You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all distill yours.
(a) Sell many billions of dollars of fancy chips to China, thus bringing in billions of dollars of money and billions of dollars of trade balance improvement. And let China continue to build models quickly when they seem oddly happy to export the trained weights for free.
Or
(b) Decline to do so, thus reducing exports and very very strongly encouraging China to do everything in their power to avoid needing to depend on our chips.
In exchange for (b), what do we gain? A temporary advantage in model training and availability?
They aren't patriotic and they don't really care about competing with China, they fancy themselves princes and are playing on the silents/boomers in charge being irreparably stuck in the Cold War.
I don't agree with all of their means for getting here, but to accomplish what they have in ~30 or so years [1] should blow minds far more than it does in the West. And they did it by convincing us to give them control of our manufacturing and selling us (literal) boatloads of cheap junk. Historians will look back on this era as one of the greatest demonstrations of "winning without firing a single shot."
This whole insular POV is tired, ignorant, and frankly just another indicator that America has lost the plot, shit-faced on its own arrogance.
I'm confused, what has America and the west lost the plot on? You would have preferred the west to exploit China more?
This framing of a zero sum game is counterproductive.
I agree but that's not at all what I was getting at. Quite the opposite. The mistake America made, what made it vulnerable, was playing everything like a zero sum game. We're in the early days of that behavior coming to roost.
> China played the smart long game and took advantage of America's...
Zero sum games imply that if there is a winner, there has to be a loser. That one country takes advantage of another.
“If you assume everyone only has hammers, you'll end up getting screwed”, or something like that.
I didn't bother responding earlier, and I'm not sure why I'm responding now because I don't think "because they framed things as a zero-sum game." explains anything, and it sounds like something that sounded like a retort but offered without any evidence means nothing.
If even the suggestion of considering different points of view feels like an attempt to disprove your own position, then that mainly says something about how you are approaching this exchange.
Hmm, sounds awfully sensationalist, designed to fan the flames of Sinophobia and thinly veiled racism.
Of course china isnt innocent in all of this. Their 996 work culture is inhuman, and basically indentured service. But, their government is able to leverage that workforce.
And why was it cheaper? Shipping things from the literal other side of the world isn't free. Cultural and language barriers to efficient communication aren't free. Etc. etc.
China's protectionism is emplaced to support long-term goals. Amodei's policy suggestion is explicitly in support of short term goals (1-5 years), a time window he claims to be "critical" without evidence. A cynic may link that window to forthcoming AI IPO's, and allowing current CEOs to secure ridiculous golden parachutes before leaving the mess of how to deal with the unpaced Chinese frontier models to their successors and future US legislature.
Letting AI companies set your foreign policy (voluntarily ceding global primacy to maximize domestic[1] profits) may have awful higher-order effects for the US. What's hilarious is the shameless about-face: for years, the same companies have been declaring that it is vital American AI innovation not be encumbered by new laws. Until the Chinese models glided to the frontier.
1. Maybe they hope to browbeat Europe too, like how they pushed out Huawei equipment from Euro telecoms. An alternative reading is that the loss of primacy is involuntary, so they may as well spin the reality, and salvage a win by colluding to eliminate better, open-weight models from the markets in "democracies" with the excuse that they are unpaced and therefore dangerous. What will predictibly happen is there will be `Qwen-8.1` for RoW, and a lobotomized `Qwen-8.1-paced` for Americans.
There’s a reason China has a GDP per capita somewhere around that of Argentina.
Of course, they also have futuristic cities, maglev, and plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists, therefore it makes sense to be pragmatic. But there are a lot people talking up China because they hate the US and are bought into a massive propaganda / influencer campaign.
Having visited the US a few times it felt that way too
https://www.heise.de/en/news/DeepSeek-orders-160-000-Huawei-...
Like I said, it will delay the Chinese labs for a couple years. These are not even top-line chips.
Frankly, China was not going to allow them to depend on NVIDIA forever, I don't think this motivates domestic production that much over the counterfactual. If NVIDIA didn't have export controls, China was going to set up formal import controls. They want to own their entire supply chain.
Not even that long. China can simply order its industries to stop supplying externally and go full-domestic. It has happened before in others parts of Chinese industry; it will happen again. As it stands China can easily build computational nodes at scale, and their LineShine supercomputer holds top place in the Supercomputer Top 500 at almost 2.2 exaflops. They have zero issues building performant hardware.
Couple of years? Their current technology level can make that less than a month.
Also as we have seen, the Chinese labs will just buy their kit through cut outs or do training in locations where there's no embargo.