with enough nuclear weapons to assure mutual destruction. The choices were clear - coexist or die, and there were many opportunities where we narrowly escaped the second option.
You could point to many possible causes of WW1, but I think that a lot of the causes can be traced back to a hot-headed emperor who desired a larger and more prestigious empire but lacked the statecraft to do so without pissing off nearly all of his neighbors. Looking around at our world today at the number of unserious leaders who govern like a bull in a china shop, I would be lying if I didn't see any similar causes for concern.
This is not news, I had "the multi polar world" in history class in high school in the early 2000s, it's just that the US suddenly realized it and has been blind to the change for a while.
Do you think countries behave differently than what the parent has said? This has been going on forever, since the first clan of humans fought another, any reasoning other than "might makes right" is a post-hoc rationalization not based in history.
The theory that humans are evil to one another and that this behavior has been going on since the dawn of time has shaky grounds. David Graeber looks for alternative explanations in his book [1] The Dawn of Everything.
That first sentence feels like one of those fake-deep things that sounds important, but can effectively be used to justify about anything?
Which is to say, in a world that's -- you know -- a society; not screwing over the other guy is often, if not usually, a good way to "optimize your own citizens economic prospects," too.
The very first sentence crashes and burns, because there are multiple moral systems and compasses. Using "imperative" in the context of morals is extra spicy, because it reference a very specific, very strict moral code - The Categorical Imperative.
The CI is, in my experience, not a moral system about personal or group advantage, but about rules the can govern everybody.
> The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership
There is some truth, but this is how you get a crappy-ass intelligence agency.
Good intelligence agencies are focused on gathering intelligence, not performing random tasks that benefit from secrecy.
The US wants to have its cake and eat it too. It will pose around as a democratic and peaceful force, and use these illegal and shady tactics whenever they seem fit. And if you say this, their enablers in the traditional media will label you a conspiracy theorist.
> It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
Surely there are constraints on this, because otherwise, it would be the moral imperative of every country to enslave non-citizens for the benefit of (some subset of) citizens.
I hate this talking point so much. If you are talking about China, that's just growth. They are also rolling out more solar than the rest of the world combined. While the US is now actively discouraging investing in renewables.
Chinese coal power outgrows renewables still. A Western country with already cleaner energy destroying whatever remains of their manufacturing only to be moved to China and powered by mostly coal is not only treason of its own citizens but also bad for the climate. Feels so good to be "net zero" while importing materialized coal with not much to trade back (other than coal of course).
> It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
"Moral imperative"? No country was ever created out of a moral imperative. None. Also, no country was ever created to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects. Every country was created by the elites for the benefits of the elites.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The intent is there.
It's an incredibly complex distributed system with millions of actors and interactions, entrenched powers, regulatory capture, Citizens United, etc. It has to be defended and garbage collected.
I don't want to fight against decades of State propaganda and indoctrination, but do you realise that by "men" they were not referring to black slaves or Mexicans in Texas or California or native Americans(the best Indian in the dead Indian).
You mean, the fiction is there. They did use a lot of nice words, but the reality is a bunch of slave owners creating a society controlled by oligarchs.
The declaration of independence was written by one of the wealthiest slave owners in the country. "Moral imperative" was certainly not behind the american revolution. The economic interests of the elites were. There are no saints in politics. Just interests - mostly of the elites.
This is an extremely reductive take. Thomas Jefferson was a hero and a scholar! Think about the times he lived in, everyone lived under some sort of aristocratic monarchy, that was the norm. Certainly there were some economic interests at play in tge Revolution, but is it economically smart to declare independence from the most powerful empire of the day? Indeed, many of the "elites" at the time sided with the British! There had to be something more than just "class interests" at play to convince these wealthy elites to renounce their fealty to their government, giving up all legal claims to their property and indeed their very lives, should the revolutionaries have lost.
Why historical did empires collapse or split? Was there always a noble reason that a portion of some empire declared themselves independent and fought a war for it? Maybe they just wanted to be rulers in their own land because they were young and ambitious and willing to put up with some risk.
Both the most vulgar and selfish interest, and the most principled passions, seems to play a role in history at different times. The most important contributing factor, though, is selfish interest of large groups of people, because the sun of it's many little influences do not cancel out, unlike the actions of principled actors. In exceptional times, good intends are allowed to take the front seat just as long as necessary, by the many behind the scene who will silently weight toward the prompt reestablishment of "business as usual".
Projection. China does not even try to export their ideologies to the rest of the world who they see as clearly different culturally. The “west” OTOH does not have a good track record of that.
It's interesting how this sounds like projection to me as well, from the perspective that China does export their ideology. Your post itself seems to be a form of that, whether you're Chinese or not.
China certainly does export their ideologies by telling the world Taiwan is part of China and telling others to not recognize Taiwan as a country. They also have major if not direct influence on Myanmar's civil war. North Korea. Let's not forget the taking land(India, tibet) and extending their borders with man-made islands so they can extend their fishing territories. that's a great track record. you're not biased at all.
Most European countries did awful things during their colonial years, some late into the XX century. Some still do shady things in Africa right now. And they all welcome money siphoned off peripheral countries by crooks.
I see Chinese citizens traveling abroad every day. Doesn't look like they cannot travel. Freedom of what exactly? Are you really free in America when you have to toil away 12 hours per day to make ends meet? Honestly funny to see people falling for American propaganda.
They only let some of them out. And it's hard to get a passport. Most other countries work the opposite way. You need approval to enter. In China, you need approval to exit.
One way to think about it: if every country prevents people from entering, the effect is exactly the same as one country preventing people from leaving.
Communism is a political and economic ideology aiming for a classless society where the community, rather than individuals, owns major resources like factories and land, distributing wealth based on need.
Hypothetical: I buy a product imported legally from the US and later sell it on the local used market to a Chinese tourist who takes it back to China with them. Where is the crime, smuggling, or 'banditry' here? US law is just that - US law.
If the importer didn't have the intent of it going to the tourist, then things are fine for that one-off GPU. If they did have that intent we quickly get to smuggling territory, with or without you as a middleman.
And for GPU trips without a country in between, the plausible deniability is close to zero.
> Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems,
This is just model distillation.
Anyone with the expertise to build a model from scratch (which DeepSeek certainly can) can do this in a careful manner.
> but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators.
Bingo.
I have no problem with pirates pirating other pirates.
Screw OpenAI and Anthropic closed source models built from public data. The law should be that weights trained from non-owned sources should be public domain, or that any copyright holder can sue them and demand model takedown.
Google and Meta are probably the only two AI companies that have a right to license massive amounts of training data from social media and user file uploads given that their ToSes grant them these rights. But even Meta is pirating stuff.
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic continue pirating training data and keeping the results closed, China's open source strategy will win out in the end. It erodes the crust of value that is carefully guarded by the American giants. Everyone else will be integrating open models and hacking them apart, splicing them in new ways.
Google and Meta are probably the only two companies that have a right to license their training data
For the sake of someone unfamiliar... Why is that?
Did they pay teams of monkeys to generate their own, novel training data? Or gain explicit, opt-in permission from users who entrust them with their files/content?
> For the sake of someone unfamiliar... Why is that?
I edited my comment, but basically they both own massive social media properties (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) or file upload sites (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail) and their ToSes grant them these rights. You accept these terms when you use their services.
That's not great, but we are getting free services. It's in the terms.
It's a whole lot better than just scraping without permission, compensation, acknowledgement, or even notice.
To be clear, I have no problem with these models being built. But if they "steal" the data, the resultant model shouldn't be owned by anyone. It should be public domain and not allowed to be kept as a trade secret.
And it's funny that Anthropic is trying to depress our wages by training on our code. Again - I'm fine with that - I want to work faster, and I like these models and their capabilities. But Anthropic shouldn't be able to own the models they train off of us exclusively since they didn't license or buy our data. They provided us with nothing at all.
Facebook stole copyrighted material well above their own and admitted to it. It's not just "we took our users data", its "we literally downloaded torrent with 81 terabytes of books and used that for training".
Google most likely did something similar, just using books they already had indexed in Google Books, and probably by still seriously violating any reasonable notion of copyright
You accept these terms when you use their services.
I certainly didn't*. I'd love to see litigation testing just how solid those insidious opt-in-by-default schemes are as a basis for "ownership".
If they had users explicitly opt-in with a "Yes, go ahead and train on my stuff and by the way I assert that I have all the rights to grant you the same", I'd have no problem with that, and they'd have a much stronger claim.
(*Before others inevitably disagree: I do opt-out of this stuff aggressively, and further send notice to companies from time to time that I don't agree to certain objectionable clauses of their ToS and they're welcome to close my account).
> and further send notice to companies from time to time that I don't agree to certain objectionable clauses of their ToS and they're welcome to close my account
Other times they turn a blind eye and choose to provide the service (and collect my money) despite the lack of agreement to some part of their standard terms and their tacit acknowledgement that I didn't accept them. On two occasions their legal team responded and said "that's fine", and once they actually fixed their ToS.
People who didn't grow up dealing with paper contracts where you could easily redline and send back for countersigning don't seem to understand that you don't just need to blindly say "yes" to everything a company tries to foist upon you.
It's not that simple. The EU may be the only ones to have codified that, but there's centuries of case law in other jurisdictions dealing with ownership, that once the matter hits litigation might turn out to say something other than these tech companies would like.
This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
> This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade.
In this case it's just wrong. I don't know what people think "e-waste" recycling actually is or what happens to their "unrepairable" units after they rid themselves of them.
> Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state.
Interestingly the Dollar is most definitely meaningful outside of our state. I think the assumption becomes, that if this is true, then using it's power to enforce trade sanctions isn't that big a stretch.
> Of course people will evade sanctions
What's less clear if they should expect their government to actively help them in this evasion or not. I think the Chinese citizens are in unique international territory here.
> what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
Deny our exports to them. This will cost the political donor class a lot of profits. So this is why it doesn't get done.
None of this is a fait accompli. This is the result of years of intentional corruption of the core systems involved.
Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Embargoes aren't impossible to enforce against the foreign importer. If a foreign entity is found to have placed orders with false documents, they can be sanctioned, which can be enforced against any of their international operations. It makes it hard for them to do future business in global markets. I would not recommend violating US sanctions no matter where you are.
> Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Expecting to strangle world markets with intellectual property as your moat is absurd. You can only fight honest competition with dishonest means for so long, and intellectual property is one of the dirtiest tricks in the book.
The companies it "stole" from broke the law in their own country while acquiring the training data; frankly sanction avoidance is lesser and arguably not even their (it's the people in US that smuggle them, nothing breaking china law afaik) crime
It's not even stealing. They paid OpenAI for the tokens. It violates the OpenAI TOS, which specifically forbids using it's outputs for training competing models (which is very ironic)
There’s no honor among thieves. You don’t get to cry about Chinese “bandits” when Anthropic just had to pay $1 billion to settle a massive copyright infringement lawsuit. All of these models were created through the mass-scale theft of humanity’s intellectual property, personal data, and dignity.
Open always beats closed. Drain the moats. Starve the ClosedAI beast.
That's a little disingenuous. If i buy a printer and use the ink in the cartridge to reverse engineer a beautiful red, have i stolen something from the printer manufacturer? Especially if they lose business because they no longer have what distinguished them?
Clean room design is not new (or illegal), but it's always been a form of stealing
I think the fact that DeepSeek trains on competitor queries (i.e., distillation) — along with using banned Nvidia chips — helps explain how it can achieve such low training costs (USD 6 million vs. billions) while delivering only slightly worse performance than its American counterparts. It also undermines the narrative that DeepSeek or China is posing a serious challenge to the U.S. lead in AI. The gap may be closing, but the initial reactions now seem knee-jerk.
That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.
These models never cost billions to train and I doubt the final training run for models like GPT-4 cost more than 8 figures. 6 million is definitely cheaper and I would attribute that to distillation.
> I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data
Did OpenAI observe any ToS when scraping content from the Internet? Sorry, but you cannot complain about stealing the stolen. OpenAI cannot even have the copyright on ChatGPT output, because it's a tool.
ToS didn't stop the companies that built those models and it won't stop the companies that bootstrap off them. Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way.
> Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way
If only. That's my dream, massive copyright lawsuits against all of these AI players and maybe the courts can do something good for a change, put an end to all of this AI bullshit
They don't need to break any laws for this. Where do you think are the customers for data centers in the Middle East? Chinese companies do everything legally, paying for access to data centers that got the chips directly from the US.
Lets take the weapons embargos placed on Israel by our allies. In the NDAA must pass bill we set funds aside to procure those weapons and sell them to Israel. We don't really care about these things we have selective enforcement.
| Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems
Not sure why you would expect this, all the models started doing this as its much more cost effective to get data for post training don't you remember the first grok release where many times it started replies "as a model trained by openai..."
"The TBD group is using several third-party models as part of the training process for Avocado, distilling from rival models including Google’s Gemma, OpenAI’s gpt-oss and Qwen, a model from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the people said."
LOL. Distillation doesn't count as plagiarism, or you should call Meta out on it. They're distilling the Chinese model.
i find it weird that this comment got so much pushback. i don't think it was portraying deepseek as any more morally wrong than anyone else, or castigating anyone as morally wrong.
I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market.
They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country.
So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.
Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.
This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.
Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?
Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.
On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)
What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.
If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.
I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.
Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.
So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.
I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.
Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.
One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.
Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything.
Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.
This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs.
The illegality of something and the enforcement of that illegality can be mutually exclusive. Iran had sanctions placed on them after the 1979 revolution, but the US funneled arms to them anyway to raise money to ovethrow the Nicaraguan government [0]. Cocaine is illegal but the CIA trafficked it anyway to again raise money to topple the Sandinistas [1].
It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.
I don’t think the root problem is political corruption or donors.
If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.
The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.
> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]
The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.
The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.
Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.
Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else.
You can investigate buyers who have anomalous purchase patterns for sanction violations and convict them. DEA commonly looks at narcotic purchases by legal buyers for indications they might be funneling it to illegal market and investigates. NVidia could report "Hey, we are seeing massive purchases from entities we didn't expect so you might want to look into that"
Cartels, mafias and other criminal organisations have been involved in other industries for many generations now. Money laundering requires legitimate businesses and if that business happens to turn a profit. That's even better. Just look at the construction industry in new York or Italy many decades ago.
This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).
Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.
A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident.
If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.
Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes.
I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that.
Increased costs might be a factor in a competing commercial market, but for military purposes, you buy the components no matter the price or search for an alternative (China is now making lot of components - for example, resistors, transistors, logic chips - I have several 74HC chips of Chinese origin, and they are very cheap). Also, there are thousands ships and no legal basis for "policing" them in open sea.
> Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
Many Americans, including their government, seem to think that US laws apply globally.
They have extradited Ukrainian men from Poland because that Ukrainian was running a torrent website (illegal in the US, not illegal in Ukraine nor Poland).
They tried getting an Australian extradited from Sweden and the UK for supposedly hosting a website that contained information the US government considered illegally obtained.
More egregiously, they have kidnapped tens to hundreds of people from various countries, sometimes on reasons as flimsy as watch model or name, to torture (sometimes to death), because a lawyer working for the president decided that's actually legal because they're waves hands "enemy combattants".
> When a US soldier was photographed in Vietnam waterboarding a vietnamese PoW he got 22 years of prison.
Really? Did he serve more than a month? Because if the people who committed My Lai for off with slaps on the wrist, I can't imagine something as trivial as waterboarding would get any serious consequences.
I am referring to this is the picture [1] which was printed on the post in 1968.
I am not able to find more information about the court martialed soldier, but the fact that he was sentenced to 22 years of prison is a quote from a lecture of professor Sarah Paine from the US Navy War Academy.
Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.
"In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down."
acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position
every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way
That is just not true. The referees have the power to change the game. The fans have the power to change the game. The owners and the commissioners have the power to change the game. The players have no power at all.
China banned them AFTER the US first banned them and then unbanned them and a series of unfriendly trade moves by the US.
This discussion where China is always purely dishonest, bad etc. without any context is honestly lame.
The Chinese ban is largely a political move designed to signal that they're not going to be pushed around. They pretty much know companies are using them, (and H100 in Thailand etc.) but as long as it sends a message and over time incentives domestic development, (which it does), then good as far as they're concerned.
It's certainly better than the EU just rolling over for King Donald, which as a EU citizen is embarrassing.
> It's certainly better than the EU just rolling over for King Donald, which as a EU citizen is embarrassing.
I'm seeing it more as buying time thing. In sourcing as much as possible in the EU is already in progress, as well as various trade agreements with different countries and economic blocs. That doesn't mean it isn't preferable to play nice with the demented guy to make the transition less painful in the short term.
The problem is, the EU is damaging its relationships with countries like China and India etc. too, rather than building strategic alliances,
On diplomatic trips, it often 'lectures' others, rather than listens. I think the EU is less and less liked by these other countries too, which is a disastrous combination when coupled with where the US is at imo.
Chinese propaganda full of nonsense falsehoods isn't better diplomacy either.
> Guo noted that the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was an important part of the World Anti-Fascist War. 80 years ago, the Chinese people made tremendous national sacrifices to save human civilization
Lol, that particular part is hilarious. Imperial Japan wasn't drastically different in terms of governance compared to Chiang's or Mao's China. All three were pretty brutal anti-democratic regimes. Chiang had pretty clear fascist inspirations too.
> showed a lack of basic historical knowledge
Indeed, Chinese propaganda doesn't concern itself with historical knowledge. Those are the same people who imagine claims to half of Southeast Asia.
But China is a bit like Russia, their foreign minister blabbers nonsense, but that doesn't prevent actual trade or deal making.
Why? Neither Chiang nor Mao were fighting "the anti-fascist war". Both were more interested in fighting each other, for starters.
Imperial Japan being considered fascist is also quite the stretch. And importantly, neither of the two/myriad of Chinese entities was fighting "to preserve human civilisation". When they were fighting the Japanese for a change, it was because the Japanese were attacking them.
The article tries to position China as some "was fighting for good in WW2 so it's unfair to say current China is autocratic with it's buddies in NK and Russia". Even if it were true thay China was fighting for a good cause in WW2 (extremely debatable), doesn't in the slightest change the fact that today, China is an autocratic regime. How long is Xi's term? How long has he been in power? For how long will he be in power? It's the same story as Putin.
China's foreign minister might bitch about it all he wants, it's nothing but the truth. You can consider that autocratic regimes aren't inherently bad, and that's a debate to be had about upsides and downsides. But it is categorically nonsense to pretend that China isn't autocratic.
It’s debatable whether it’s a better use of US power and resources to try to stop PRC from obtaining these chips versus, say, sinking the Chinese fishing fleets actively wrecking entire ecosystems. I probably agree with you that on balance working on the later problem has a higher long term ROI.
I agree that a fair playing field for everyone would be the ideal state.
But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either.
The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.
The US sanctions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. I thought that was quite obvious historically and specially now. They've imposed tariffs on literally every country on the planet.
Tariffs are applied to countries that we are "ripping off", if King Donald's definition is used consistently for every country. If we had a surplus, you still get a 10% tariff that Americans have to pay...
It's my fault for wading into a political discussion on a forum of react developers. That's on me.
But the "banned" chips this article is referring to and the original chips act is from the Biden administration, having nothing to do with the current tariff climate.
Also, obviously US actions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. Nor does China feel that way either. Which is my point.
China has promised to wage war and forcibly subjugate Taiwan, a democratic ally and critical trade partner. If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
>If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
Total historical illiteracy. if only there was an island nation immediately southeast of the US we could look to for information on how America treats countries that try the whole "back off" thing
What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand.
I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
OpenAi, Anthropic, etc have access to specialized network topologies from high profile relationships with cloud providers. I don't think you can get anything like that off the shelf.
sure but to do this at scale you need better control of the networking layer than they typically give you, and there will definitely be KYC at a certain point in the process
I mean, I thought the paranoia was about China making their own models with their own chips. If they're renting USA models via the cloud, that's "good".
You should really seek to actually understand an issue before you comment so arrogantly.
US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.
Traditional social norms are reversed online because there is no threat of immediate violence. Arrogance gets attention. Politeness gets ignored. Don't be so harsh. It's just how this generation communicates.
I don't think anyone is surprised by this.. And I'm almost certain nothing will happen. When manufacturing is next door to you, you'll find a way to get your hands on chips.
What realistically could happen? Nvidia is already prohibited from selling their GPUs to China, I guess if you wanted it to really stop, you'd need to prohibit Nvidia from selling GPUs in any other country but the US, and require some sort of government controlled license to be able to buy it inside the US. Neither of which sound like realistic options.
So what could anyone really do, to "solve" this "problem"?
You log into the Nvidia Enterprise Portal and download a license file that is temporary valid (e.g. 7 days) and bound to the specific serial numbers.
You transfer that file to your local license (DLS) server.
It does not need to be permanently connected to the internet, but it needs to be refreshed periodically.
Your local server now holds the tickets that the GPUs need to use to run (obviously checked by the GPU itself, not on a driver-level, though driver could be a first step).
If an account is suspected of violation, they get suspended and need to pass the KYC again.
It's not perfect (as violators can use shell companies), but it is relatively elegant. In case of shell companies, they can get caught one day or another.
Regular users or those who don’t need air-gapped network can just stay online and the lease automatically renew in the background.
Friction-less.
Added benefit: nobody is going to try to steal your cards
Minus: enshittification of the world in the name of politics, and Nvidia will lose sales, and backfire at the US economy
This isn't a Chinese government ban, though. It's a US export restriction, not a Chinese import restriction. So why would the Chinese government do anything at all?
The gamernexus point about "open one eye, close one eye" was on point here.
China instructed companies to stop using nvidia chips too...knowing fully well it'll not stop. It achieves their aim though - a strong nudge in the direction of independence.
Much of Chinese top level direction seems to be that way - indicating direction of travel and implied future threats for companies not rowing in said direction
As for the US side of the ban - that's about as sound as the war on drugs. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that's futile
As someone who doesn't want to live in a country run by corporations, that first part of indication the direction of travel sounds like a good idea. Obviously, the companies should follow the direction set out by the nation willingly and not because of threats, but otherwise it doesn't sound like a dumb idea to try to unify people toward some goal rather than the goal being "individuals can get very, very rich and wealthy".
Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.
Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.
Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.
It seems pretty difficult to prevent two other countries from trading, especially when it is sort of low-volume (I mean how many boats full of GPUs was this? It isn’t like oil or something, where we can see the infrastructure to consume it via satellite).
Long term consequences: China outperforms Nvidia, by producing cheaper, faster chips at a large scale, by getting inspired by the IP but using their own production lines.
Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.
Well done.
If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.
> Long term consequences: China outperforms Nvidia, by producing cheaper, faster chips at a large scale, by getting inspired by the IP but using their own production lines.
Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no.
Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing some things down and forcing reallocation of investment away from other areas into the sanctioned areas.
The US refraining from sanctions is likely the stupid move, because that lever of control will expire at some point. To not use it is to squander it.
But if there's one thing the US government and its business elite is good at, it's squandering things.
"Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen.
It's ridiculous to think they won't succeed, just by dint of sheer numbers alone.
> "Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. Sanctions and tariffs need to be coupled with massive investments to build new capabilities, and the latter is usually lacking. For instance, tariff revenue (and then some) should be poured directly into subsidies for building new facilities that support critical industries (like rare earths and electronics manufacturing). And things would probably be counterintuitively more effective if there was more tolerance of waste For instance, China's subsidized hundreds of solar panel manufacturers, none of them make money and a lot have probably failed, but the vicious domestic competition has helped them dominate that technology globally. The US freaked out in a massive scandal when one subsidized solar panel maker went out of business.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative.
There were lots of stories along the lines of https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/china-microchi... from the early 2020s, not so many lately. Their internal posture will now be the same as Russia's post-1945 push for the Bomb. Continued failure will (possibly literally) place heads at stake.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated.
They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy.
It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply.
Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Trump is the living embodiment of the old cliché about how in the Chinese language, the words for "threat" and "opportunity" are similar. His actions have comforted Russia, alienated Europe, and galvanized China.
> It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply.
> Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Sorry dude, all of that is coming from inside your own head. You're so blinded by Trump that you're incapable of having this conversation.
I don't want to put in the effort to try to fix that. Have a nice day.
I don't know much about GPUs, but is there really any value in IP? I can learn to write HDL code all day long, but turning it into real transistors is the hard part. Code is worth nothing nowadays with AI.
not IP in particular but APIs. Putting your existing CUDA codebase into new NVIDIA generation that might be noticeably more expensive but is still faster/more energy-efficient than competition.
Competition's software stack have to be good enough that it is worth migrating over and I think till we get some kind of cross vendor API for that it won't happen for a while
I thought it was impossible for them to leapfrog without actively occupying the TSMC fab as it takes years and years just to dial-in the insane precision.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is in the awkward position of being legally required to deny everything but economically incentivized to sell as much as Washington allows
and forcing them to allow opium to be sold in their country
and forcing them to give up major port cities and open up trade against their wishes
Honestly whenever China gets around to getting its served-extremely-cold revenge for all the savagery committed against it in the 19th and 20th centuries, some chips are going to be the least of everyone's problems.
This is the least surprising thing ever and was highly suspected when DeepSeek released their original model.
We've also seen this with sanctions on Russia but they still somehow bought a bunch of TI chips for missiles [1].
As many here know, the US restricts the export of certain technology to China because reasons. This includes lithography machines from ASML, a Dutch company, who have a monopoly on the latest EUV processes. It's geopolitically interesting that the big buyer of ASML products are TSMC in TAiwan as well as Samsung in South Korea (and possibly Japan?).
I expect this will become a national security issue for China and long-term you will see China try and replicate the best lithographic processes and chips such that the gap will greatly narrow. This will take years and involves a lot of depenedent industries but of anyone China has shown the willingness, ability and resolve to pursue decades-long infrastructure and national security projects.
In the meantime, bans on GPU exports to China will continue to be circumvented (eg [2]) and honestly there's no real reason for those export restrictions anyway.
A lot of people attack US for banning the chip sale to China, but the reality is that the ban is two way. Not only US bans advanced chips, China also severely limits US chips in the hopes that it can spur the homegrown ones. In fact, the first sentence says it much
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has relied on Nvidia Corp. chips that are banned in the country
The neo cloud providers, especially those outside the US, with dubious financial backing, that are buying Nvidia chips as if they were an appreciating asset, kind of like being a bitcoin treasury, will be tempted to create some income in ways that break sanctions.
Since the supply chain is all from the same place, they can get so creative and resourceful. You can get 48 and 96GB VRAM 3090 on the grey market which is pretty awesome.
Where can you get 48/96GB 3090s? I know there are 24GB customized RTX 2080s (there were a few on ebay even last I checked) but I've never even heard of the 3090 being upgraded before.
eBay or aliexpress. A handful of people have bought it on r/locallama. You can search for 4090 48GB (I misremembered, they’re modded 4090, not 3090). There’s 96GB 5090s
If the companies which are officially banned from owning these products already own them, what does it say about recent initiatives to unban Nvidia sales in China?
If demand of companies like deepseek has already been served, will they buy significant volume of additional products from nvidia once it is "legal" again?
It feels like the initiative of US politics to unblock nvidia China sales might not be very fruitful.
Hmm. I’ve been out of the loop too long. When did China start getting munitions laws thrown at it? When I cared to know, Boeing could sell to everyone except NK, Syria, Iran, and two others I’m now blanking on. It didn’t matter we were using cryptography that couldn’t ship there because it was illegal for them to have our hardware in the first place.
This explains the 1000s of “no core no vram” listings for 5090s
If it were due to parts substitution for repairs, would have expected they would be RMA’d rather than salvaged as they’d all be within warranty.
I’ve seen comments saying that many foundational model providers like DeepSeek haven’t done a full pretraining in a long time. Does that mean this use of chips is in reference to the past?
Whilst there aren't many papers on the matter, I would guess that pretraining from scratch is a bit of a waste of money when you could simply expand the depth/width of the 'old' model and retrain only the 'new' bit.
Imagine being a blackmarket GPU smuggler. High danger and high reward to get the most advanced AI silicon to a corporation operating under a repressive regime.
Young travelers have always found ways to subsidize their trips by selling some of their personal possessions while there. I heard Levi’s were so popular during the Cold War that customs started counting your clothes going in and out of Russia, which still wouldn’t stop someone swapping a worn out pair for new ones.
And American cigarettes were popular in Canada in the 90’s and 00’s. IIRC the Turkish tobacco blended in was banned by the Canadian state dept so theirs were garbage. Meanwhile Americans were flying into Canada in order to fly to Cuba.
There is a sudden groundswell of reports about China using nvidia chips, always by unnamed sources, and I suspect if you could trace it back you'll find nvidia pulling the levers.
nvidia is facing a lot of competitive threats and their moat is being filled in. Google with their Ironwood TPU. Amazon with Trainium3. Even Apple is adding tensor cores to their chips, and if Apple went big scale it would be legitimate in the space as well.
We know that China has a number of upstart TPU vendors, and Huawei has built some "better than H200" solutions with a roadmap to much higher heights.
So there is suddenly a bunch of secret-source reports that no, China actually is totally reliant on nvidia. nvidia needs this to be true, or at least people to believe it to be true.
I mean, after all the fanfare about the H200 being allowed to be exported, nvidia shares...dropped. The market doesn't seem to be buying the China reliance bluster.
The phrasing "chips that are banned in the country" seems completely inaccurate. These are chips that the US does not allow to be exported to China. We do not have the power to ban anything in China, that's up to the Chinese government.
Didn't China ban two processors for like 140 companies? It wouldn't be unlike China to ban modern Nvidia chipsets from Alibaba and similar while allowing Deepseek to do what they want. To win at both advancing domestic semiconductor development and also AI.
What do you want to bet ALL GPU's being manufactured by US sources have NSA requirements that now have built into the chips and firmware interesting "controls". They know what region of the world the chip is in, they have features to "brick them" in case of war, etc. Encrypted communication back to US servers required, or if denied, then GPU will not function, etc.
I’d be curious to hear how that could be achieved at a technical level.
Presumably everything youre describing could be averted by simply air gapping the hardware? Or tightly controlling how data gets into and out of the system where the chips are used?
I’d bet good money. The chips have been decapped and roughly analyzed, the only information going into or out of them is from the host systems. Those are easy to convince they are anywhere. Chips don’t have wifi or gps or radios of any kind inside of them, and what the nvidia drivers send and receive to the world is easy to audit.
Yes. China banned NVidia. Jensen Huang said NVidia is the first one in the history banned by both sides. So Deepseek might find a way to get around Chinese government ban if the claim is true
hope so! why should computing technology be restricted based on country? this isn't a nuclear missile (and china already has those, with a much saner strategic policy than us too (we have no policy against preemptive strikes!))
I mean, it makes sense in the USA's head. They want to win the AI race. What they are doing is making it so China has no choice but to develop an alternative to Nvidia chips.
Eventually China will make their own shovels to dig up the gold. I'm not sure what this would do to Nvidia, but I'm sure we will find out.
The funny thing is we do not have the ability to do more than slow them down briefly, so this will simply result in the production of a totally parallel capability that can then be sold to the rest of the world
The ban is on Nvidia selling the chip to China. There is no ban on China using the chips. So long as NVidia isn't knowingly selling the chips to China this is a nothing burger.
CIA disinformation campaigns notwithstanding, maybe accept global competition, open-source models, and the fact that whatever advantage OpenAI had was fleeting and mostly squandered at this point. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is especially brutal if you've never made a profit.
Anyone interested in the topic of whether the US can stay ahead of China should ask AI to explain to them the Chinese concepts of 空降美国人 and 美宝.
These concepts are the reason why during some periods flights to the US have had an uncanny number of pregnant women and flights back to China have had an uncanny number of newborn babies.
Now these babies are adults with US citizenship, with some who returned to the US after primary school and became fully fluent native English speakers, and some of whom may be thoroughly culturally loyal to the Chinese communist party. And 100% hireable by top US AI firms and working there as we speak.
It’s staring everyone right in the face, but it’s taboo to talk about, because people conflate concerns about cultural loyalty with racism.
I don’t dislike these people. I welcome them. I also hope they will learn the value of freedom and (representative) democracy. btw Taiwan is a litmus test. (If you are one of the people I’m speaking about, and you think it would be great if the CCP could take over Taiwan, your values are not aligned with freedom and democracy.)
The point is it’s just silly to think we can stay ahead of China. Some of their best researchers are embedded in some of our best teams.
Keeping the technology from our best researchers is not going to work imho. The only avenue I see is to try to culture hack the AI efforts, and maybe most of the researchers, to be well aligned as we go.
It's really annoying to me that China is in this superposition between a Han ethnostate and a self-proclaimed multicultural multiethnic society, and it always happens to be the more convenient one for any side to make their point
Yeah and Israel is using Microsoft technology to commit war crimes. Which is the greater evil? (Forgive the whataboutism, but the handwringing is real)
I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.
I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
> It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?
Yes. The bans are export controls. They are not banned in china. They are just banned from export in the US. Using them in china is legal in china.
> Yes. The bans are export controls.
These export controls increasingly look like "tax".
> Using them in China is legal in China.Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligen... / https://archive.vn/B2pah
> Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.
I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.
Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
> Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego. I highly agree with you - and that’s coming from someone who can’t stand the Democrats[1]. Things like announcing all of a sudden that he opposes a merger when everybody knows Kushner is involved with a rival bid… it’s too obvious how much corruption is his very operating system. [1] (I didn’t vote for either candidate for President, but I’m not in a swing state so I’m not sorry)
The lesson from Mamdani is that the only way forwards for actual policy based and anticorruption politics is within the Democrat primaries. These are even run by the state in many states, I believe.
Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.
This recent White House is another animal. It’s just bribes all the way down.
Add the Export Clause to the list of flagrant violations of the Constitution by this despicable regime.
That's Corporatism. It's from the fascist playbook where the state takes partial or complete ownership of private companies. Where does that money go, to some slush fund for the president? The reason for the export controls is to keep our potential adversaries from being on the bleeding edge of frontier AI. It goes against the US's interests to give China a leg up with advanced chips. It's almost laughable, of course, as the Nvidia chips are already manufactured in a country that China claims as their own. If they ever pressed the issue, we could find ourselves without the most advanced chips.
This is not at all what is meant by fascist corporatism, nor corporatism more generally. Corporatism is more about collective bargaining by professional trades, and is not the sense of corporation as used for private companies.
Hmm, the way I read “bandit” here was to be implying illegality not necessarily immorality.
It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership. Many of the things they do are questionable or worse. In the case of the DoD, they do these things at the behest of democratically elected leadership.
Of course US and China will operate in their own best interests. Of course they will both play chess, both name call, both sanction and impede. When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle for each country's total economic, soft, and hard power market share.
This is every country.
It's geopolitics.
This is just "might makes right" but modern. I don't know that this is the consistent, wide-held belief that you seem to think it is. Plenty of people would rather our governments not engage in clandestine disruption and undermining of foreign governments.
Competition is inevitable, especially between geopolitical rivals, but we don't have to engage in Minitrue-style "the enemy has always been our enemy" rhetoric.
We live under economic conditions created by a government that does intervene. And a greater world order established by a hegemon that does intervene.
It would be interesting to see what life would be like today had that not happened. It might be better, it might be worse. Probably a little of both for different groups of people.
As the world returns to multi-polarity, there are signs of increases in violence.
The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
> The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
Citations? Simply saying that World War 1 happened during a time of multi-polarity is just begging the question. Multi-polarity of varying degrees has always been the case throughout human history, and often times single-polarity is achieved only through extreme violence.
American Hegemony or Pax Americana (post WWII until present) is the most peaceful period of human history, despite the myriad atrocities which have occurred during that period, from myriad different parties, including the USA itself
A big reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that if one side has the USA on its side, they're basically unattackable for many places since the USA is so over powered militarily and can project force anywhere
It stands to reason as the USA recedes from the world's stage it will get more violent as more nations stand at parity with their adversaries again. And we're certainly seeing wars cropping up lately as the US continues to undermine its traditional allies, bully adversaries, declare trade wars, and withdraw from agreements.
I do not disagree with that assessment, but maybe one can hope that at some point we evolve past this "us versus them" mentality that we inherited from the savannah? If so, it's worth pushing for it.
I think this is too simplistic of an outlook. The post-Napoleonic balance of powers was not uni-polar, it was a carefully constructed and negotiated settlement by diplomats and politicians who knew the cost of war, and it lasted a remarkable 99 years. There were skirmishes in the interim, but the balance of power ensured that the bloodletting never escalated to the point of continent-spanning "world" war...until it did.
Pax Americana, by contrast, was essentially a standoff between ideological opposites that were equipped with enough nuclear weapons to assure mutual destruction. The choices were clear - coexist or die, and there were many opportunities where we narrowly escaped the second option.
You could point to many possible causes of WW1, but I think that a lot of the causes can be traced back to a hot-headed emperor who desired a larger and more prestigious empire but lacked the statecraft to do so without pissing off nearly all of his neighbors. Looking around at our world today at the number of unserious leaders who govern like a bull in a china shop, I would be lying if I didn't see any similar causes for concern.
This is not news, I had "the multi polar world" in history class in high school in the early 2000s, it's just that the US suddenly realized it and has been blind to the change for a while.
Do you think countries behave differently than what the parent has said? This has been going on forever, since the first clan of humans fought another, any reasoning other than "might makes right" is a post-hoc rationalization not based in history.
The theory that humans are evil to one another and that this behavior has been going on since the dawn of time has shaky grounds. David Graeber looks for alternative explanations in his book [1] The Dawn of Everything.
https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-...
Can we at least distinguish between descriptive and normative?
That first sentence feels like one of those fake-deep things that sounds important, but can effectively be used to justify about anything?
Which is to say, in a world that's -- you know -- a society; not screwing over the other guy is often, if not usually, a good way to "optimize your own citizens economic prospects," too.
The very first sentence crashes and burns, because there are multiple moral systems and compasses. Using "imperative" in the context of morals is extra spicy, because it reference a very specific, very strict moral code - The Categorical Imperative.
The CI is, in my experience, not a moral system about personal or group advantage, but about rules the can govern everybody.
> The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership
There is some truth, but this is how you get a crappy-ass intelligence agency.
Good intelligence agencies are focused on gathering intelligence, not performing random tasks that benefit from secrecy.
The US wants to have its cake and eat it too. It will pose around as a democratic and peaceful force, and use these illegal and shady tactics whenever they seem fit. And if you say this, their enablers in the traditional media will label you a conspiracy theorist.
> It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
Surely there are constraints on this, because otherwise, it would be the moral imperative of every country to enslave non-citizens for the benefit of (some subset of) citizens.
Slave labour is very inefficient. It was found to be more beneficial to lure non-citizens with temporary working visas.
>It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
Moral???
Correct, this is double-speak at its maximum.
Any other motivation forfeiting citizens' interests are perceived as treason, therefore immoral, so yes.
So for example addressing climate change might be perceived as treason if it gets in the way of optimizing economic interests?
It can, especially when some other countries commission a new coal power plant every week.
I hate this talking point so much. If you are talking about China, that's just growth. They are also rolling out more solar than the rest of the world combined. While the US is now actively discouraging investing in renewables.
Chinese coal power outgrows renewables still. A Western country with already cleaner energy destroying whatever remains of their manufacturing only to be moved to China and powered by mostly coal is not only treason of its own citizens but also bad for the climate. Feels so good to be "net zero" while importing materialized coal with not much to trade back (other than coal of course).
So when slave trade advances citizens' economic prospects it's moral imperative for the country to facilitate it, right?
> the CIA .. operate in the grey area...
*operate in areas too dark for Anish Kapoor
> When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle
no, battle is not a moral imperative.
bascially a version of its ok to steal from grocery store to feed your kids
More like it's okay for one store to steal from another if they can offer you better prices.
> It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
"Moral imperative"? No country was ever created out of a moral imperative. None. Also, no country was ever created to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects. Every country was created by the elites for the benefits of the elites.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The intent is there.
It's an incredibly complex distributed system with millions of actors and interactions, entrenched powers, regulatory capture, Citizens United, etc. It has to be defended and garbage collected.
I don't want to fight against decades of State propaganda and indoctrination, but do you realise that by "men" they were not referring to black slaves or Mexicans in Texas or California or native Americans(the best Indian in the dead Indian).
well, from my perspective in an occupied Territory, it has to defied and sent home.
stated intent goes nowhere to the harm done.
You mean, the fiction is there. They did use a lot of nice words, but the reality is a bunch of slave owners creating a society controlled by oligarchs.
> The intent is there.
The declaration of independence was written by one of the wealthiest slave owners in the country. "Moral imperative" was certainly not behind the american revolution. The economic interests of the elites were. There are no saints in politics. Just interests - mostly of the elites.
This is an extremely reductive take. Thomas Jefferson was a hero and a scholar! Think about the times he lived in, everyone lived under some sort of aristocratic monarchy, that was the norm. Certainly there were some economic interests at play in tge Revolution, but is it economically smart to declare independence from the most powerful empire of the day? Indeed, many of the "elites" at the time sided with the British! There had to be something more than just "class interests" at play to convince these wealthy elites to renounce their fealty to their government, giving up all legal claims to their property and indeed their very lives, should the revolutionaries have lost.
Why historical did empires collapse or split? Was there always a noble reason that a portion of some empire declared themselves independent and fought a war for it? Maybe they just wanted to be rulers in their own land because they were young and ambitious and willing to put up with some risk.
Both the most vulgar and selfish interest, and the most principled passions, seems to play a role in history at different times. The most important contributing factor, though, is selfish interest of large groups of people, because the sun of it's many little influences do not cancel out, unlike the actions of principled actors. In exceptional times, good intends are allowed to take the front seat just as long as necessary, by the many behind the scene who will silently weight toward the prompt reestablishment of "business as usual".
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Is it morally OK as long as they pay their 25% vig to POTUS?
The concept of morality in this context is absurd.
Projection. China does not even try to export their ideologies to the rest of the world who they see as clearly different culturally. The “west” OTOH does not have a good track record of that.
It's interesting how this sounds like projection to me as well, from the perspective that China does export their ideology. Your post itself seems to be a form of that, whether you're Chinese or not.
China certainly does export their ideologies by telling the world Taiwan is part of China and telling others to not recognize Taiwan as a country. They also have major if not direct influence on Myanmar's civil war. North Korea. Let's not forget the taking land(India, tibet) and extending their borders with man-made islands so they can extend their fishing territories. that's a great track record. you're not biased at all.
How about and.... this might be too radical for you but here me out...... no one with "dominance for humanity overall"
I like how you're careful to use the "west" because if you had said US your argument would have been laughable.
Most European countries did awful things during their colonial years, some late into the XX century. Some still do shady things in Africa right now. And they all welcome money siphoned off peripheral countries by crooks.
Nobody can claim moral superiority.
Give me 1 reason why the USA, the (for now) leader of "the west", is morally superior to China?
I’ve got one. The US doesn’t mow down its citizens with tanks for protesting, and then perpetually suppress all discussion of the incident.
(Yes, there have been situations that are similar in theme, but they paw in comparison to that incident.)
You felt the need to backpedal before hitting submit, so you're almost there.
China doesn't allow people to freely leave the country. How is that ok?
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I see Chinese citizens traveling abroad every day. Doesn't look like they cannot travel. Freedom of what exactly? Are you really free in America when you have to toil away 12 hours per day to make ends meet? Honestly funny to see people falling for American propaganda.
They only let some of them out. And it's hard to get a passport. Most other countries work the opposite way. You need approval to enter. In China, you need approval to exit.
Personally, I'm against both of those.
So just no borders? That's fair I guess.
One way to think about it: if every country prevents people from entering, the effect is exactly the same as one country preventing people from leaving.
Very few Americans commenting here have to toil away for 12 hours to make ends meet.
China's economy is very much capitalist.
Oh god, it's like talking to my Dad. What is Communism?
Your Dad is wise. And you can Google it.
It's fine if you don't know.
Communism is a political and economic ideology aiming for a classless society where the community, rather than individuals, owns major resources like factories and land, distributing wealth based on need.
yes stealing is morally wrong?
They did not subtract anything from anyone.
Smuggling or buying from a smuggler is on the "banditry" side whether you think it's moral or not.
Hypothetical: I buy a product imported legally from the US and later sell it on the local used market to a Chinese tourist who takes it back to China with them. Where is the crime, smuggling, or 'banditry' here? US law is just that - US law.
If the importer didn't have the intent of it going to the tourist, then things are fine for that one-off GPU. If they did have that intent we quickly get to smuggling territory, with or without you as a middleman.
And for GPU trips without a country in between, the plausible deniability is close to zero.
I think it's not.
> Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems,
This is just model distillation.
Anyone with the expertise to build a model from scratch (which DeepSeek certainly can) can do this in a careful manner.
> but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators.
Bingo.
I have no problem with pirates pirating other pirates.
Screw OpenAI and Anthropic closed source models built from public data. The law should be that weights trained from non-owned sources should be public domain, or that any copyright holder can sue them and demand model takedown.
Google and Meta are probably the only two AI companies that have a right to license massive amounts of training data from social media and user file uploads given that their ToSes grant them these rights. But even Meta is pirating stuff.
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic continue pirating training data and keeping the results closed, China's open source strategy will win out in the end. It erodes the crust of value that is carefully guarded by the American giants. Everyone else will be integrating open models and hacking them apart, splicing them in new ways.
Google and Meta are probably the only two companies that have a right to license their training data
For the sake of someone unfamiliar... Why is that?
Did they pay teams of monkeys to generate their own, novel training data? Or gain explicit, opt-in permission from users who entrust them with their files/content?
I'm pretty sure Meta stole a bunch of content for training by torrenting it - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/court-documents-show...
> For the sake of someone unfamiliar... Why is that?
I edited my comment, but basically they both own massive social media properties (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) or file upload sites (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail) and their ToSes grant them these rights. You accept these terms when you use their services.
That's not great, but we are getting free services. It's in the terms.
It's a whole lot better than just scraping without permission, compensation, acknowledgement, or even notice.
To be clear, I have no problem with these models being built. But if they "steal" the data, the resultant model shouldn't be owned by anyone. It should be public domain and not allowed to be kept as a trade secret.
And it's funny that Anthropic is trying to depress our wages by training on our code. Again - I'm fine with that - I want to work faster, and I like these models and their capabilities. But Anthropic shouldn't be able to own the models they train off of us exclusively since they didn't license or buy our data. They provided us with nothing at all.
Facebook stole copyrighted material well above their own and admitted to it. It's not just "we took our users data", its "we literally downloaded torrent with 81 terabytes of books and used that for training".
Google most likely did something similar, just using books they already had indexed in Google Books, and probably by still seriously violating any reasonable notion of copyright
You accept these terms when you use their services.
I certainly didn't*. I'd love to see litigation testing just how solid those insidious opt-in-by-default schemes are as a basis for "ownership".
If they had users explicitly opt-in with a "Yes, go ahead and train on my stuff and by the way I assert that I have all the rights to grant you the same", I'd have no problem with that, and they'd have a much stronger claim.
(*Before others inevitably disagree: I do opt-out of this stuff aggressively, and further send notice to companies from time to time that I don't agree to certain objectionable clauses of their ToS and they're welcome to close my account).
> and further send notice to companies from time to time that I don't agree to certain objectionable clauses of their ToS and they're welcome to close my account
And then you stopped using their service right?
Sometimes, if they said tough luck.
Other times they turn a blind eye and choose to provide the service (and collect my money) despite the lack of agreement to some part of their standard terms and their tacit acknowledgement that I didn't accept them. On two occasions their legal team responded and said "that's fine", and once they actually fixed their ToS.
People who didn't grow up dealing with paper contracts where you could easily redline and send back for countersigning don't seem to understand that you don't just need to blindly say "yes" to everything a company tries to foist upon you.
The explicit opt in is only necessary under gdpr, which is a lot of data, but not a majority.
only necessary under gdpr
It's not that simple. The EU may be the only ones to have codified that, but there's centuries of case law in other jurisdictions dealing with ownership, that once the matter hits litigation might turn out to say something other than these tech companies would like.
> less than legal means.
This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
> This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade.
In this case it's just wrong. I don't know what people think "e-waste" recycling actually is or what happens to their "unrepairable" units after they rid themselves of them.
> Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state.
Interestingly the Dollar is most definitely meaningful outside of our state. I think the assumption becomes, that if this is true, then using it's power to enforce trade sanctions isn't that big a stretch.
> Of course people will evade sanctions
What's less clear if they should expect their government to actively help them in this evasion or not. I think the Chinese citizens are in unique international territory here.
> what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
Deny our exports to them. This will cost the political donor class a lot of profits. So this is why it doesn't get done.
None of this is a fait accompli. This is the result of years of intentional corruption of the core systems involved.
Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Embargoes aren't impossible to enforce against the foreign importer. If a foreign entity is found to have placed orders with false documents, they can be sanctioned, which can be enforced against any of their international operations. It makes it hard for them to do future business in global markets. I would not recommend violating US sanctions no matter where you are.
> Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Expecting to strangle world markets with intellectual property as your moat is absurd. You can only fight honest competition with dishonest means for so long, and intellectual property is one of the dirtiest tricks in the book.
The companies it "stole" from broke the law in their own country while acquiring the training data; frankly sanction avoidance is lesser and arguably not even their (it's the people in US that smuggle them, nothing breaking china law afaik) crime
It's not even stealing. They paid OpenAI for the tokens. It violates the OpenAI TOS, which specifically forbids using it's outputs for training competing models (which is very ironic)
There’s no honor among thieves. You don’t get to cry about Chinese “bandits” when Anthropic just had to pay $1 billion to settle a massive copyright infringement lawsuit. All of these models were created through the mass-scale theft of humanity’s intellectual property, personal data, and dignity.
Open always beats closed. Drain the moats. Starve the ClosedAI beast.
Everyone trains on queries from other models, it's called distillation
Well, given AI content cannot be copyrighted, haters can hate hate hate hate hate...
That's a little disingenuous. If i buy a printer and use the ink in the cartridge to reverse engineer a beautiful red, have i stolen something from the printer manufacturer? Especially if they lose business because they no longer have what distinguished them?
Clean room design is not new (or illegal), but it's always been a form of stealing
> It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.
Strictly speaking, it's not illegal for them to acquire it, it's illegal for an exporter in the US to sell (even if transitively) to them.
I think the fact that DeepSeek trains on competitor queries (i.e., distillation) — along with using banned Nvidia chips — helps explain how it can achieve such low training costs (USD 6 million vs. billions) while delivering only slightly worse performance than its American counterparts. It also undermines the narrative that DeepSeek or China is posing a serious challenge to the U.S. lead in AI. The gap may be closing, but the initial reactions now seem knee-jerk.
That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.
These models never cost billions to train and I doubt the final training run for models like GPT-4 cost more than 8 figures. 6 million is definitely cheaper and I would attribute that to distillation.
training on data isn’t stealing the data, in the same way learning from a textbook doesn’t mean youre stealing from it
> I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data
All the labs permitting synthetic data do that.
pretty sure it is against ToS for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Did OpenAI observe any ToS when scraping content from the Internet? Sorry, but you cannot complain about stealing the stolen. OpenAI cannot even have the copyright on ChatGPT output, because it's a tool.
ToS didn't stop the companies that built those models and it won't stop the companies that bootstrap off them. Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way.
Didn’t Anthropic already eat a $1.5 billion lawsuit?
> Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way
If only. That's my dream, massive copyright lawsuits against all of these AI players and maybe the courts can do something good for a change, put an end to all of this AI bullshit
It's against my ToS for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to train their models on my writing, but they've all done that. They are free to pound sand.
Not the heckin' ToS!
They don't need to break any laws for this. Where do you think are the customers for data centers in the Middle East? Chinese companies do everything legally, paying for access to data centers that got the chips directly from the US.
Lets take the weapons embargos placed on Israel by our allies. In the NDAA must pass bill we set funds aside to procure those weapons and sell them to Israel. We don't really care about these things we have selective enforcement.
| Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems
Not sure why you would expect this, all the models started doing this as its much more cost effective to get data for post training don't you remember the first grok release where many times it started replies "as a model trained by openai..."
"The TBD group is using several third-party models as part of the training process for Avocado, distilling from rival models including Google’s Gemma, OpenAI’s gpt-oss and Qwen, a model from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the people said."
LOL. Distillation doesn't count as plagiarism, or you should call Meta out on it. They're distilling the Chinese model.
Ref: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/inside-meta-s-piv...
i find it weird that this comment got so much pushback. i don't think it was portraying deepseek as any more morally wrong than anyone else, or castigating anyone as morally wrong.
but maybe i gave it a gracious reading.
Lol @ quoting 3 companies that broke any possible copyright law as victims.
Singapore is where it happens.
I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country.
So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.
Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
People with Chinese names do sometimes live in Delaware.
Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.
This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.
Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?
Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.
On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)
What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.
If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.
And Australia; ~5% of Australia's population is Chinese origin.
With their profile in Australia?
While this is likely what the op was suggesting,
I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.
Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.
So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.
1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop
2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)
> Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag
And a good thing, too, or I would be concerned about posting that I knew it was going somewhere forbidden.
Sometimes. But the vast proportion live in China. Like 9000 vs 1.4 Billion.
I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.
> So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop
Cool, though. Where can I buy one? :p
last I checked you can find these cards with more VRAM on aliexpress and ebay.
Same!
Can't they do it here? or will the authorities go after these kind of upgrades?
Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.
I think you are overestimating the ease of getting hopper/blackwell from alibaba or ebay.
Yeah? Tried Ebay Singpore as a first try, seems like there is plenty of stuff: https://www.ebay.com.sg/sch/i.html?_nkw=gpu+blackwell
Edit: just for fun (and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too, seems not-impossible: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=blackwell+gpu&_sacat=0&...
> and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too
Eh, you'd have to cross the Himalayas and go through what is kind of a military zone.
Kazakhstan and Vietnam are more suitable candidates, but neither has actually good infrastructure connectivity to China.
One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!
Chinese government recently banned Chinese companies from buying Nvidia chips.
Yup, the change was in the news in September
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/china-blocks-sal...
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
The US government doesn't really care either.
We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.
> suspicious bidders
A person with a Chinese name living in Delaware? Gasp.
Why would the Chinese government care about US export restrictions in the first place?
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Where does nvidia manufacture those chips?
The Republic of a China, not the People's Republic of China. You might not legally be able to identify the difference in your jurisdiction.
Right. I am a TSMC shareholder. I know this story.
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Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything.
Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.
This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs.
The illegality of something and the enforcement of that illegality can be mutually exclusive. Iran had sanctions placed on them after the 1979 revolution, but the US funneled arms to them anyway to raise money to ovethrow the Nicaraguan government [0]. Cocaine is illegal but the CIA trafficked it anyway to again raise money to topple the Sandinistas [1].
[0] https://www.history.com/articles/iran-contra-affair#Oliver-N...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/US/9811/03/cia.drugs/
It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.
I don’t think the root problem is political corruption or donors.
If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.
The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.
> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]
The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.
The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.
Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.
Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else.
You can investigate buyers who have anomalous purchase patterns for sanction violations and convict them. DEA commonly looks at narcotic purchases by legal buyers for indications they might be funneling it to illegal market and investigates. NVidia could report "Hey, we are seeing massive purchases from entities we didn't expect so you might want to look into that"
Maybe criminal cartels should switch to GPU trafficking?
Mexican cartels were branching out into the avocado trade, so why not.
Cartels, mafias and other criminal organisations have been involved in other industries for many generations now. Money laundering requires legitimate businesses and if that business happens to turn a profit. That's even better. Just look at the construction industry in new York or Italy many decades ago.
By now most Mafias of the world are probably trying to train their own models
great thinking, that must be why the ccp doesn't care about this policy
This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).
Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.
A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident.
If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.
> many people speak negatively of the CCP
Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes.
I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that.
Increased costs might be a factor in a competing commercial market, but for military purposes, you buy the components no matter the price or search for an alternative (China is now making lot of components - for example, resistors, transistors, logic chips - I have several 74HC chips of Chinese origin, and they are very cheap). Also, there are thousands ships and no legal basis for "policing" them in open sea.
Imagine the correct answer being "what incident?"
> chips that are banned in the country
> The US bans the sale of these advanced semiconductors to China
Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
> Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
Many Americans, including their government, seem to think that US laws apply globally.
They have extradited Ukrainian men from Poland because that Ukrainian was running a torrent website (illegal in the US, not illegal in Ukraine nor Poland).
They tried getting an Australian extradited from Sweden and the UK for supposedly hosting a website that contained information the US government considered illegally obtained.
More egregiously, they have kidnapped tens to hundreds of people from various countries, sometimes on reasons as flimsy as watch model or name, to torture (sometimes to death), because a lawyer working for the president decided that's actually legal because they're waves hands "enemy combattants".
The same government that runs Guantanamo prison, known for it's illegal torture practices and imprisoning people with no charges?
Can't be!
Fun fact, when US prisoner of wars were water boarded by the Japanese, these got death sentences.
When a US soldier was photographed in Vietnam waterboarding a vietnamese PoW he got 22 years of prison.
Then came 2002 and rule of law stopped applying.
> When a US soldier was photographed in Vietnam waterboarding a vietnamese PoW he got 22 years of prison.
Really? Did he serve more than a month? Because if the people who committed My Lai for off with slaps on the wrist, I can't imagine something as trivial as waterboarding would get any serious consequences.
I am referring to this is the picture [1] which was printed on the post in 1968.
I am not able to find more information about the court martialed soldier, but the fact that he was sentenced to 22 years of prison is a quote from a lecture of professor Sarah Paine from the US Navy War Academy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waterboarding_a_captured_...
I believe it is very much a two-way ban, depending on the specific chips [0].
[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/17/china-bans-tech-...
China banned companies from buying the made-for-China 6000D.
I'm sure they have knowledge of it being backdoored or underpowered/buggy.
IIRC they ban companies that got funding from china's government. i.e. they don't want their investment in AI to go to NVIDIA but to local chipmakers
Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.
"In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down."
acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position
every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way
When china will do it, I'll judge them for it.
If I don't make the world worse then someone else will is such a depressing state of affairs.
If that's the mentality, then what's worth fighting over? We should give up because we don't even deserve the rewards.
we shouldn't give up securing resources for ourselves, our loved ones, and our nations
"If I don't make the world worse then someone else will is such a depressing state of affairs."
its not make the world worse but simply take what matters to your group
does that evil??? hmmm noo, people call it patriotism
what do you think entire US military base reside in 80% of the world btw????? does US military doing picnic on these country?????
I can tell you answer but some people didn't want to confront reality and would be downvote me to hell
but in the end someone gotta to do it
china's global status was obtained very differently from the US, its material interests and levers of influence are different
if china was in the same position as the us it would just be the us; obviously this is not inherent to nationality, but material conditions
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The player has the power to change the game.
That is just not true. The referees have the power to change the game. The fans have the power to change the game. The owners and the commissioners have the power to change the game. The players have no power at all.
I don’t see how that follows
China banned them tho.
China banned them AFTER the US first banned them and then unbanned them and a series of unfriendly trade moves by the US.
This discussion where China is always purely dishonest, bad etc. without any context is honestly lame.
The Chinese ban is largely a political move designed to signal that they're not going to be pushed around. They pretty much know companies are using them, (and H100 in Thailand etc.) but as long as it sends a message and over time incentives domestic development, (which it does), then good as far as they're concerned.
It's certainly better than the EU just rolling over for King Donald, which as a EU citizen is embarrassing.
> It's certainly better than the EU just rolling over for King Donald, which as a EU citizen is embarrassing.
I'm seeing it more as buying time thing. In sourcing as much as possible in the EU is already in progress, as well as various trade agreements with different countries and economic blocs. That doesn't mean it isn't preferable to play nice with the demented guy to make the transition less painful in the short term.
The problem is, the EU is damaging its relationships with countries like China and India etc. too, rather than building strategic alliances,
On diplomatic trips, it often 'lectures' others, rather than listens. I think the EU is less and less liked by these other countries too, which is a disastrous combination when coupled with where the US is at imo.
> On diplomatic trips, it often 'lectures' others, rather than listens.
Like when?
i.e. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/kaja-kallas-history/ - or from the Chinese side https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202509/1342651.shtml
This is not good diplomacy.
Chinese propaganda full of nonsense falsehoods isn't better diplomacy either.
> Guo noted that the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was an important part of the World Anti-Fascist War. 80 years ago, the Chinese people made tremendous national sacrifices to save human civilization
Lol, that particular part is hilarious. Imperial Japan wasn't drastically different in terms of governance compared to Chiang's or Mao's China. All three were pretty brutal anti-democratic regimes. Chiang had pretty clear fascist inspirations too.
> showed a lack of basic historical knowledge
Indeed, Chinese propaganda doesn't concern itself with historical knowledge. Those are the same people who imagine claims to half of Southeast Asia.
But China is a bit like Russia, their foreign minister blabbers nonsense, but that doesn't prevent actual trade or deal making.
I don't think I ever saw a more illiterate comment in my life.
Why? Neither Chiang nor Mao were fighting "the anti-fascist war". Both were more interested in fighting each other, for starters.
Imperial Japan being considered fascist is also quite the stretch. And importantly, neither of the two/myriad of Chinese entities was fighting "to preserve human civilisation". When they were fighting the Japanese for a change, it was because the Japanese were attacking them.
The article tries to position China as some "was fighting for good in WW2 so it's unfair to say current China is autocratic with it's buddies in NK and Russia". Even if it were true thay China was fighting for a good cause in WW2 (extremely debatable), doesn't in the slightest change the fact that today, China is an autocratic regime. How long is Xi's term? How long has he been in power? For how long will he be in power? It's the same story as Putin.
China's foreign minister might bitch about it all he wants, it's nothing but the truth. You can consider that autocratic regimes aren't inherently bad, and that's a debate to be had about upsides and downsides. But it is categorically nonsense to pretend that China isn't autocratic.
Especially since the demented guys public support seems to be in freefall. Why not wait a year and kick him when he is down on the ground.
It’s debatable whether it’s a better use of US power and resources to try to stop PRC from obtaining these chips versus, say, sinking the Chinese fishing fleets actively wrecking entire ecosystems. I probably agree with you that on balance working on the later problem has a higher long term ROI.
I agree that a fair playing field for everyone would be the ideal state.
But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either.
The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.
The US sanctions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. I thought that was quite obvious historically and specially now. They've imposed tariffs on literally every country on the planet.
Tariffs are applied to countries that we are "ripping off", if King Donald's definition is used consistently for every country. If we had a surplus, you still get a 10% tariff that Americans have to pay...
It's my fault for wading into a political discussion on a forum of react developers. That's on me.
But the "banned" chips this article is referring to and the original chips act is from the Biden administration, having nothing to do with the current tariff climate.
Also, obviously US actions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. Nor does China feel that way either. Which is my point.
Forum of react developers is wild. I, for one, appreciate the humor
China has promised to wage war and forcibly subjugate Taiwan, a democratic ally and critical trade partner. If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
>If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
Total historical illiteracy. if only there was an island nation immediately southeast of the US we could look to for information on how America treats countries that try the whole "back off" thing
What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand.
I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
Yes, it’s easy, cheap and it works. Maybe they need a super big volume and all the GPUs in the same space, to guarantee minimum latency.
OpenAi, Anthropic, etc have access to specialized network topologies from high profile relationships with cloud providers. I don't think you can get anything like that off the shelf.
If the CIA shows up, Amazon is 100% going to let them rootkit those boxes. They might even have a way to do it without rebooting your servers.
To obtain what? Deepseek's newest open source model before they release it?
You think they’re only going to eavesdrop?
You’re mistaking them for the FBI. CIA has destabilized entire countries.
You can’t really spend $500k on AWS without doing some form of identity disclosure.
A shell company complete with directors of your preferred nationality is trivial to procure for relatively small amounts of money.
That's fair, I'm also not accessing these resources from Russia or North Korea so I imagine there's different precautions for different countries.
sure but to do this at scale you need better control of the networking layer than they typically give you, and there will definitely be KYC at a certain point in the process
I don't think DeepSeek could do that in the volume they need
It’s always the bandwidth. Noisy neighbors or part of the Eight Fallacies and the cloud tries to pretend they don’t exist.
I mean, I thought the paranoia was about China making their own models with their own chips. If they're renting USA models via the cloud, that's "good".
You should really seek to actually understand an issue before you comment so arrogantly.
US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.
Traditional social norms are reversed online because there is no threat of immediate violence. Arrogance gets attention. Politeness gets ignored. Don't be so harsh. It's just how this generation communicates.
I don't think anyone is surprised by this.. And I'm almost certain nothing will happen. When manufacturing is next door to you, you'll find a way to get your hands on chips.
> And I'm almost certain nothing will happen
What realistically could happen? Nvidia is already prohibited from selling their GPUs to China, I guess if you wanted it to really stop, you'd need to prohibit Nvidia from selling GPUs in any other country but the US, and require some sort of government controlled license to be able to buy it inside the US. Neither of which sound like realistic options.
So what could anyone really do, to "solve" this "problem"?
License leases, this is what they can do.
You log into the Nvidia Enterprise Portal and download a license file that is temporary valid (e.g. 7 days) and bound to the specific serial numbers.
You transfer that file to your local license (DLS) server.
It does not need to be permanently connected to the internet, but it needs to be refreshed periodically.
Your local server now holds the tickets that the GPUs need to use to run (obviously checked by the GPU itself, not on a driver-level, though driver could be a first step).
https://docs.nvidia.com/license-system/dls/index.html
If an account is suspected of violation, they get suspended and need to pass the KYC again.
It's not perfect (as violators can use shell companies), but it is relatively elegant. In case of shell companies, they can get caught one day or another.
Regular users or those who don’t need air-gapped network can just stay online and the lease automatically renew in the background. Friction-less.
Added benefit: nobody is going to try to steal your cards
Minus: enshittification of the world in the name of politics, and Nvidia will lose sales, and backfire at the US economy
I hope they don't plan it
A government-funded party would likely have an exploit or jailbroken firmware up and run in in days, if not sooner
A new opportunity for my new business: a datacenter right off the Chinese border with a VPN tunnel into China!
Better run "Super AI company LLC" from Singapore, download the tickets, send them by email, and run it in China
This guy worked for Microsoft. I can tell.
didn't the US just allow H200s to China last few days btw
> And I'm almost certain nothing will happen.
The Chinese government has done more for less so I wouldn't be so certain.
This isn't a Chinese government ban, though. It's a US export restriction, not a Chinese import restriction. So why would the Chinese government do anything at all?
The gamernexus point about "open one eye, close one eye" was on point here.
China instructed companies to stop using nvidia chips too...knowing fully well it'll not stop. It achieves their aim though - a strong nudge in the direction of independence.
Much of Chinese top level direction seems to be that way - indicating direction of travel and implied future threats for companies not rowing in said direction
As for the US side of the ban - that's about as sound as the war on drugs. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that's futile
As someone who doesn't want to live in a country run by corporations, that first part of indication the direction of travel sounds like a good idea. Obviously, the companies should follow the direction set out by the nation willingly and not because of threats, but otherwise it doesn't sound like a dumb idea to try to unify people toward some goal rather than the goal being "individuals can get very, very rich and wealthy".
Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.
Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.
Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.
It seems pretty difficult to prevent two other countries from trading, especially when it is sort of low-volume (I mean how many boats full of GPUs was this? It isn’t like oil or something, where we can see the infrastructure to consume it via satellite).
Long term consequences: China outperforms Nvidia, by producing cheaper, faster chips at a large scale, by getting inspired by the IP but using their own production lines.
Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.
Well done.
If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.
> Long term consequences: China outperforms Nvidia, by producing cheaper, faster chips at a large scale, by getting inspired by the IP but using their own production lines.
Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no.
Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing some things down and forcing reallocation of investment away from other areas into the sanctioned areas.
The US refraining from sanctions is likely the stupid move, because that lever of control will expire at some point. To not use it is to squander it.
But if there's one thing the US government and its business elite is good at, it's squandering things.
"Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen.
It's ridiculous to think they won't succeed, just by dint of sheer numbers alone.
> "Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. Sanctions and tariffs need to be coupled with massive investments to build new capabilities, and the latter is usually lacking. For instance, tariff revenue (and then some) should be poured directly into subsidies for building new facilities that support critical industries (like rare earths and electronics manufacturing). And things would probably be counterintuitively more effective if there was more tolerance of waste For instance, China's subsidized hundreds of solar panel manufacturers, none of them make money and a lot have probably failed, but the vicious domestic competition has helped them dominate that technology globally. The US freaked out in a massive scandal when one subsidized solar panel maker went out of business.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative.
There were lots of stories along the lines of https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/china-microchi... from the early 2020s, not so many lately. Their internal posture will now be the same as Russia's post-1945 push for the Bomb. Continued failure will (possibly literally) place heads at stake.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated.
They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
> Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative.
That's how things sometimes go when you're building up a capability. I'm sure they were going to work through the setbacks, regardless.
>> The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated.
> They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy.
No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy.
It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply.
Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Trump is the living embodiment of the old cliché about how in the Chinese language, the words for "threat" and "opportunity" are similar. His actions have comforted Russia, alienated Europe, and galvanized China.
> It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply.
> Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Sorry dude, all of that is coming from inside your own head. You're so blinded by Trump that you're incapable of having this conversation.
I don't want to put in the effort to try to fix that. Have a nice day.
I don't know much about GPUs, but is there really any value in IP? I can learn to write HDL code all day long, but turning it into real transistors is the hard part. Code is worth nothing nowadays with AI.
not IP in particular but APIs. Putting your existing CUDA codebase into new NVIDIA generation that might be noticeably more expensive but is still faster/more energy-efficient than competition.
Competition's software stack have to be good enough that it is worth migrating over and I think till we get some kind of cross vendor API for that it won't happen for a while
I thought it was impossible for them to leapfrog without actively occupying the TSMC fab as it takes years and years just to dial-in the insane precision.
Bob is a citizen of X, the site formerly known as twitter where their are no laws
Meanwhile, Nvidia is in the awkward position of being legally required to deny everything but economically incentivized to sell as much as Washington allows
this is revenge for stealing their silkmoths isnt it?
and their proprietary tea strains
and forcing them to allow opium to be sold in their country
and forcing them to give up major port cities and open up trade against their wishes
Honestly whenever China gets around to getting its served-extremely-cold revenge for all the savagery committed against it in the 19th and 20th centuries, some chips are going to be the least of everyone's problems.
Also, porcelain, paper and gunpowder. And maybe (don't remember exactly), magnetic compass.
I think that was the British? We are just getting over hating them ourselves.
A quick read of some British press and you'll realize that the British are going through their own self-hate moment, so everyone is aligned.
This is what living in the ashes of an empire does to you.
Will come for the USA in time.
Already ahead of you there sport. November 2016.
the american century of humiliation begins
The opium will be full of sugar and preservatives though.
Or fentanyl!
This is the least surprising thing ever and was highly suspected when DeepSeek released their original model.
We've also seen this with sanctions on Russia but they still somehow bought a bunch of TI chips for missiles [1].
As many here know, the US restricts the export of certain technology to China because reasons. This includes lithography machines from ASML, a Dutch company, who have a monopoly on the latest EUV processes. It's geopolitically interesting that the big buyer of ASML products are TSMC in TAiwan as well as Samsung in South Korea (and possibly Japan?).
I expect this will become a national security issue for China and long-term you will see China try and replicate the best lithographic processes and chips such that the gap will greatly narrow. This will take years and involves a lot of depenedent industries but of anyone China has shown the willingness, ability and resolve to pursue decades-long infrastructure and national security projects.
In the meantime, bans on GPU exports to China will continue to be circumvented (eg [2]) and honestly there's no real reason for those export restrictions anyway.
[1]: https://archive.is/S2uD4
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-justice-department-ac...
A lot of people attack US for banning the chip sale to China, but the reality is that the ban is two way. Not only US bans advanced chips, China also severely limits US chips in the hopes that it can spur the homegrown ones. In fact, the first sentence says it much
See also below:https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-shares-gain-trump...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bans-foreign-ai-ch...
Well if unnamed sources are saying it you know it has to be true.
Oh no, this will lead to better models for less money!
The neo cloud providers, especially those outside the US, with dubious financial backing, that are buying Nvidia chips as if they were an appreciating asset, kind of like being a bitcoin treasury, will be tempted to create some income in ways that break sanctions.
This is so obvious, have you seen how many GPUs does Singapore and the countries nearby are buying?
They are still training with less than 1/10 of what the US companies do own, and yet having similar results.
China is killing it.
Since the supply chain is all from the same place, they can get so creative and resourceful. You can get 48 and 96GB VRAM 3090 on the grey market which is pretty awesome.
Where can you get 48/96GB 3090s? I know there are 24GB customized RTX 2080s (there were a few on ebay even last I checked) but I've never even heard of the 3090 being upgraded before.
eBay or aliexpress. A handful of people have bought it on r/locallama. You can search for 4090 48GB (I misremembered, they’re modded 4090, not 3090). There’s 96GB 5090s
If the companies which are officially banned from owning these products already own them, what does it say about recent initiatives to unban Nvidia sales in China?
If demand of companies like deepseek has already been served, will they buy significant volume of additional products from nvidia once it is "legal" again?
It feels like the initiative of US politics to unblock nvidia China sales might not be very fruitful.
Hmm. I’ve been out of the loop too long. When did China start getting munitions laws thrown at it? When I cared to know, Boeing could sell to everyone except NK, Syria, Iran, and two others I’m now blanking on. It didn’t matter we were using cryptography that couldn’t ship there because it was illegal for them to have our hardware in the first place.
Since they're going to get them anyways, maybe we should exchange a few for a few pandas with the right to reproduce.
Sanctions are stupid. Its a sign that the country realizes it can't compete fairly anymore.
These bans are hard to enforce.
You just need any company outside china that isn't under sanction to buy them and then sell them.
Even further, you can skip the hardware buying entirely and set some shell company to buy compute from the dozens of vendors.
This explains the 1000s of “no core no vram” listings for 5090s If it were due to parts substitution for repairs, would have expected they would be RMA’d rather than salvaged as they’d all be within warranty.
I’ve seen comments saying that many foundational model providers like DeepSeek haven’t done a full pretraining in a long time. Does that mean this use of chips is in reference to the past?
Whilst there aren't many papers on the matter, I would guess that pretraining from scratch is a bit of a waste of money when you could simply expand the depth/width of the 'old' model and retrain only the 'new' bit.
Even if they're not doing full-from-scratch training every cycle, any serious model updates still soak up GPU hours
Imagine being a blackmarket GPU smuggler. High danger and high reward to get the most advanced AI silicon to a corporation operating under a repressive regime.
Sounds straight out of sci-fi.
Illegal video gamers playing 3d shooters in virtual world using contraband gpus
The wild part is that it sounds sci-fi, but the reality is probably way less glamorous
I don't think a h100 in the prison pocket would be very comfortable.
The main reason "Nvidia chips control" doesn’t work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining Nvidia chips nor breaking laws.
Young travelers have always found ways to subsidize their trips by selling some of their personal possessions while there. I heard Levi’s were so popular during the Cold War that customs started counting your clothes going in and out of Russia, which still wouldn’t stop someone swapping a worn out pair for new ones.
And American cigarettes were popular in Canada in the 90’s and 00’s. IIRC the Turkish tobacco blended in was banned by the Canadian state dept so theirs were garbage. Meanwhile Americans were flying into Canada in order to fly to Cuba.
There is a sudden groundswell of reports about China using nvidia chips, always by unnamed sources, and I suspect if you could trace it back you'll find nvidia pulling the levers.
nvidia is facing a lot of competitive threats and their moat is being filled in. Google with their Ironwood TPU. Amazon with Trainium3. Even Apple is adding tensor cores to their chips, and if Apple went big scale it would be legitimate in the space as well.
We know that China has a number of upstart TPU vendors, and Huawei has built some "better than H200" solutions with a roadmap to much higher heights.
So there is suddenly a bunch of secret-source reports that no, China actually is totally reliant on nvidia. nvidia needs this to be true, or at least people to believe it to be true.
I mean, after all the fanfare about the H200 being allowed to be exported, nvidia shares...dropped. The market doesn't seem to be buying the China reliance bluster.
We gotta protect Altmans and Jensen's moat. Can't have those Bad Guys compete and drive down profits.
The phrasing "chips that are banned in the country" seems completely inaccurate. These are chips that the US does not allow to be exported to China. We do not have the power to ban anything in China, that's up to the Chinese government.
I thought China also wanted them banned to dogfood domestic chips?
Which they did! https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/china-tells-its-tech-compa...
Didn't China ban two processors for like 140 companies? It wouldn't be unlike China to ban modern Nvidia chipsets from Alibaba and similar while allowing Deepseek to do what they want. To win at both advancing domestic semiconductor development and also AI.
it's the standard USian view that their laws apply worldwide
I learned it by watching you, Dad.
American Imperialism is European Imperialism 2.0.
Fine. Good. Unless you want the Chinese to be even more motivated to develop an alternative to Nvidia chips.
What do you want to bet ALL GPU's being manufactured by US sources have NSA requirements that now have built into the chips and firmware interesting "controls". They know what region of the world the chip is in, they have features to "brick them" in case of war, etc. Encrypted communication back to US servers required, or if denied, then GPU will not function, etc.
I’d be curious to hear how that could be achieved at a technical level.
Presumably everything youre describing could be averted by simply air gapping the hardware? Or tightly controlling how data gets into and out of the system where the chips are used?
I’d bet good money. The chips have been decapped and roughly analyzed, the only information going into or out of them is from the host systems. Those are easy to convince they are anywhere. Chips don’t have wifi or gps or radios of any kind inside of them, and what the nvidia drivers send and receive to the world is easy to audit.
You give the tech too much credit.
Did china ban them too? I mean.. why should a chinese company care about american regulation?
Yes. China banned NVidia. Jensen Huang said NVidia is the first one in the history banned by both sides. So Deepseek might find a way to get around Chinese government ban if the claim is true
hope so! why should computing technology be restricted based on country? this isn't a nuclear missile (and china already has those, with a much saner strategic policy than us too (we have no policy against preemptive strikes!))
I mean, it makes sense in the USA's head. They want to win the AI race. What they are doing is making it so China has no choice but to develop an alternative to Nvidia chips.
Eventually China will make their own shovels to dig up the gold. I'm not sure what this would do to Nvidia, but I'm sure we will find out.
The funny thing is we do not have the ability to do more than slow them down briefly, so this will simply result in the production of a totally parallel capability that can then be sold to the rest of the world
The ban is on Nvidia selling the chip to China. There is no ban on China using the chips. So long as NVidia isn't knowingly selling the chips to China this is a nothing burger.
Send to Singapore then to China, it’s a prett simple loophole.
Oh no! Anyway ...
CIA disinformation campaigns notwithstanding, maybe accept global competition, open-source models, and the fact that whatever advantage OpenAI had was fleeting and mostly squandered at this point. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is especially brutal if you've never made a profit.
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Related: Deepseek just leapfrogged the competition. Scores gold in 2025's IMO, IOI, and ICPC world finals with an openweights model.
:shocked pikachu face:
Anyone interested in the topic of whether the US can stay ahead of China should ask AI to explain to them the Chinese concepts of 空降美国人 and 美宝.
These concepts are the reason why during some periods flights to the US have had an uncanny number of pregnant women and flights back to China have had an uncanny number of newborn babies.
Now these babies are adults with US citizenship, with some who returned to the US after primary school and became fully fluent native English speakers, and some of whom may be thoroughly culturally loyal to the Chinese communist party. And 100% hireable by top US AI firms and working there as we speak.
It’s staring everyone right in the face, but it’s taboo to talk about, because people conflate concerns about cultural loyalty with racism.
I don’t dislike these people. I welcome them. I also hope they will learn the value of freedom and (representative) democracy. btw Taiwan is a litmus test. (If you are one of the people I’m speaking about, and you think it would be great if the CCP could take over Taiwan, your values are not aligned with freedom and democracy.)
The point is it’s just silly to think we can stay ahead of China. Some of their best researchers are embedded in some of our best teams.
Keeping the technology from our best researchers is not going to work imho. The only avenue I see is to try to culture hack the AI efforts, and maybe most of the researchers, to be well aligned as we go.
It's really annoying to me that China is in this superposition between a Han ethnostate and a self-proclaimed multicultural multiethnic society, and it always happens to be the more convenient one for any side to make their point
Cool plot for a novel, I’d read that!
Yeah and Israel is using Microsoft technology to commit war crimes. Which is the greater evil? (Forgive the whataboutism, but the handwringing is real)
Doesn’t matter. Trump just lifted bans on the H200 to China , for a 25% cut. Until he is gone, everything is for sale.
let me just dig out a surprise Pikachu face from my pocket somewhere here ....
No shit. My question is the real question, how can I make money straw-buying GPU's and smuggling them to China?
I'm shocked, shocked!
Not only am I not shocked, I am in no way offended as to who is doing the "stealing"
ohhh nooo!
"No shit Sherlock" moment
I mean of course that’s the case
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