WH Executive Order Affecting Chips and AI Models | Hacker News Reader

WH Executive Order Affecting Chips and AI Models

whitehouse.gov

69 pointsatlasunshrugged80 comments

Open articleView on HN

> Chip orders with collective computation power up to roughly 1,700 advanced GPUs do not require a license

Structuring, but for gpus. Seems like the sort of loophole you could drive a truck through.

I don’t know what you’re talking about officer! I always ship just 1,699 GPUs, otherwise the box gets too full!

Officer leans over and finds another gpu right underneath the bumper... got em.

Vehicle crashed; subsequent investigation revealed the driver was faulty.

Officer leans over and sprinkles one gpu on him...

> Restricting the transfer to non-trusted actors of the model weights for advanced closed-weight models. The rule does not in any way inhibit the publication of model weights for open-weight models.

> Setting security standards to protect the weights of advanced closed-weight AI models, permitting them to be stored and used securely around the world while helping prevent illicit adversary access.

Controlling the weights is becoming critical for the US…

I think it's interesting that they're actually using the term "open-weight" here instead of what AI corps would want you to use which would be "open-source", trying to conflate sources and weights. Perhaps a good sign, for a week.

Oracle: Export Control Diffusion Confusion

https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/export-control... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690300)

Note Oracle's statement is already a week old (Jan 5th), it's not in response to this Whitehouse order. Expect we'll see a new statement from them soon.

Singapore’s Copyright Act already had the best Text and Data Mining exception. If scraped yourself, anything on the Internet is probably legal to train with.

Now, both Europe and the U.S. are trying to regulate both training and distribution of A.I. models. That might make Singapore an even better place for training A.I. models. The only question is if they have any regulations on training or distribution outside of the Copyright Act.

The linked executive order restricts exports of large numbers of GPUs to Singapore, which might make training models there hard, at least until Chinese GPU technology catches up enough.

There’s companies hosting GPU’s in Singapore. There’s also probably places without export restrictions to Singapore that have GPU’s to sell them. They might also buy them in smaller quantities from many suppliers online. Finally, they could try distributed training on the various, low-cost clouds.

A higher-risk option would be to build or buy FPGA accelerators. They’ve had lots of FPGA’s over there. They might be able to do A.I. on them. It would also be easier for their engineers to port published designs to FPGA’s than to make ASIC’s. Then, maybe make their own FPGA like some academic teams did.

Are we trying to slow global competition with bad actors by restricting their ability to run compute on these.

And then we don't want GPT4o closed models going over the fence, but we are ok with Llama3.3?

I am I reading this correctly?

You and I have to compete in this "competitive" job market thanks to AI, but we can't have US megacorps compete with China who might develop better tools used to swindle us.

>Are we trying to slow global competition with bad actors by restricting their ability to run compute on these.

Huawei GPUs

> but we are ok with Llama3.3?

Considering Meta's view about the new president, the new Llama might become closed source at any moment now.

In seriousness, this make Meta's decision to push open weight models incredibly valuable. Now there's no restrictions on their geographic use or "Security Standards" unlike their competitors.

Yes. I'm also a big supporter of open-weight models. Hope they don't touch it and continue down that path.

I actually prefer "reproducible" models with their code and training data attached, but we don't live in that world, yet.

Which will apply for exactly one week.

It seems like Trump would only go harder on this kind of thing "as a negotiating tactic" or something.

He seems unlikely to make it easier for China, at least without something in return.

Quite the opposite

The US' usual pressure tactic is to create a bluff, first raise sanctions, and use this as a bargaining chip in negotiations to gain benefits. If you observe closely enough, you will find that every time before the U.S. government negotiates with the Chinese government, it announces new sanctions or other pressure tactics. Biden, however, played the card that Trump was going to play prematurely.

Trump can not go 'harder', because Biden has compressed Trump's tactical space.

So, when Trump enters the White House, he will find that he has few cards left to play - Chips, Oil, Ukrain War, interest rates, debt and deficit , etc Instead, there'll be mines left for him by Biden admin.

I'm glad to see we're already rationalizing Trump's poor performance, before he even starts.

... I'm a Chinese living in China. I don't have to select and defend one of those two presidents like Americans.

It appears that Chinese merchants don't seem to be as confident that Trump won't do anything:

https://www.newsweek.com/trade-surplus-china-economy-exports...

Apparently Trump can't do this because Biden cut off his options..?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/trump-unleash-nearly-40...

Trump can't cancel MFN because Biden already cancelled MFN?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/04/trump-pntr-status-china...

I think you're taking Trump too lightly.

> I think you're taking Trump too lightly. I didn't

You're talking about another thing.

Trump(or Biden admin)'s tactic is - move/push 3 step forward, back 1 step, use it to trade China's concession

Let's take TikTok ban as an example, if Biden didn't rush to play it and traded nothing, it will be a card of Trump, Trump can use it to trade(or threat) profit.

ofc Trump can seek other cards to play, but the TikTok card, and the Chip sanction card, were wasted by Biden, Trump can not go further in these two topics.

It's not about China or Chinese merchants, it's the game between Biden and Trump, and their parties.

Either one of these two president are willing or able to be friendly to China, there's no different, Trump will pressure China with tarrifs, Biden pressured China with geopolitical/financial containment and regime change

The only difference is which one will harm the US more.

The tiktok ban was Trump's idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...

If it's happens, Trump will take credit for it, while Biden did all the work.

Trump: 1, Biden: 0.

Trump seems to have very little to lose in a maximum policy towards China. Time for Trump to go full retard.

Nvidia responds with a Trump endorsement: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-policy/

As far as I can see, if Trump follows the rhetoric of "Anti-China" for security policy and "America First" trade policy, I believe they will continue with more enforcement.

>As the First Trump Administration demonstrated, America wins through innovation, competition and by sharing our technologies with the world — not by retreating behind a wall of government overreach.

that's kind of a strange thing to say

Not long ago like 90% of Hacker News commenters would have agreed with the sentiment that information wants to be free.

Many of you purchased merchandise with DeCSS code written on it.

that's not my point, my point is that that's not really what trumps policies have been

Maybe they are playing the card of "Trump is with us" and will undo it?

Yes, they appear to publicly attempting to manipulate him, out of a belief that he responds to flattery without regard for logical consistency.

"belief". lol

> that's kind of a strange thing to say

Not when your goal is to publicly fellate Donald Trump.

It's nauseating, but much worse than that, the parade of newly minted corporate sycophants is only encouraging more authoritarian threats in the future, because they're demonstrating how well they work.

It's like the battered wife trying to please her wife beating husband to avoid a black eye.

yes, but even so it's a choice to essentially say "we need a president who doesn't want to build walls, like donald trump". But obviously even in a less literal reading this is on its face just not true based on his presidency, whether you think that's a good thing or not.

Dont get me wrong, it's a ridiculous thing to write or say.

But unfortunately we exist in a ridiculous timeline.

Just wait until they start prefixing everything with ‘His Majesty, the Best President Ever, Donald Trump.’. You know it’s coming.

Trump's tariffs plan is all about wielding power over companies. Now companies need to suck up to him to avoid tariffs as much as possible. Suck up could mean public endorsements, pressure on other companies, campaign "donations" (bribes), "investments" (bribes) etc.

It is political power for money in a direct way and it is going to get a lot worse and less subtle.

Is this deepthroating because they are worried about his tariffs raising GPU prices in the US?

This is great news for Huawei: people outside China will finally have a reason to buy their GPUs, because a mediocre GPU is better than no GPU.

China will impose similar regulations and export restrictions.

Maybe, on the US and our 18 friends. Meaning we've accomplished nothing besides giving the rest of the world to China.

I'm reminded of oil regulations, and the days when munitions laws meant encryption couldn't be exported. Won't last long.

This reminds me of the restrictions they had around encryption.

It seems like it may hurt open source efforts.

Is there a Viktor Bout of GPU smuggling? Has any journalist written about it? Whenever I see discussions of GPU restrictions I just think about what would happen if I boarded a US to China flight with a stack of H100s in my carry-on.

GPU smuggling to China has already happened.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

> Restricting the transfer to non-trusted actors of the model weights for advanced closed-weight models. The rule does not in any way inhibit the publication of model weights for open-weight models.

So the rule pre-supposes that close-weight models will just always be better than their open-weight counterparts. How do they know this will hold up?

>So the rule pre-supposes that close-weight models will just always be better than their open-weight counterparts

It doesn't necessarily presuppose that. Trying to limit the export of open weight models would likely fail on first amendment grounds, the same way the supreme court struck down attempts to limit the export of "military grade" cryptography.

I didn’t read it that way. I read it as trying to control what can be controlled; risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.

Who are the 18 key allies that can get our chips?

The 18 countries with no restrictions are: UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden and Taiwan. https://www.wired.com/story/new-us-rule-aims-to-block-chinas...

Singapore and Israel are notably absent.

Israel probably due to NPT violations (same with India) and probably Singapore due to existing compliance issues with export controlled products being exported to China or Russia (same with UAE and India).

> NPT violations (same with India)

Just a small correction.

India is not a signatory to NPT. There's no violation.

That's the violation. Same reason Israel isn't included despite being a major NATO+ member.

Just because you aren't a party to an agreement doesn't mean you aren't in violation of it.

They are not in compliance with the provisions. They aren't violating anything. They can't violate a promise they haven't made.

While you are technically correct, they still are getting denied because they wouldn't make the promise. So the outcome is the same.

Why are you singling Singapore? It's not a particularly close ally. It's like Switzerland, neutral.

Singapore is VERY close to the US.

One of the US's largest naval bases is in Singapore, they are one of the very few countries allowed by the US to buy F35s (F35s are interconnected, so being given entry into the F35 program means being given entry to the entire intranet used to manage it), and plenty of US Naval officers cross-train and study with Singaporean naval officers at NUS.

They’re basically Asian Israel.

At a macro level they look similar, but when you dig closer it starts to fall to the wayside.

A major driver for Singapore's initial growth was the fact that it is the de facto Oil Refinery hub in ASEAN - much of the oil that is extracted in Malaysia or Indonesia has had to be routed to Singapore at some point.

It has the benefit of having a strong financial service sector thanks to a business law system that strives to maintain parity with that in the UK and the US, but it's a very narrow industry that most Singaporeans don't partake in.

Also, Singapore has always had strong economic relations with it's neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia (even at it's worst points). Most of the business leadership in both countries are ethnic Chinese with blood relations in Singapore, which made it easier for Singapore to leverage it's position.

A major downside I've noticed in SG when I've travelled there a bunch is the lack of a truly strong innovation ecosystem. Sure there are plenty of startups, but most of them are just Chinese or Indian startups that are leveraging a Singapore CoLo to simplify investment. Much of the actual R&D and even leadership capacity remains in China or India.

SG is a very hierarchical country and that really limits their innovation capacity. Back in my undergrad, I knew 5 A*STAR candidates and a couple other bonded service candidates - of them maybe 50% returned to Singapore, and those that did were from households who owned a house (iykyk). The rest got offers with tech companies here in the US and broke bond. Even in the SAF, races segregate into their own units (eg. Ethnic Malays are de facto banned from airforce and high clearance positions).

That seems to assume that Israel is not in Asia

for some strange reason when I say Saudi Arabia is the biggest Asian oil country, everyone gets confused too.

it’s a different enough area geologically and politically, there is a reason everyone calls the region the middle east.

No one should be confused about your statement. Middle East is a region in Asia. The hint is in the word "East" which references Asia.

Do you imagine people calling the Earth flat because "everyone says it is"?

The Middle East is in Western Asia. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East]

The East in the Middle East (and frankly also the ‘Middle’) has nothing to do with it being in Asia.

If it did, Japan would likely be the Middle East. Or maybe Thailand, depending.

Instead, Japanese and Chinese are typically referred to as ‘East Asians’.

Usually, if someone is going to say anything at all about West or Central Asians, they tend to be referring to the ‘stans and/or Mongolia. Since Russia’s a bit… special. And takes up most of the rest.

The more you know.

Your first statement proves my point that Israel is in Asia. Unless you believe that Western Asia is not in Asia or that people in Western Asia are not Asians. China and Japan are referred to as the Far East. As I said, the keyword is "East" which references Asia. The "Middle" refers to it being between Europe and the Far East. Hence the Middle East. I thought this was common knowledge.

I don't think there is any need for sarcasm. It's common knowledge that there are 6-7 continents (depending on how you want to count the Americas).

No one in western media is going to say Western Asia for the Middle East. As you well know. I’ve never heard it in media in Asia either.

And most people in the English speaking world would be very confused if you tried - just like you were, when you tried to say it was because the Middle East was in East Asia, or had anything to do with it being in Asia - which that link makes clear it doesn’t.

Not sure why you hold the media to such a high standard given its history of ignoring the science regarding health claims, climate change denials or covid misinformation. I wouldn't focus too much on that. :)

"you tried to say it was because the Middle East was in East Asia". I didn't. This is what I said (quoted): "Middle East is a region in Asia". And you said "The Middle East is in Western Asia" which supports my point.

Most people in the English speaking world get confused with basic math (as indicated by studies by the OECD and Santander among others) or world geography (especially concerning territories outside the western world, this seems to be anecdotally true in the US).

What are you even arguing?

See my first reply if you forgot: "That seems to assume that Israel is not in Asia". You seemed to disagree.

They're trusted enough to purchase F-35s.

Well, there's a bunch of different dimensions of trust.

Britain will work hand-in-hand with the US with regards to fighter jets, nuclear weapons and spy agency cooperation.

But America doesn't trust Britain's blood sausage and haggis, or its traditional unpasteurised cheeses. And Britain doesn't trust America's chlorinated chicken, GMOs or guns.

Take a look where (US) hyperscalers have presence, they still need to be able to expand.

Only having part of the EU is an interesting decision.

The rest need to split their orders into 1,699 units per shipment.

Perhaps Switzerland is too neutral as well.

Or Poland

Along with every other country in Eastern Europe, plus long-time NATO members Greece and Turkey. And in the West, there's Iceland, Luxembourg and Portugal.

Nvidia Statement on the Biden Administration's Misguided 'AI Diffusion' Rule

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682773

Reply on news.ycombinator.com