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Comment by f38zf5vdt | Hacker News Reader

From the executive order (Executive Order 14110) it seems to affect only massive compute infrastructure:

> (i) any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations; and

> (ii) any computing cluster that has a set of machines physically co-located in a single datacenter, transitively connected by data center networking of over 100 Gbit/s, and having a theoretical maximum computing capacity of 10^20 integer or floating-point operations per second for training AI.

Keep in mind that most consumer graphics cards are in the _teraflops_ range, which is 10^12. It's hard to imagine this affecting the average person, it seems that they are specifying KYC for people using clusters with thousands or tens of thousands of cards.

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No, that is just one part of it. The proposed rules are intended to cover both EO13984, which addresses foreign entities using US IaaS for Cyber attacks, and EO14110 which addresses foreign entities using AI hardware.

They require all IaaS[1] to determine if customers are US persons, and if not to collect and retain certain identifying information[2], and provide annual reports describing their processes[3]. It grants the Secretary of Commerce extra-judicial power to force any IaaS to stop doing business with any foreign customer, or place restrictions on their use[4]. This section lists things that the Secretary should consider in doing so, but doesn't have any hard requirements. Finally, it requires the IaaS to report certain foreign use of AI[5].

[1]§7.301 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-189

[2]§7.302 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-219

[3]§7.304 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-266

[4]§7.307 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-377

[5]§7.308 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-403

> It grants the Secretary of Commerce extra-judicial power to force any IaaS to stop doing business with any foreign customer

This can backfire, as foreign customers of public clouds may switch to local providers, which erodes the US near-monopoly on cloud services. Ironically this can reduce the visibility and control the US government has over foreign nation states.

E.g.: most of the Australian government is hosted in either Azure or AWS. That kind of thing might stop if extrajudicial power is granted to pull the plug on any customer on any time.

If they’re inspecting what people are running on GPU instances to report that information back to the US government it’s going to give a lot of people pause for thought. It’s basically violating guarantees that many businesses have with cloud providers.

> Keep in mind that most consumer graphics cards are in the _teraflops_ range, which is 10^12.

Something like 40 of them, or 100-300 if you're looking at FP16. So well over 2^14.

And that's per second, give it your idle cycles for four months and that's 10^7 seconds.

It gets pretty close to 10^23.

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