U.S. will soon stop Chinese companies from using American clouds for AI training | Hacker News Reader

U.S. will soon stop Chinese companies from using American clouds for AI training

tomshardware.com

53 pointsgeox37 comments

This is a great way of inducing increased technological competence in countries outside the US.

If the US is hoping to promote free-market policies, then increasing demand for technological innovation within China is a likely objective of this policy.

For an example of the theoretical framework being discussed by experts, here is an article from Stanford in which the West's recent competitive advantage in technological innovation is attributed to free markets. The implication is that a country would need to operate a free market in order to become a global leader in technological innovation.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-innovation-drives-...

Sure; ofc. That's not the point. Your suggestion is just as likely to fail and stumble as any other suggestion.

This has been the rallying cry of the Chamber of Commerce and big businesses since the dawn of time to argue against national security concerns in favor of big profits, so forgive me if trite regurgitation is unconvincing.

The 30,000th wake-up call for EU. Spoiler alert: it will still not wake up.

The EU didn't wake up to the massively critical gas dependency on Russia, what makes you think it will wake up to core tech dependency to the US.

That ship has sailed for the EU. We just accepted that all the cool SW comes from the US and we just buy it from them instead of making our own. Who cares about SW jobs in the EU anyway?

Completely agree.

How the EU will wake up is the basic question. Capital allocation won't happen until there's some value in it. At the moment, capital, skilled labour all is available to at least start building chips that if not rival but are sufficiently advanced for day to day usage such as desktops and laptops to begin with.

But they won't be cost effective, might be around the same price as an Intel/AMD/ARM chip. Being new, the adoption would be slow as well.

Only way to change that would be for the EU to ban imported chips so that there's no way for the consumers but to buy local which amounts to trade war.

Therefore, I don't think so there are much (rational) choices as of now.

The only countries that successfully created a local industrial ecosystem did it with massive natural and/or artificial market entry barriers/regulations (Korea, China, Japan, Russia). I believe that until the EU doesn’t dump its absolutist free-market ideology, it will never be able to create an environment suitable for local players to emerge.

That kinds of curbs will invite retaliation in form of tariffs on EU exports causing more damage than good.

At some point the tree needs to be shaken. It just cannot go on like this forever. This is insane.

Correct, the US is not a reliable partner and should be viewed very warily.

Absolutely. Hold my beer while I buy another round of F35.

Slower chips elsewhere will take longer to train a model but not exponentially longer.

Not initially. In time there might be a compounding effect.

During the Cold War there was a time in the 50's when the Soviet Union was running neck and neck with the US. Famously they were the first to launch a satellite. A few decades later and the technological gap was so large that the US seemed to be from an alien world compared to the Soviet Union.

>A few decades later and the technological gap was so large that the US seemed to be from an alien world compared to the Soviet Union.

Only for consumer tech, not military. Also, as the war in Ukraine proves, you don't need cutting edge chips to inflict worlds of pain on another country, but 100+ year old tech of mortar cannons and shells are more than enough.

Plus, high tech Russian weapons use commercial off the shelf chips from the west that you can't stop them buying off the free market anyway. An Arduino or Raspberry Pi could very easily guide a bomb. You don't need an Nvidia A100 for that.

> Also, as the war in Ukraine proves, you don't need cutting edge chips to inflict worlds of pain on another country, but 100+ year old tech of mortar cannons and shells are more than enough.

Worth noting the difference in scale between Russia (1.3m active personnel) and Ukraine (0.2m active personnel), the West are not directly participating in the battlefields (due to nuclear threats), and that Russia is connected to Ukraine by land.

For the Chinese case, the US has been very clear about sending armies to defend Taiwan, which is separated from China by sea.

So a technological gap can be a sufficient deterrent for the Chinese case, while less so for the Russian case.

Why do you believe that nuclear concerns wouldn't arise if China were facing significant setbacks in attempting a conquest of Taiwan?

It's hard to see China (or anyone else) using nuclear weapons without similar response or worse.

So they would go from attempting to conquer a new piece of land via conventional war that they can withdraw from at any point if losing to facing destruction.

They've lost wars like vietnam and withdrawn after declaring victory, so it's not like they are suicidal if they dont get their way.

China has a No First Use policy on nuclear weapons.

Russia threatens to use nuclear, even without being hit with nuclear.

No, the Soviets couldn't get any of their engineering computation done either [1].

Later they were unable to do things like manufacture propellers for their submarines [2]. Not to mention the Gulf War.

[1] `The state of scientific computing was particularly backwards, with the CIA commenting that "to the Soviets, the acquisition of a single Western supercomputer would give a 10%–100% increase in total scientific computing power."[54]`

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scan...

Sure, but that's not really the case today. You don't need to buy export controlled supercomputers now, when China can build one with commercial Nvidia GPUs or AMD CPUs.

But China can't buy those Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-may-be-forced-shif...

They can buy RTX 4090s.

I'm not sure why you're continuing down your argumentative line. Do you really not see the forest through the trees? You have even rebuttalled against the other person, you just keep saying "nuh uh what about X"

> A few decades later and the technological gap was so large that the US seemed to be from an alien world compared to the Soviet Union.

You shouldn't believe everything you read.

Indeed. By the 1970s they started to abandon their native computing technologies and just started blatantly copying western ones.

Which is very ironic, when you compare 1st tier chinese cities with 1st tier US cities, you could probably say the same thing.

It should have ALWAYS been this way. Now do this for our Farmland and our Homes. Said EVERYONE.

I'd first like to see restrictions related to corporate ownership of those resources. Food quality has gone down, and housing prices have gone up, due to the interests at odds with smaller ownership.

Whatever happens, limiting food exports to any country is non discuss able. That is the old ugly world of pre ww1 were empires starved out there enemies unpunished. That road has given birth to a monstrous century.

What do you imagine sanctions to be exactly?

The Commerce Department is asking for mandatory KYC for cloud services. This is weird and the kind of thing that authoritarian countries do. Why must all actions be tied to a registered identity?

That's fine, they can just pull a bytespider and move their equipment to Singaporean IP addresses. (Or any country for that matter)

Why bother? They’ll just wait for the U.S. to train something then attack until they exfiltrate it. IP means nothing to them.

It's so easy to just create a foreign entity and get access to American Clouds these days ....

And the moment china stops US companies from buying silicon, the US will throw a fit.

> And the moment china stops US companies from buying silicon, the US will throw a fit.

Citation needed. Taiwan != China, and domestic Chinese chip production does not produce anything unique or strategically important.

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