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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Nobody thinks a distillation crackdown is a long term plan, but it does delay Chinese labs for the couple years while they are compute-starved. Of course they could make competitive models if they were drowning in NVIDIA chips but they aren't, and the native ones aren't at scale production for at least a year.

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If anything it'll speed up their progress by forcing local solutions.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/DeepSeek-orders-160-000-Huawei-...

> According to Bloomberg, supply bottlenecks for high-end memory and other key components could limit chip production this year. Since Huawei also has to serve other customers, DeepSeek might have to wait over a year for the full delivery, estimates Bloomberg.

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.

"Like I said, it will delay the Chinese labs for a couple years."

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.

They'll build five data centers by the time that 1m wide pot hole on your local highway ramp gets a (half assed) fix.

They will build data centers but not have the chips to put in them until 2028. I don't know why you're arguing about things I'm not saying.

At the current pace of iteration from Deepseek I think this is a moot point, they'll keep building their own RL environments, and just keep RL on top of whatever flavor of model they can train/host on their Huawei SuperPods

But they're not compute starved. NVidia's kit is convenient for compute but not absolutely necessary. Chinese labs have been training with Huawei chips already. They also have a huge supply of existing Nvidia gear to use. Just because it's not the absolute latest generation isn't really important.

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.

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