US gov fires a warning shot at Nvidia
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
The US gov created some rules which basically set some limit on the max bi-directional bandwidth of the chip, the max number of operations per second (4800 TOPS), and in the latest regulation they added another rule around “performance density”.
So basically they said something like: if you make a chip that has (in my arbitrary units) less than 100 TOPS, 500 bandwidth, and 200 performance density, then it’s OK to go to China.
So Nvidia made a chip that has 99 TOPS, 499 bandwidth, and 199 performance, which of course would be legal to export. And now the government is saying, well, we don’t like that. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given they previously said they were OK with chips not hitting those limits being exported.
I don’t think you can blame Nvidia for taking the government at face value, assuming the government picked what they consider to be good values for their “chip banning equation” and then making chips that apply to the new rule.
This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly and thus keeps changing their regulation, none of which is a surprise to me. The whole thing reeks of incompetence.
They know exactly what they want. Writing regulations to attain that without too many unintended consequences or negative impacts on the US is the difficult part.
Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
Right now SMIC can produce 5 nm and 7 nm chips. That means about 5 years difference. I guess they can catch up in a decade if they invest enough resources, and will.
Having a domestic chip industry will be a huge win for China. Not only the chips will be much cheaper for them but they can export a ton while undercutting the competition. They will try to eat TSM, Samsung, Intel, AMD pies.
The West pretends that Taiwan is another country with another totally alien set of people who hate the mainland. However, that is not really the case. I imagine it's fairly easy to poach TSMC personnel, who well now realize that Taiwanese semi-conductor industry is going to be ruined by American meddling in the coming decade (much like they did of Japan's).
They already did that. They offered some TSMC engineers much better payment and they built 5nm and 7nm fab processes for SMIC using DUV instead of EUV. :)
To add insult to the injury, Huawei released their Kirin 9000s CPU during US secretary of commerce visit in China.
Is having one really fast and big chip that much better than having 10x 5 year old chips? (I have no idea how many chips they can produce, just wondering if being second really is that bad.)
There was a hack on 23andme.. if I was China/Russia, and it would be me hacking 23andme then I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail), sick people (bribing), etc.
And then there's a moment of cultural confusion as the younger generation of parents looks at the person attempting blackmail and says "Correct, we couldn't afford the wedding. Were you offering to pay for one?"
And US never stole secrets?
Grandstanding over power instead of just writing better rules doesn't seem like a great approach. Other people do all the difficult stuff, because if they stop they don't get paid. Getting paid (and lauded) for doing a bad job writing down some rules and complaining when they're followed is not great.
so if the law is permissive enough it allows easily getting around it, they can just rewrite the laws or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law
The legal obligation is to comply with what the law actually says, not what the legislator possibly had in mind when they wrote the law...
Judges absolutely do look at the intent of lawmakers and rule on that intent.
Here if the law says "don't sell A to China" then you don't sell A to China but obviously you're free to sell B or C if you want to, you can't claim that the "spirit" and what was actually meant was not to sell anything at all...
I am binge watching Last Week Tonight, and around s2e20(?) there is a Supreme Court ruling that interpreted something about medical care that if read literally (it has the word "state") would mean "each State individually" which would allow each state to slap it down, OR by the wider meaning of the word 'state' aka the central Government. So there are authorities in the US that very much interpret laws to capture the meaning.
This should be obvious. They're changing the rules because the intention of the rule was being violated via a loophole that wasn't obvious when the rule was first made.
> Their incompetence is at best causing a lot of wasted effort.
It's unclear if you're saying the intention of the rule is bad, or merely the way the rule was implemented is bad. If you're talking about the former, you haven't justified that position. If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.
I don't think triumphalistic declarations of war from legislators who have just written a badly worded law should be celebrated. If that's not big picture enough, either justify why that is, or please refrain from telling me what I should be talking about.
Reminds me of the Crypto ban that the USGOV was trying to impose in the 90s. Utter idiots running things as always.
This is a tricky one where it’s a lose/lose for Nvidia.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to investors to drive more revenue (while being compliant with laws), US gov doesn’t like that Nvidia is driving sales while technically being compliant to the letter of the law.
So it really isn't that tricky at all.
Regulators made educated guess to legislate it as XYZ fixed levels of compute that's fraction of current compute, which doesn't scale, reasoning it will increase compute gap over time. Nvidia obeys law, because I surmise even they don't know what threshold of compute translates to what potential military capabilities - it would be crazy if were so integrated into US MIC that they do.
Queue Raimondo fires warning shot at Nvidia for following law. The logic behind these moves is to make doing business with PRC expensive in the hopes uncertainty would compel AI sector to reduce business with PRC out of their own volition. Because when US gov doesn't actually know how to regulate compute controls, thereby can't effectively regulate with rule of law, they resort to rule by law (PRC playbook) to shape behaviour. A few flip flops might seem like regulatory incompetence, but enough sustained flip flops to create enviroment of uncertainty is strategy.
Banning AI chips exports will have the same effect.
Long term US will lose money from sales while China will use their newly developed industries to earn more.
This move is only to win some votes at the next elections.
Nothing. I believe all governments in theory have the power to do that in one way or another. Governments write and enforce the laws of their country.
Or are they hoping that China will give in to some political demand?
Probably this. Many in the foreign policy establishment expect a war with China within 10 years.
Not really. It is to hinder the economic and technological development of China.
If they meant "Don't sell to China", but they said "don't sell capability X+1 to China", so they sell capability X to China, who's fault is that?
Expecting a US tech company to not behave as per the uber-capitalism that defines almost everything else about how the country is run is just weirdly, unexpectedly naive.
Nvidia and other businesses have been handed an olive branch but allowing them to sell things the US government considers inconsequential to China to make a few bucks. If Nvidia decides to abuse this privilege, the olive branch might just get taken back.
Private enterprises anticipating the political needs of a central government was a tenet of Mussolini’s economic fascism and has no place in American political discourse.
But that is exactly what they did. The acceptable level of exports is whatever the law says it is and Nvidia followed the law. "to get around US export restrictions" is just a sneaky way of saying "to comply with US export restrictions".
Now, the reasonable thing to do as the regulator - is to acknowledge that the company you were asking for compliance from is acting in a hostile manner and modify the regulation to punitively clamp down on everything they're doing.
What I'm saying is that if I were the US in this situation I would be happily inviting nVidia to comply with the new rules that allows them to export anything above 100nm. Nvidia had their shot at meeting the regulation - the spirit not the letter, they blew it, they can live with the consequences.
Politics created the rules; drew the line beyond which is "bad". Nvidia stayed under the line so as to comply with the rules, and yet "politics" still doesn't like it.
Reminds me a bit of the UK banning all psychoactive substances when they got tired of playing whack-a-mole with what the press called "designer drugs", that hadn't technically been banned but which acted exactly the same as things which had been.
Everything on the permissible side of the line we draw will be done. This is the entire purpose of having a line separating options into permissible and forbidden. So we shouldn't cross our fingers and lie about where we want the line to be drawn; we should make sure we draw the line where we actually want it to be.
If we don't want Nvidia selling anything at all in China, we need to say so already, rather than just shouting at them for doing things we said they were allowed to do.
It worked...at what, exactly? I mean, leaving aside whether what was in question was actually a threat, I don't see that it has had any substantive effect on the policy either of the Netherlands or of the particular international institution headquartered in The Hague that that was its subject, so I don't see how it can be described as working like a charm, except as a piece of US domestic propaganda (which was its real purpose, of course.)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
It's not an entity of the Netherlands government in any respect.
As far as the actual country of Netherlands goes, the United States and that country have a standard extradition treaty, as the US does with most countries that have a reasonable court system that protects the rights of the accused.
The US views the ICC as an illegitimate kangaroo court that does not meet the minimum standards for such protection, and thus does not recognize it any more than it would recognize, say, a terrorist-run "Islamic court". If such "courts" grab US citizens and put them "on trial", then, yeah, they shouldn't be surprised when US Navy SEALs coming crashing through their windows. That wouldn't make it an "invasion" of the country where the "court" was located, but something more akin to a hostage rescue mission.
No, it doesn't, which is why it makes referrals to the ICC. The US just believes that the US, uniquely, should not be subject to any external accountability, because it uniquely can be trusted to hold its own war criminals accountable without such external fallback.
Yes, actually, it does.
https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/pm/rls/fs/23428.htm
In part: "We object, however, to the investigation or prosecution of our citizens by the ICC, whose jurisdiction we have not consented to and which lacks necessary safeguards to ensure against politically motivated investigations and prosecutions."
Read the whole thing.
No way the US threatened troops into the Netherlands, and the Dutch would have never capitulated. At all.
All of Western Europe would join in.
The best I can figure is the US threatened to extract someone in an op. That's not invasion, and even that seems hard to buy.
So link please. And to a real news source, not some guy going on about it on tiktok or youtube, or a blog by a random person.
You don't have permission to access "http://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/american-is-charged..." on this server.
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(Why is it redirecting to http?)
I'm a Canuck, but you need to call a thing what it is.
For example, sanctions could be something done as part of this bill. Arresting a Dutch person on US soil.
You may not like this bill, and I personally don't have much of an opinion on it, but it does not say "arrest and we will immediately invade and blow up cities and take control of your entire nation". It isn't even directed at the Netherlands directly, instead the court, wherever that may be now or in the future.
Saying "The threatened to invade" is an effort to put the worst possible spin on it. And without context, it makes it sound like this happened 2 weeks ago, such as "The US moved a carrier group to the coast of the Netherlands, and they're threatening to invade!"
The only way I would accept language like "threatened to invade" would be if it was actually threatened.
All EU countries bend their backs when US say so.