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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what to think about this. Leaving aside whether this trade war is a good idea, I think this is a really bad look from Nvidia. It's not a good look to be undermining US sanctions, at the end of the day the US has the power to basically entirely crush Nvidia's exports into China. Given that's the case it would have been a lot smarter to work with the US gov to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do, rather than play these bullshit games and risk a punitive response. The US really isn't joking about these sanctions.

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The US set new rules and Nvidia redesign/make new product to make sure they are play within these new rules. In other words, this is a process of Nvidia following the rules, how is this a bad look from Nvidia at all? If US really wants to ban all exports they should have done it at the beginning instead of playing this whac-a-mole game with entities at US, which turns out to be a very bad look from these bureaucrats that they don't know what they want and what they are doing.

Let's be honest though - Nvidia aren't really redesigning their products at all. These chip companies don't work by manufacturing new variants. They produce one chip that does it all and they either fuse out or write firmware to limit them. So what will happen with these chips is exactly the same thing that happened with the crypto-disabled products they sold. They'll just buy the limited chips and then find a workaround. That was pretty much fine when it was just market segmentation with crypto, quite a different thing when you're participating in skirting sanctions.

I see it as a case of Nvidia obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit - hence these cat and mouse games with the US government; where they expend extra effort to work around the rules just so they can make money from China.

Law has no spirit in such a context.

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?

The “spirit” is don’t help China develop AI / advance their military capabilities.

"Don't sell to China" spells it out in a way that doesn't allow for such misinterpretations. It's not hard to fit the "spirit" into the description. It's likely fewer words than whatever they made a hash of in the first place.

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.

The US government has been pretty clear why they are doing this and the purpose of the “chip war”.

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.

I would disagree. Our form of classical liberalism requires those wielding the baton of power to do a better job. The state serves the individual.

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.

>to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do

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".

There's following the letter of the law, then there's following the spirit of the law. This is when being a robot isn't helpful.

You could equally well argue that it's the government's fault for not expressing the spirit they intended into the letters they wrote.

Language is ambiguous. That's why we have judges.

Numbers aren't ambiguous.

Yes, true, but the idiom "the law is an ass" doesn't exist for no reason.

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.

Do you pay the exact amount of tax you owe to the government, or do you always add a bit of extra on top to comply with the "spirit of the law"?

That's not what happens. What happens is that the government comes out with something like "Hey, we don't want you to sell AI chips to China". Then with some beauracratic process - which almost certainly involves consulting with chip manufacturers - invents a set of rules get drawn. Then nVidia produce a SKU of their chip (note: not a new chip, a variant of one that clearly breaches the rules) that exactly matches the letter of regulation, but not the intent of the regulation.

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.

Companies (theoretically) play by the rules. If those rules allow shenanigans, expect shenanigans. A government figure saying things like this is probably for the best, as it means they know not to waste time looking for loopholes… but even then, you can't expect companies to know what to take seriously in advance, given how much noise and fury signifying nothing normally comes out of talking heads.

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.

You're assuming that the USG is run by competent people rather than a bunch of petulant basket-weaving (okay, okay, polsci) majors.

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