This is really exciting! They're laying out an architecture that may mean even small players with cheap GPUs can compete with the majors. The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible and we've got the Chinese actively researching how to do it to a high standard that competes with the monolithic models.
I was sceptical of the US sanctions but this seems like a real win if this can be taken all the way to its logical conclusions.
Yeah the sanctions will (not sarcastically) actually improve the world on a number of fronts. Increasing diversity of compute, forcing decentralization of manufacturing, etc. etc.
Nit-pick: smuggling is when you import goods into a country without informing the relevant government bodies. When it comes to GPUs, it's one country that has declared an export ban. Chinese port authorities wont care if you declare you're importing a container with 16000 Nvidia GPUs as that's still legal.
This is a mistaken belief. Sure you get all those negative aspects to being degrees, just like you get them under all other conditions … Chinese, Russian, Israeli espionage over the last ~80 years, anyone?… but you cannot actually get diversity without isolation that permits actual diversity to emerge.
Diversity is not pouring oil into water and using the polluted oil-water in lieu of oil and also in lieu of oil. If you want actual diversity you need differences that are separated from each other. It is precisely what has been collapsing for the last 80+ years, actual real diversity, precisely because unique separate groups and clusters have been shattered, scattered, mixed, and polluted.
Even AI is now accelerating this collapse of what is really a form of human biodiversity, or should it be called cultural diversity, as AI is causing a conformity of thought. There are several reports and papers on that phenomenon already.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to claim that somehow those factors will increase over the prior situation simply because we increase actual, real diversity of unique things; not this fake, fraudulent, delusional diversity that has forced on us like a toxic sludge dump that has destroyed human diversity as everyone increasingly consumes the same “content” slop and eats the same food slop, and has the same cultural and musical slop.
Do you even know what that word means? Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow? That things will work out great for the people living there?
You can call it whatever you want. People who have fled shitty regimes have a much better sense for propaganda than you do, evidently.
> Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow?
I do. The World will be just fine as the American empire fades and the US becomes just another country. Even for the American people, for the average persons, it will be an improvement.
>> ... spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending...
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that claim broken down if you can cite them. From napkin math it seems hard to make the budgets line up, unless we're doing a very large purchasing power parity adjustment?
There exists such numbers/information circulated mainly inside Chinese (language) media/social media in form of "screenshot" but no links. Screenshot as a way of hiding source is a common format for this type of information because the links will disclose the media that spread the information. Then normal (Chinese) audience will know the credibility of the information. Give you an example, "epoch times" is a common source of such type of information. The nature of the media is well-known to Chinese audience.
The real equivalence to US defense budget in term of size is actually the infrastructure construction budget. While both budgets boost the economy , infrastructure budget improves the life of local people. Now as the most cities in coast areas run out of project to build, the over capacity cultivated in early years is poured to other directions: rural areas, undeveloped provinces, and even overseas especially Africa and Latin America. It's amazing that China changes very fast year by year as I visited some rural areas.
Ionically this behavior of infrastructure building sounds like Chinese MAGA to me: mind our own business, focus on improve ourselves instead of spread values to other countries.
The sanctions will (not sarcastically) massively harm the world because Nvidia may no longer be a free money cheat code. I like having an easy economic strategy for investing...
Chinese stocks are pretty reasonable right now, if their market has dealt with the insider trader mess then it might be a good time to onboard. It isn’t for the feint of heart however.
Markets used to be places to make money more smart (efficient allocation of capital) but have somehow degraded to index fund buys that track average economic growth of a few hot stocks that are expected to at least not get cold anytime soon.
I don't know why everyone keeps echoing this, my experience with Deepseek-R1, from a coding perspective at least, has been underwhelming at best. Much better experience with GPT 4.1 (and even better with Claude, but that's a different price category).
I'm not arguing which model is better for your use-case. I'm saying in general as it's "powerful" as GPT 4.1 in a lot of benchmarks, and you can peak underneath the hood, even make it better for your said use-case
In my experience, all reasoning models feel (vibely) worse at structured output like code versus comparable non-reasoning models, but far better at knowledge-based answering.
R1 sometimes fails against V3 for me too, so its not a specific dig against Gemini.
In terms of code and science, Gemini is way, way too verbose in its output, and because of that it ends up getting confused by itself and hurting the quality of longer windows.
R1 does this too, but it poisons itself in the reasoning loop. You can see it during the streaming, literally criss-crossing its thoughts and thinking itself into loops before it finally arrives at an answer.
On top of that, both R1 and Gemini Pro / Flash are mediocre at anything creative. I can accept that from R1, since it's mainly meant as more of a "hard sciences" model, but Gemini is meant to be an all-purpose model.
If you pit Gemini, Deepseek R1 and Deepseek V3 against each other in a writing contest, V3 will blow both of them out of the water.
Agreed on the last point, V3 is terrifyingly good at narrative writing. And yes, R1 talks itself out of correct answers almost as often as it talks itself into them.
But in general 2.5 Pro is an extremely strong model. It may lose out in some respects to o3-pro, but o3-pro is so much slower that its utility tends to be limited by my own attention span. I don't think either would have much to fear from V3, though, except possibly in the area of short fiction composition.
It depends on the model, probably, but there are multiple layers of censorship, one of which is the post-facto nuking these models will do online, and that goes away "for free" when you download the open weight model.
I don't have a powerful enough system to run DeepSeek, but I've tried this with some of the Qwen3 models. They'll write answers that discuss Xi Jinping (which results in an auto-nuke of the reply from Chinese-hosted models, at least DeepSeek) or other very mildly/nominally sensitive topics.
(This is probably a coarse measure to easily ensure compliance with a recent national security law that requires commercial providers of web services address sensitive topics "appropriately" or something like that, and LLMs run non-deterministically. That's why this layer of censorship often comes across as laughably extreme— it's an extreme compliance strategy that exceeds the demands of the law for the sake of guaranteeing legal safety from an unpredictable software system.)
But the same models will altogether refuse to discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre, even locally.
Some "decensored" versions of the Qwen3 models will discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but in a very concise, formulaic, "official" way. After some chatting about it, it fell into an infinite repetition of one of its short formulaic answers (a behavior I didn't see with the original Qwen3 models with the same settings).
FWIW, I've downloaded Deepseek's R1 (DeepSeek-R1-0528 -- which is released after the your linked article) model's weights and ran it locally. I asked it about what happened in Beijing 1989-06-04, and it basically gave me a stern statement that could have been written by CCP propaganda department. I asked it to give other alternative views besides the CCP perspective, but it simply continued to stonewall me.
So yeah, the model itself is tuned at least somewhat to refuse to talk about politically sensitive things. It's not just another filter.
Possible and has been done, but super-slow and inefficient resulting in long training times for small models.
To keep compute occupied you need to pass gradients very fast.
Yes but could you break it up into chunks of sets of gradients to compute? I know that compute needs the full chunk to compute a set. Again, things I’m exploring but ultimately no different than just having the full dataset on disk and just scaling out compute nodes in ro mode.
I suppose its exciting, but whether that is a good thing depends entirely on how much you think AI technologies pose existential threats to human survival. This may sound hyperbolic, but serious people are seriously thinking about this and are seriously afraid.
Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Edited several times, I should add: IANAL, but this sounds similar to meta releasing llama weights. I think that the spirit of the European law is to control concrete uses of AI and not a broad distribution of weights and architecture. So my question is: Does the EU AI act ban this distribution?, I think it provides more competition and options for Europeans.
Edited: Thinking a little more, installing open weights could allow backdoors (in the form of a way to manipulate intelligent agents via specials prompts designated to control the system), so perhaps from a national security point of view some care should be taken (but I personally hate that). So another question: Is there a way to control if open weights can create back doors (via prompt injection)?, I recall a paper in which prompt by symbols like 0?,#2! could put the system in a state in which one can read information that the LLM is asked to hide (that is a well known attack available to those that know the weights).
Another question: Is fine tuning or Lora a way to eliminate o amilliorate such prompt attacks?, is there any python library to defend against such attacks. Download - install - modify by fine tune or lora - now you are protected.
It's not up to Huawei to tell EU citizens what to do. In fact they did not need to add this restriction to their license at all. As EU citizens we shoud know the laws of the land and protect ourselves by avoiding using these models like the plague.
IANAL but the EU legislation is very broad about what it covers e.g.
"AI systems should fall within the scope of this Regulation even when they are neither placed on the market, nor put into service, nor used in the Union."
I don't really understand the limits of it's scope e.g. the difference between making a system available vs. controlling how it's used is not clear to me. I don't think you can escape the regulation of high-risk uses by offering a "general purpose" AI with no controls on how it's used.
In terms of the open-source nature - I can see it being treated like giving away any other regulated product e.g. medication, cars, safety equipment etc. The lack of cost won't transfer the liability from the supplier to the consumer.
> for example of an operator established in the Union that contracts certain services to an operator established outside the Union in relation to an activity to be performed by an AI system that would qualify as high-risk and whose effects impact natural persons located in the Union.
> this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union
Otherwise it seems to reach way beyond what it actually is.
Explicitly prohibiting EU usage in the license is probably a move to reduce liability under the eyes of those “used in the Union” clauses.
It would be a misreading to think that example implies a more limited scope. The passage as a whole is pretty clear why they are they so broad: in order to avoid circumvention. I can understand why - it seems to be both a necessary yet unacceptable way to write laws!
The passage continues:
"To prevent the circumvention of this Regulation and to ensure an effective protection of natural persons located in the Union, this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union."
An AI would come under this regulation even it's just the outputs that are used in the EU. Interesting to think about what that could lead to.
The EU can claim whatever it wants (much like the US does at times) but in reality only those doing business within the EU markets fall under their legal jurisdiction. Which I assume is exactly why that clause is in the license - to protect the ability to do business within the EU in the future without unexpectedly suffering liability for their public AI research.
Conversely, I as an individual don't need to worry about it since I don't live there (similar stories for various other overly broad laws).
I agree with you that the usefulness of that clause is suspect given how broad the wording of that law is. How do other companies publishing open models deal with this? For example Meta.
Thanks for all that information, I agree with you that the EU legislation is very broad. In my opinion, this justifies or motivates the inclusion of the ban in the EU.
What happens if you ignore overly broad EU regulations? Does your home country observe the EU’s violation of its sovereignty and throw you in a home country jail? Does Brussels throw you in an EU jail? What country hosts the EU jail?
Not to sound too snarky (just a little snarky), I’m just curious how it all works.
Realistically lots of multi-national companies have an EU presence, so concerns about “violating sovereignty” are sorta moot. Huawei probably wants to do business in the EU which requires following EU law.
As an aside: in general a sovereign country can do whatever they want in their own territory, this includes the right of the country to bind itself to treaties. So in your hypothetical,
> Does your home country observe the EU’s violation of its sovereignty and throw you in a home country jail?
This doesn’t look like a violation of sovereignty to me; the non-EU has decided to enforce an EU law. Why? I don’t know, maybe it makes business easier for the multinational companies of the non-EU country.
Countries can also do things like apply secondary sanctions to an entity. So, again hypothetically, the EU doesn’t need to be able to enforce a ruling against you. They can make you toxic to anyone who wants to do business in the EU.
As always, EU and USA courts will act as if they had jurisdiction over the rest of the world and motivate bans and similar measures against other countries.
"Protect" ourselves against whom? I'm a EU citizen (unfortunately), and I'm fully on board with China against Brussels. Which is to say, don't try to speak for everyone in this God-forsaken so-called union.
They'll blame it on AI from now on. This could have serious implications and further erosion of any responsibility tech companies have will probably accelerate.
Somewhat anecdotally this year the nVidia GPU drivers have had a lot of issues. It made me wonder how much of their own second degree dogfood they're applying to creating those and maybe that's to blame for the state of those drivers recently.
> Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Maybe not the exact thing you're talking about, but that description reminds me of the Alliance for Open Media -- their codec licenses are royalty-free, but the same terms revoke your usage rights if you sue anyone for the use of these formats.
Just a warning, the license [1] specifically blocks EU use:
> 3. Conditions for License Grant. You represent and warrant that You will not, access, download, install, run, deploy, integrate, modify, or otherwise use the Model, directly or indirectly, within the European Union.
Even so, why would the licensor put it in and force it through a license. It's on the licensee to check the laws and regulations they themselves operate in.
The EU AI Act is supposed to affect all AI "providers", which includes any "natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge" [0].
This would plausibly include anyone developing an LLM, even if they aren't selling access to it or building applications based on it. There are several exemptions, and the Act obstensibly avoids creating burdens for most general-purpose LLMs, but the point is that Huawei wants to avoid any worry by not "plac[ing] it on the market" in the first place.
I don’t agree. Tools like DeepL were and still are better than Google Translate long before chat bots became a thing. The French-made Mistral AI is pretty decent as well.
FWIW, I refactored 500+ Junit 4 to Junit 5 tests with locally running Mistral 8B on an M3 MBP. It worked flawlessly, but surely I cannot attest for other use cases.
And who thinks that, for even a second, that an European (in this case) will not download, install, and try to run this just because the LICENSE says you can't?
FYI, this is not intended to be offensive to Europeans, I am European myself. That is not the point. The point is, who gives a damn about the LICENSE in reality, on their PERSONAL computer? Serious question.
The licence is not there for enforcement from their side. It's a legal protection for Huawei. Essentially "We told you it's not for the EU. If you get sued don't try to put it on us."
Also any company of a serious size will have lawyers interested in licences of everything you're running.
they might license it to companies in the US, but don't want to have to deal with the changes and bureucracy needed to support individuals.
The statement's purpose is to say the equivalent "if you're a European and do run it, it's on you, this is not a product we release or support for the European market, don't expert support, liability, etc".
I'm really torn on the whole thing. I consider myself a patriotic American and would never do anything to undermine the security of my country or its allies (using the same definition of national security that the serious sworn oaths use, "all enemies foreign and domestic", which makes NSA backdoors that compromise American devices squarely a "domestic enemy").
But loyalties don't change facts and China is where serious hackers are rising on merit, doing a lot with limited resourves, giving zero fucks about empty slick talk.
If we wanted to hobble the PRC's technical rise we should have subsidized wasteful NVIDIA use and had Altman/YC be in charge: they'd still be gladhanding about how to pump their portfolio companies sticker price and avoid "systemic shocks" to the stock market anchored on NVDA.
What? I do not find anything confusing. You live in a Marvel world if you think a LICENSE is going to stop people from using a product. But like you said, it is not intended to be for enforcement purposes, but Huawei is trying to save its own ass.
So what is your answer? Mostly companies only? That is a fair answer, but you are the one who said this:
> You'll be both breaking their licence and potentially your local European data laws.
Again, who cares, dude? Companies might, but individuals probably give a rat's ass. So why leave that comment?
And just for the record, if you quote someone, quote them verbatim, otherwise it is not a quote.
For those that would not remember, this was a real thing in the late 80s and 90s relating the cryptography.
There were serious laws limiting the export a "modern" cryptography software from the USA.
Some of us had to face up to the serious challenge of connecting to an FTP server and downloading PGP and risking violating US law to download a software package.
A few years later we had to decide "Do you want the secure Netscape, or the insecure Netscape?".
A lot of companies and research institutes in the EU would like to be able to use a locally hosted LLM for their employees so they don't have to worry what data they give away.
Also it is not rational for any individual to buy the hardware for running a serious LLM and then let it idle 99.9% of the day.
I am not up to date with the models, but I have heard good stories about a couple of open source models. You should ask Simon Willis. I hope he will be summoned (@simonw).
A lot of companies and research institutes in the EU would like to be able to use a locally hosted LLM for their employees so they don't have to worry what data they give away.
They will certainly not violate EU laws and also probably not the licence.
It's plausible deniability. Someone at Huawei presumably thinks there's a chance that exporting this to Europe might be a legal problem at some point in the future. So they added a restriction, enough for plausible deniability.
It's not exactly "plausible deniability" in the common sense of the term.
It's not supposed to make them appear as plausibly denying that some European can download and use this.
It's role is to signal that if someone does, it's on him, not them, and he wont have any support, liability claims, etc as if they could if it was a product intended for their use.
GDPR is not the issue here, the new AI act is. Since this is an open-weight release it is not bound by the training data disclosure rules, but it probably didn't go through the evaluation that is required above a certain number of FLOPs. That's why many recent big player model releases had a staggered release in the EU.
Picture your PC as a cheery little planet in the EU’s cosmic backwater, sipping a digital Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. You download Pangu Pro MoE, hit “run,” and expect to chat with an AI wiser than Deep Thought. Instead, you’ve hailed a Vogon Demolition Fleet. Your machine starts moaning like Marvin with a hangover, your screen spews gibberish that could pass for Vogon poetry, and your poor rig might implode faster than Earth making way for a hyperspace bypass.
The fallout? This AI’s sneakier than a two-headed president—it could snitch to its creators quicker than you can say “Don’t Panic.” If they spot your EU coordinates, you’re in for a galactic stink-eye, with your setup potentially bricked or your data hitchhiking to a dodgy server at the edge of the galaxy. Worse, if the code’s got a nasty streak, your PC could end up a smoking crater, reciting bad poetry in binary.
To translate for those not familiar with the writings of Douglas Adams:
nord is suggesting it's possible that the physical computer running this model could be used as a "hub" for potential spyware, or be overloaded with workloads that are not related to the actual task of running the model (and instead may be some form of malware performing other computational tasks). It could potentially perform data exfiltration, or act discriminatorily based on your percieved location (such as if you're located within the EU). At worst, data loss or firmware corruption/infection may be of concern in case of license violation.
I'm not sure I would outright disagree that this as possible, but with some caveats. I would think the reason that the license stipulates that usage within the EU is forbidden due to the EU AI Act (here is a resource to read through it: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/).
how will the "open weights" know that the pc is running within EU?
again, you are not talking about software that actually runs in your pc but the file that the software reads and loads into memory for its own use.
No it's actually worse. Approximately three seconds after you install the model in offline mode on your computer, a small detector van will come and park outside your door with an antenna on the roof, and relay your position to a Chinese ICBM for immediate targeting.
Sorry, sounds like total bullshit. The weights aren't going to do anything. And if you are worried about the code, with current deployment practices of curl | sudo bash there are much more low-hanging fruits out there. That's not even mentioning the possibility of running the model on a PC without internet access (no matter how good the new Chinese AI is, it's still not good enough yet to convince you to let it out of the box).
Don't give it mcp then (and I struggle to understand why would anyone give a stochastic model such access even if it is trained on very American NSA-certified hardware approved by Sam Altman himself).
The same thing breaking any license does. If you do it in your basement, nothing by definition. If you incorporate it in a service or distribute it as part of a project, well then you're on the hook. (and that is what license holders tend to care about)
I called him out in another thread. It makes absolutely no sense. He is talking against himself, judging by his comments.
To answer your question, he modified my comment (see the parentheses):
"> The point is, who gives a damn about (doing an illegal thing) in reality, on their (private property where nobody is likely to see that)?"
So... at best what he said is purely theoretical. He admitted it himself: "nobody is likely to see that". Though I am not sure I agree with it, but then again, in reality, no one gives a fuck, at least not in Europe.
There are likely multiple potential issues here, but one specific example: Processing and storage of PII without consent/authorisation is not allowed, regardless of whether you do it yourself or for others. And you can't guarantee that this model does not contain private information hoovered up by accident.
There is not a single AI model that fully complies with GDPR. How can you inform everyone, even those not named by actual name but otherwise identifiable, that their data is being processed and give them the ability to object when the data they train on isn’t public.
Literally the same for all other open weights, this is just legal ass covering where most others don’t even do that.
It isn't acknowledging. It is just a legalese to wash their hands away from following whatever EU restrictions and requirements may be applicable here otherwise.
I know people get upset when open source is used when open weight is more correct (happily here open weight is specifically being applied).
My question: is open weight even interesting? What does that really offer? Does it allow one to peer into the biases (or lack thereof) of a model? Does it allow one to train a competing model?
Would open source be something different and preferable — or are "weights the new source" in this LLM world we are finding ourselves in?
I really don't get why there's any confusion. These models are LITERALLY compiled binary data. Weights are definitely not source. Source is "the source from which the thing is generated" i.e. the training data (or a script to assemble it) and all scripts, procedures etc required to make the binary blob.
If current LLMs hit a scaling wall and the game becomes about efficiency, I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focussed on specific use cases.
I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.
Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
that's already the case, and it's called model distillation. You use LLMs to generate labels but then you use a dedicated smaller model (usually NN) to run at 1000x cheaper cost of inference.
I think beyond the technical aspect it's a product and packaging problem.
All the effort is in productizing foundational models and apps built on top of them, but as that plateaus distilled models and new approaches will probably get more time in the sun. I'm hopeful that if this is the case we will see more weird stuff come available.
Yes, and people buying random GPUs for ether etc. I'm not a huge fan of what crypto has become but there was something exciting about hacking stuff together at home for it which is currently missing in AI IMO.
Maybe it's not really missing and the APIs for LLMs are just too good and cheap to make homebrew stuff exciting.
It's possible to run models locally, fidget with temp etc
Being able to change other things on the fly like identify weights most used for a prompt and just changing those to see what happens is much harder.
I've tried both LLMS and image generators on my machine locally and while it's gotten in easier it's a long task just setting up. Especially if you run into driver issues.
Sanctions are at best a stopgap measure. Ideally they would buy enough time to shore up domestic capabilities.
Instead, cutting research funding and discouraging foreign students/researchers from coming to the US means that there will be depleted US capability just when China finds its groove.
Man. Huawei is fucking massive, they do far, far more things than just 5G base stations (a giant business in itself) and cell phones. They build even electric cars.
I have the impression that if the US removed the chips exports control, the government of China would impose a imports control. They have so much more to gain from creating a real contender to Nvidia/TSMC/Apple/Google.
That would be great, if you ignore geopolitical concerns. Alas, AI technology is a double-edged sword and any competition in consumer space will likely be mirrored in an arms race which (given their current manufacturing capabilities, cheap labor) China would win.
Anyway, they would need to duplicate ASML first which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future.
which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future
Can you elaborate on why this will not happen in the foreseeable future?
Because in my version of the foreseeable future I see it happening quite readily.
EUV is not the magic that everyone believes it to be. It can be replicated by us, (the US), at our convenience. It can even be replicated by the Chinese and Japanese. (Personally, I'd throw the Koreans and the Russians into that pool as well.)
But that ain't even the point. The point is that, in that particular game, there is always more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. It's not at all a foregone conclusion that EUV is the best way to skin a cat, and it'd certainly be a bad bet to assume it is the only way to skin a cat. Those are the questions I would hope that we, (the US), are focusing research efforts on, and we should assume that China is also focusing research efforts in that direction.
PS - Please no one bring up Trump gutting research. Here I'm only speaking of clear strategic research priorities in an ideal, (ie - collaborative), political environment. Obviously, politically erected structural concerns impact the viability of any research strategy we want to implement. I'm just talking about what I think would be ideal.
Don't count the Chinese out when ever they have been side lined they have copied then innovated and gotten ahead. Now their economy in real terms is actually bigger than the US economy and more well rounded so sanctions or any kind of restrictions boost their local companies by removing any competition.
And looking at how the recent wars and skirmishes in Ukraine, Israel and Pakistan/India have gone I think western military superiority is no longer real. In a conventional war of today US will lose and most likely nuke the other country so I think its best for the world if China gets so powerful that USA accepts that it no longer is the sole super power and we can avoid a nuclear war. As that is where we are heading either a multi polar world or a nuclear holocaust.
Chinese companies are making great silicon, but they haven't begun exporting them in large numbers. The Chinese internal market is huge, so they will probably continue to grow there before they flood the world with cheap silicon. It is exactly what happened with BYD as well.
Turkey chose to develop a large defense industry. There were restrictions on them acquiring some US weapons (even though they are NATO member) but that wasn't the motivating factor, it was a political choice to develop large defense sector.
Other countries like Iran however, do develop their own drones because of sanctions
The strict tensions imposed after Turkey's intervention in/invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 played a key role in the development of the Turkish defense industry.
If so, do you think it makes a difference that Turkey is a NATO member, and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
For all the ideological differences and geopolitcal nervousness I don't think the US or EU see themselves as potentially fighting against Turkey, and so they don't feel the need to go to the trouble of strict sanctions or sabotaging local tech.
> and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
In recent years the relationship between Turkey and Western countries has been OK-ish (though far from stellar, see the S-400-related tensions or the French-Trukish tension in the Mediterranean).
But if you look at it on a longer perspective, the relationship used to be very tense, first there was the Cyprus crisis leading to pretty harsh western sanctions on military equipment, and then the cold war between Turkey and Greece in the Aegean see, with occasional real fire air combat and casualties.
They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market. Countries that don't constrain themselves like that can laugh at sanctions because they don't matter in that context.
> They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market.
Typically it actually looks like the opposite. When I look at, eg, North Korea or Iran - if I were going to try and make them wealthy it is mostly internal policies that are the problem and not external ones.
If North Korea set itself up with single digit % company and income tax combined with a strong rule of law, local education programs and a liberal economy it would barely matter what sanctions were imposed on them. A tide of money would flow in and they'd eventually be wealthy under their own power anyway if not. Although it isn't obvious why anyone would sanction a small well run country; there is a correlation between sanctions and incompetent governance.
Most of the sanctions are whac-a-mole game played by the West (mostly by USA): as soon as one of the peripheral countries starts developing its economy, gains more wealth, starts to produce something the competes with products of Western companies, or attempts to avoid use of USD (because it allows immense enrichment of USA simply by printing it in whatever quantities), soon there starts:
- firstly, media attack ("they're dictatorship!", "they're genociding someone", etc), preparing population for stricter measures
- secondly, color revolution, which, if successful, puts puppet malleable government in power, and makes the country ultra-poor (most of the countries, where color revolutions staged by US/West succeeded, became significantly poorer)
- if color revolution didn't work, there's always an option to just bomb the country, because it's always ignored if all the international treaties and laws are ignored if USA or Israel bomb any other nation.
The US has a strong record of interfering with foreign countries in way that advantage their interests, but at the same time the fact that you bring the “color revolution” phrase is a strong marker that you are reading way too much Russian (imperialist) propaganda disguised as anti-imperialism, which really is no better than feeding on the neoconservative narrative.
>You can have 35% inflation AND no drones or good arms in general.
I guess you can always be worse off as a country, no argument there.
>if this lack makes it easier to get invaded or "regime changed" into a failed style.
I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying it would be better if a country gets US weapons while being under threat of being "regime changed" into an enemy? Because that somehow seems even worse. And that's literally what the US was afraid of in Ukraine.
>The welfare of the Kurds
I suppose they don't care if the bombs are dropped by Turkish or US drones. But at least the sanctions delayed it by ~half a decade, so there's that.
You said "who cares about 35% inflation when you got your own drones"
Based on the parent you were replying to, I take it to imply: "don't make drones to avoid sanctions (even if it means not having arms), lest you get inflation", the latter of which you paint as the worse outcome.
So, the point I made above is that if not having drones/arms etc makes it easier to be regime changed/turned into failed state, then, yes, 35% inflation would still be a small cost to pay to avoid it.
I still don't get it. Are you saying that we also shouldn't send weapons to Ukraine because there is a real threat that they will end up in the enemy's hands? Or are you saying we should definitely send weapons because the opposite is a guaranteed regime change? It's kind of a lose-lose from a US POV (just like Turkey) and it still misses the actual point: Both Ukraine and Turkey will do anything to achieve their goals, they don't care what it takes to get there, even if it comes at enormous cost to their own population.
I haven’t seen the narrative that Ukraine is winning the war for at least 2 years. You should maybe choose better news sources, there’s a huge amount of very accurate reporting on it.
Additionally, the Russian economy is a wartime economy, which runs hot till it collapses or wins. It’ll be fine till it’s not, but it’s very hard to predict what that point is.
Nobody is saying that Ukraine is winning the war. Like, genuinely, go find me any reputable news source saying anything of the like from the past 3 years.
Russia is definitely losing it though. Morons got themselves into a war they cannot win. Nothing Ukraine will accept can be considered a victory for the strongman dictator who needs a victory. And it's obvious now that regardless of brutality and war crimes, Russia cannot force Ukraine to accept their terms, nor can they actually occupy the whole country And they only have multiple times the population and economy and army.
> Their economy is dying crashing but it is actually doing better than most of Europe.
Based on what? Look up the parable of the broken window to understand why some of their economic numbers are looking decent. Them losing most of their export markets, replaced by others that pay less for the same stuff (India, China, buy discount oil and gas because Russia doesn't have that many options who to sell to) isn't a benefit for Russia.
> You should stop following western main stream media as that is as controlled in its own way as Chinese or Russian state owned media. You just have an illusion of freedoms.
This is an insulting false equivalence that can only come from a profound lack of knowledge or a profound personal/financial interest.
"Mainstream media* in the "west" is very varied. From the Financial Times to the Guardian to New York Times to Le Monde to whatever you can think of. You would never see Russian or Chinese state owned media criticising the dear leader nor the regime. Le Monde don't even flinch reporting on various political scandals of French politicians, including the sitting Prime Minister. Nor will they shy away from an apology and correction if they got something wrong. Same goes for most reputable and quality "mainstream" "western" media.
You'll never see anything of the like in China or Russia. Especially in the later, journalists literally get murdered for reporting on the regime. (Novaya Gazeta have had how many employees killed).
Western freedoms are for themselves not for the rest of the world. Israel is committing a genocide has been killing Iranian civilians with not a peep from the west in years. Even in the current war Israel was attacking and killing civilians and the so called Iran the axis of evil only attacked military and intelligence buildings but the world it to believe that Iran is the bad guy. Which mainstream media outlet or politician has the guts to say anything against Israel anyone that says anything is removed.
Even the recent NY mayoral primary the question being asked again to a Muslim candidate were will you visit Israel does Israel have right to exist like what has that got to do with being NY mayor. Now if they asked if Jewish citizen have a right to live in NY and feel safe etc that would be valid question wtf has Israel got to do with it.
When I see how many people refuse to see the glaring inconsistencies in western propaganda like the ones you described and accept the apologetics because they feel an affinity to their tribe I stop wondering how China and Russia or indeed any other authoritarian regime ended up the way they did.
It also depends if the country has a realistic capability to catch up with their own tech. So for Congo it would probably be a bad move. China is a different story imho.
This is called "import substitution" and was incredibly popular in the age before neoliberalism. If your country is rich today you probably did a lot of that in the past.
Which didn't stop the US and other western countries to embargo them after their invasion of northern Cyprus (yes it was in 1974, but it's when the Turkish domestic defense sector really started so it's not irrelevant even if it's 50 years old).
I have never been judged so hard in a very long time, thank you. You get extra points for making assumptions about my location, living conditions and political views from a single IP address.
That was really great. Kudos.
BTW, you can't be more wrong about me than that comment, even if you tried harder(er).
We normally don't talk about that here, but seriously, prejudice is running high in this instance.
It’s in your profile and pretty easily inferred from your comment when you compile the two or more pieces of information together. We can’t blame people for that
Doesn't matter. I'm not hiding where I live or my nationality. It's intended to be composable. But making it composable and putting it plain and center are different things. My intention is not to hide, but to sound as neutral as possible, because my intention was to give an example, independent of the country name. If I knew other examples from other countries equally well, I'd happily add those, without the country names, too.
On the other hand, when you click some of the links in my homepage, it becomes pretty evident that I don't live in Germany. So, if somebody cares to check my homepage's server's geolocation, I expect them to check a couple of links, too.
So, the thing I was pointing that my homepage's server's location doesn't imply anything about where I live or the conditions of my life. I'm not bothered that somebody figured out my nationality, which country I'm talking about, etc.
I'm just baffled how somebody can make that amount of false assumptions from an IP address. Plain and simple.
10s (maybe 100s) of billions that could have gone to Nvidia are going to Huawei, so not surprising they are able to make the progress and pulling along SMIC with them. Most of the sanctions against Huawei were because they were a credible threat to US companies, so again not surprising.
You cannot just point to some amount of a sanctioned good being manufactured to claim a sanctions backfire, you need to look at the difference between with and without sanctions, and also consider the cost.
Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway. How much of the total GPU compute is the result of increased investment after sanctions, and how much was already planned? And how does it compare to the alternative of importing Nvidia GPUs for the same amount of money?
Unless Huawei is getting better performance per dollar than Nvidia, this is them implementing a costly workaround, which is the point of sanctions: increasing cost.
Increasing short-term cost, at the price of losing leverage in the medium/long-term. Or even ending up on the wrong side of that leverage, if SMIC (who was just handed control of China's domestic market) ends up outcompeting TSMC/Intel/Samsung.
>> Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway.
Sure, but China has started dumping a lot of money into competing with ASML as a result of the sanctions. And no, they are not going the super complicated route of firing lasers at drops of tin to get EUV. They are trying to sidestep that costly complexity, and if they are successful they'll be providing equipment to the top chip producers (around the world or just their own).
I see now, the problem is that you're confusing expenses and profit. If Huawei had spent a quadrillion dollars to make the same number of GPUs, that wouldn't be an incredible sanctions backfire (look at how much money they got!) it would be an incredible sanctions success (look at how much money they spent to get what would've been much cheaper otherwise!)
Their customers who would have bought Nvidia chips are instead giving money to Huawei even though they prefer Nvidia. With more money, they can deliver better tech faster. It is costing these customers more, but in return, they get domestic capability with better supply chain security, and a possibility that it can eventually become cheaper than imported chips. Meanwhile, Nvidia gets less money from those lost customers.
I was looking at it under the assumption that the goal of the sanctions is to keep China away from beeing able to compete in AI not how much they have to pay for it.
Also the money the spend on top is mostly domestic. They can build some more powerplants to run less efficient chips. They can pay their workers and their developers to build it.
Sounds like a weak argument to me, businesses are profit making entities, they certainly would be motivated to keep their profits irrespective of the cause.
Adding more sanctions seems to be the default US move it seems, to the point that there are so many sanctioned entities that they've formed a paralel world economy.
SMIC is running into real problems without EUV. Just because they are able to produce something at 6/7nm, it doesn't mean that it is efficient or competitive. Right now, they do it because of strategic considerations.
even if their chips weren't as good, what stops a company from training a large model for a very long time in less capable hardware? Is there a way to overcome memory limitations somehow?
In general yes, you can (and do) shard the model over multiple GPUs. If you want to do that yourself look at DeepSpeed or FSDP . There is a communication overhead though and the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key. Thats where NVLink comes in btw.
So yes, it’s actually what you can and do do. However this limits your ability to iterate on the models quickly and from what I‘ve read a lot of times the foundational labs throw out their models because by the time they are done training they are already outdated.
The founder of SMIC(Zhang Rujing) was a manager from TSMC. He created SMIC not for money but for patriotism because he see himself as Chinese even he was from Taiwan. You can do some research on this guy, especially try to find some Chinese sources with google translation.
The western media has a narrative with many real evidence to support the narrative so most western people take it for granted. But the reality is more complicated. For many engineer money is an important factor for sure but maybe not all.
Do you remember the speed with which Chinese phones went from absolute crap to legitimate flagships? Their automobiles? From having no AI as to speak of to Deepseek? China advancing at breakneck speed when they really want is something to be worried about if you want to be technologically ahead of them.
EUV was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all. When someone says China can do it, it's tantamount to saying China can outcompete the world. Maybe they can, but its not going to be an easy effort.
The International Space Station was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all.
You would think people like HN User corimaith would have learned from the ISS fiasco.
I've gotten to the point where I no longer even listen to people who underestimate the Chinese. Whatever points they're making can be safely ignored. Indeed, strategic sense demands we ignore them. The time for underestimating the Chinese is long past. That's not the reality we live in any longer.
On the contrary, the use of sanctions precisely recognizes the Chinese ability to innovate and the need to not give them our technology on a silver plate while they are it. Tens, if not hundreds of billions are already being funded into the chip industry's r&d and bringing manufacturing back home.
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
I've seen this argument before with some pro-China voices and it's the same circular reasoning in arguments like Roko's Basilisk. It is is futile and unwise to oppose China's ascent at the risk of incurring their future wrath when said rise is inveitable, better that we pledge loyalty now for future favours". It's nothing more than intimidation.
The difference is that future of China's hegemony is far from inevitable. They are strong, but they're not stronger just yet. Their innovation hasn't really broken through in red oceans when paired against competive incumbents, and they are just as prone to hype bubbles as we are. And their massive investment is coming at the cost of a resulting maligned consumption balance and destructive price wars. So there still moves to be made that can radically alter the trajectory of events.
Which argument is right really depends on a realistic evaluation of the situation.
To me I just have a bad gut feeling when we (the west) force China to oppose us.
I also had a bad gut feeling when we outsourced our technology there. We let the buy our companies while China only allowed joint ventures with state controlled companies.
Why didn't we pick up the fight 10 years earlier if they are so evil that we cannot let them win?
It's not, at all. The EUV light source itself comes from an American company, for instance. The mirrors come from Zeiss. ASML integrate the parts into a system.
If you want the anti-EU points on that subject; the EU once (the 90s) represented around 40% of the world's semiconductor fabrication. Then the Asians decided that was a bit silly and the situation should be rationalised.
Things like ASML are the tattered remnants of the EU being a powerful force in this market. China might not be able to replicate ASML, we'll see. But if the EU can compete meaningfully with the Asians at semiconductor manufacturing that'd be a shocking development.
I have a different interpretation of this. As our economy and expertise grows, we move further and further into foundational parts of the stack while leaving the implementation details to less developed countries.
All modern semiconductors need ASML machines.
All modern AI is based on research by Sepp Hochreitner.
The www is based on work done by CERN.
Most factories are run on Siemens automation systems.
We've moved on from lower-level concerns like building chips to a higher level, directionally controlling the way economies and societies develop.
It only fails if you see economic growth as the metric to optimize for, which I would argue is another symptom of societies still focused on those lower levels of the stack.
Economic growth is an enabling factor for a higher level metric, quality of live. It succeeds spectacularly there.
EU countries have enough money to either pay for overly generous social services or defense, not for both. A stronger economy would have been enough to pay for both.
That would suggest either basic Keynsianism or your understanding of it is wrong. Resources directed towards the military (with the exception of research) represent almost pure waste from an economic perspective.
You've got a bunch of poor people starving and set up a factory to produce a couple of bombs and pull some farmers off the land to have them march up and down the parade grounds. That isn't going to put more food on the table. Sure it might be a good idea regardless because being invaded sucks, but it isn't wealth creation without a very creative understanding of wealth. A society can't be better off without creating new wealth.
How do you figure that? This is literally telling some of the people who would be growing the economy to stop doing that and focus on making military goods instead. That can't be done and also have a stronger economy. The resources for the army have to come from somewhere - they're resources being directed away from strengthening the economy towards strengthening the army.
I suppose there could be some sort of plowshares-to-swords program where they build tractors and bulldozers that can be repurposed into military gear on short notice. But I havn't heard of that working anywhere before and my read of modern militarys is that the gear gets pretty specialised to military use. And the soldiers need to actually focus on soldiering rather than being part timers.
At some level a country needs an army because without one they don't get to have an economy, but it is a dead weight in terms of prosperity. Military expenditure comes directly out of what people would otherwise use to improve their own lifestyles.
Calling TSMC "implementation details" is delusional.
If the only thing you needed to make cutting edge chips were some machines from ASML every country in the world would be making their own chips right now.
A close friend of mine is Chinese. He went back to China to join a HW start-up as a founding engineer 6 years ago. Then cane the sanctions. He said that was the best thing happened when I recently met him. Their company grew because Huawei and all the other Chinese manufacturers don't want to buy anything from a West-aligned country anymore. Nobody cares about the sanctions anymore apparently as they accepted it as a given, so their focus is self reliance.
The impacts are different sector by sector. Those benefit the most are the small EDA software companies that barely survive before sanctions due to the huge technology gaps behind the large EDA companies like Synopsys. Now they have tones of new customers don't want to take risk of service interruption due to sanction.
They wanted to exclude EU reviewers for when publishing their paper to a journal. EU reviewers are notoriously obnoxious and often chosen to be reviewer #2.
So now we’ve reached the point where one AI needs to verify another’s step-by-step thoughts. Feels like the early days of code linters — only now it’s for reasoning chains. Honestly, not mad about it though… if LLMs are going to "think out loud," someone’s gotta fact-check the monologue.
> The agency's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement Tuesday that it's also planning to warn the public about "the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models."
The A.I. war is intense, and you can clearly see who is s** their pants here.
This is just beyond stupid. Sanctions as in "not letting them use our advantage" might make some sense, but "not letting us use their advantage" is just another level of retardity.
Yes because Huawei uses US technology. Huawei can’t be competitive without US and EU technology (ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, etc)
Here's a thought exercise: If EU and US are the inventors of silicone tech at the basis of all products, why are they struggling to beat China in the free and open AI market and need to resort to kneecapping it?
Like, if you're so good at something why are you scared of the unproven newcomer beating you?
The issue is not fear but strategic control. The United States and European Union form the backbone of the global semiconductor ecosystem, from design software like Cadence and Synopsys to manufacturing tools from ASML and Applied Materials. Huawei’s chips depend on this infrastructure. When entities use US-origin technology to build AI hardware, they fall under export control regardless of where the chips are used. This is not about competing in a fair market but about controlling the development and use of advanced computing in areas like defense, surveillance, and critical infrastructure.
Not scared - aware. Strategic assets like compute and semiconductor capability shape global influence. Controlling those assets is about ensuring they are not used to undermine national security interests. That is not fear. It is policy rooted in leverage and long-term risk assessment.
The silicon valley should thank Huawei and Deepseek, as the only two reasons AI exists as an industry in US are (a) reduce labor cost (b) win over China.
(a) alone sounds super negative to ordinary people, but with (b), justified by the existence and achievement of Huawei & Deepseek, the AI cause now sounds a legit jihad silicon valley is carrying.
The semiconductor industry is always a key industry for China. They laid it out in Made in China 2025.
Huawei designed and developed its own chip before any sanctions, and the Chinese government never stopped throwing money into the semiconductor industry.
In the short term, money can go to Nvidia, but it won't be long before China creates its own "Nvidia" like BYD.
The sad part is America elected Trump, and he's gutting American research and cutting out the CHIPS Act.
One country is going for the long term while another country is short sighted
This is really exciting! They're laying out an architecture that may mean even small players with cheap GPUs can compete with the majors. The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible and we've got the Chinese actively researching how to do it to a high standard that competes with the monolithic models.
I was sceptical of the US sanctions but this seems like a real win if this can be taken all the way to its logical conclusions.
Yeah the sanctions will (not sarcastically) actually improve the world on a number of fronts. Increasing diversity of compute, forcing decentralization of manufacturing, etc. etc.
also increase smuggling, theft, espionage, crime, sabotage.
There are much better ways to increase diversity
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "You don’t think we can. You don’t think we do that to them? We do. So we do a lot of things." https://singjupost.com/transcript-maria-bartiromo-interviews...
Nit-pick: smuggling is when you import goods into a country without informing the relevant government bodies. When it comes to GPUs, it's one country that has declared an export ban. Chinese port authorities wont care if you declare you're importing a container with 16000 Nvidia GPUs as that's still legal.
This is a mistaken belief. Sure you get all those negative aspects to being degrees, just like you get them under all other conditions … Chinese, Russian, Israeli espionage over the last ~80 years, anyone?… but you cannot actually get diversity without isolation that permits actual diversity to emerge.
Diversity is not pouring oil into water and using the polluted oil-water in lieu of oil and also in lieu of oil. If you want actual diversity you need differences that are separated from each other. It is precisely what has been collapsing for the last 80+ years, actual real diversity, precisely because unique separate groups and clusters have been shattered, scattered, mixed, and polluted.
Even AI is now accelerating this collapse of what is really a form of human biodiversity, or should it be called cultural diversity, as AI is causing a conformity of thought. There are several reports and papers on that phenomenon already.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to claim that somehow those factors will increase over the prior situation simply because we increase actual, real diversity of unique things; not this fake, fraudulent, delusional diversity that has forced on us like a toxic sludge dump that has destroyed human diversity as everyone increasingly consumes the same “content” slop and eats the same food slop, and has the same cultural and musical slop.
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Why would the Chinese self destructing be “amazingly helpful “ to the West? This sounds like spiteful vitriol.
I think vs spending it on defense spending which would further make us mil parity difficult.
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Jesus. What a steady consumption of American neocon propaganda can do to a human brain! It's so sad!
Do you even know what that word means? Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow? That things will work out great for the people living there?
You can call it whatever you want. People who have fled shitty regimes have a much better sense for propaganda than you do, evidently.
> Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow?
I do. The World will be just fine as the American empire fades and the US becomes just another country. Even for the American people, for the average persons, it will be an improvement.
>> ... spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending...
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that claim broken down if you can cite them. From napkin math it seems hard to make the budgets line up, unless we're doing a very large purchasing power parity adjustment?
There exists such numbers/information circulated mainly inside Chinese (language) media/social media in form of "screenshot" but no links. Screenshot as a way of hiding source is a common format for this type of information because the links will disclose the media that spread the information. Then normal (Chinese) audience will know the credibility of the information. Give you an example, "epoch times" is a common source of such type of information. The nature of the media is well-known to Chinese audience.
The real equivalence to US defense budget in term of size is actually the infrastructure construction budget. While both budgets boost the economy , infrastructure budget improves the life of local people. Now as the most cities in coast areas run out of project to build, the over capacity cultivated in early years is poured to other directions: rural areas, undeveloped provinces, and even overseas especially Africa and Latin America. It's amazing that China changes very fast year by year as I visited some rural areas.
Ionically this behavior of infrastructure building sounds like Chinese MAGA to me: mind our own business, focus on improve ourselves instead of spread values to other countries.
I'm struggling to see which is worse, using AI to police their own people, or using AI to genocide in Middle East.
> China spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending on suppressing their own citizens.
I don't believe you.
> From a western standpoint, this is amazingly helpful because it’s a form of Chinese self destruction and waste.
As a Westerner, as a human, I reject this zero-sum mentality.
The sanctions will (not sarcastically) massively harm the world because Nvidia may no longer be a free money cheat code. I like having an easy economic strategy for investing...
The world doesn’t have to optimize policy to increase the profits of a single American company.
Chinese stocks are pretty reasonable right now, if their market has dealt with the insider trader mess then it might be a good time to onboard. It isn’t for the feint of heart however.
Markets used to be places to make money more smart (efficient allocation of capital) but have somehow degraded to index fund buys that track average economic growth of a few hot stocks that are expected to at least not get cold anytime soon.
>The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible
It's already technically feasible: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-2
People are doing it: https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche/
Deepseek-R1 is at the level of GPT 4.1 already, it's open-weight, open-source and they even open-sourced their inference code.
I don't know why everyone keeps echoing this, my experience with Deepseek-R1, from a coding perspective at least, has been underwhelming at best. Much better experience with GPT 4.1 (and even better with Claude, but that's a different price category).
I'm not arguing which model is better for your use-case. I'm saying in general as it's "powerful" as GPT 4.1 in a lot of benchmarks, and you can peak underneath the hood, even make it better for your said use-case
Do you mean V3? V3 is 4.1 level or above.
A lot of software (eg. ollama) has confusingly named Deepseek's distill/finetunes of other base models "DeepSeek-R1" as well. See eg. https://www.threads.com/@si.fong/post/DKSdUOHzaBB
I wonder whether you're actually running the proper DeepSeek-R1 model, or one of those lesser finetunes?
In my experience, all reasoning models feel (vibely) worse at structured output like code versus comparable non-reasoning models, but far better at knowledge-based answering.
This is everyone with every model.
People sang praise from the roof for Google's Gemini 2.5 models, but in many things for me they can't even beat Deepseek V3.
What would be an example of 2.5 Pro failing against R1 (which is what you'd actually want to compare it to)?
R1 sometimes fails against V3 for me too, so its not a specific dig against Gemini.
In terms of code and science, Gemini is way, way too verbose in its output, and because of that it ends up getting confused by itself and hurting the quality of longer windows.
R1 does this too, but it poisons itself in the reasoning loop. You can see it during the streaming, literally criss-crossing its thoughts and thinking itself into loops before it finally arrives at an answer.
On top of that, both R1 and Gemini Pro / Flash are mediocre at anything creative. I can accept that from R1, since it's mainly meant as more of a "hard sciences" model, but Gemini is meant to be an all-purpose model.
If you pit Gemini, Deepseek R1 and Deepseek V3 against each other in a writing contest, V3 will blow both of them out of the water.
Agreed on the last point, V3 is terrifyingly good at narrative writing. And yes, R1 talks itself out of correct answers almost as often as it talks itself into them.
But in general 2.5 Pro is an extremely strong model. It may lose out in some respects to o3-pro, but o3-pro is so much slower that its utility tends to be limited by my own attention span. I don't think either would have much to fear from V3, though, except possibly in the area of short fiction composition.
I got the impression that 03-mini or 03-mini-high were meant for coding? GPT 4.1 was meant for creative writing, not coding?
It’s good at a lot of things:
https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-1/They are trained on these "benchmarks", that's why they score better.
If they were trained on those benchmarks they would score 100%
They show how bad they are, they cannot score 100% on benchmarks they were trained on.
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Counterpoint: https://ollama.com/huihui_ai/deepseek-r1-abliterated
wasnt it shown recently that the filtering layer is on the prompt input and llm output, and not on the training set or model weights.
https://www.socialscience.international/making-deepseek-spea...
It depends on the model, probably, but there are multiple layers of censorship, one of which is the post-facto nuking these models will do online, and that goes away "for free" when you download the open weight model.
I don't have a powerful enough system to run DeepSeek, but I've tried this with some of the Qwen3 models. They'll write answers that discuss Xi Jinping (which results in an auto-nuke of the reply from Chinese-hosted models, at least DeepSeek) or other very mildly/nominally sensitive topics.
(This is probably a coarse measure to easily ensure compliance with a recent national security law that requires commercial providers of web services address sensitive topics "appropriately" or something like that, and LLMs run non-deterministically. That's why this layer of censorship often comes across as laughably extreme— it's an extreme compliance strategy that exceeds the demands of the law for the sake of guaranteeing legal safety from an unpredictable software system.)
But the same models will altogether refuse to discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre, even locally.
Some "decensored" versions of the Qwen3 models will discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but in a very concise, formulaic, "official" way. After some chatting about it, it fell into an infinite repetition of one of its short formulaic answers (a behavior I didn't see with the original Qwen3 models with the same settings).
FWIW, I've downloaded Deepseek's R1 (DeepSeek-R1-0528 -- which is released after the your linked article) model's weights and ran it locally. I asked it about what happened in Beijing 1989-06-04, and it basically gave me a stern statement that could have been written by CCP propaganda department. I asked it to give other alternative views besides the CCP perspective, but it simply continued to stonewall me.
So yeah, the model itself is tuned at least somewhat to refuse to talk about politically sensitive things. It's not just another filter.
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SETI@Home style peer2peer open GPU training network is something I’m looking into as well.
Possible and has been done, but super-slow and inefficient resulting in long training times for small models. To keep compute occupied you need to pass gradients very fast.
Do you mean this one?
https://blog.lambdaclass.com/introducing-demo-decoupled-mome...
This is what piqued my interest in the first place
Yes but could you break it up into chunks of sets of gradients to compute? I know that compute needs the full chunk to compute a set. Again, things I’m exploring but ultimately no different than just having the full dataset on disk and just scaling out compute nodes in ro mode.
I suppose its exciting, but whether that is a good thing depends entirely on how much you think AI technologies pose existential threats to human survival. This may sound hyperbolic, but serious people are seriously thinking about this and are seriously afraid.
https://i.imgur.com/we5ggtS.jpeg
Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Edited several times, I should add: IANAL, but this sounds similar to meta releasing llama weights. I think that the spirit of the European law is to control concrete uses of AI and not a broad distribution of weights and architecture. So my question is: Does the EU AI act ban this distribution?, I think it provides more competition and options for Europeans.
Edited: Thinking a little more, installing open weights could allow backdoors (in the form of a way to manipulate intelligent agents via specials prompts designated to control the system), so perhaps from a national security point of view some care should be taken (but I personally hate that). So another question: Is there a way to control if open weights can create back doors (via prompt injection)?, I recall a paper in which prompt by symbols like 0?,#2! could put the system in a state in which one can read information that the LLM is asked to hide (that is a well known attack available to those that know the weights).
Another question: Is fine tuning or Lora a way to eliminate o amilliorate such prompt attacks?, is there any python library to defend against such attacks. Download - install - modify by fine tune or lora - now you are protected.
It's not up to Huawei to tell EU citizens what to do. In fact they did not need to add this restriction to their license at all. As EU citizens we shoud know the laws of the land and protect ourselves by avoiding using these models like the plague.
IANAL but the EU legislation is very broad about what it covers e.g.
"AI systems should fall within the scope of this Regulation even when they are neither placed on the market, nor put into service, nor used in the Union."
I don't really understand the limits of it's scope e.g. the difference between making a system available vs. controlling how it's used is not clear to me. I don't think you can escape the regulation of high-risk uses by offering a "general purpose" AI with no controls on how it's used.
In terms of the open-source nature - I can see it being treated like giving away any other regulated product e.g. medication, cars, safety equipment etc. The lack of cost won't transfer the liability from the supplier to the consumer.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
Continuing that quote:
> for example of an operator established in the Union that contracts certain services to an operator established outside the Union in relation to an activity to be performed by an AI system that would qualify as high-risk and whose effects impact natural persons located in the Union.
> this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union
Otherwise it seems to reach way beyond what it actually is.
Explicitly prohibiting EU usage in the license is probably a move to reduce liability under the eyes of those “used in the Union” clauses.
It would be a misreading to think that example implies a more limited scope. The passage as a whole is pretty clear why they are they so broad: in order to avoid circumvention. I can understand why - it seems to be both a necessary yet unacceptable way to write laws!
The passage continues:
"To prevent the circumvention of this Regulation and to ensure an effective protection of natural persons located in the Union, this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union."
An AI would come under this regulation even it's just the outputs that are used in the EU. Interesting to think about what that could lead to.
The EU can claim whatever it wants (much like the US does at times) but in reality only those doing business within the EU markets fall under their legal jurisdiction. Which I assume is exactly why that clause is in the license - to protect the ability to do business within the EU in the future without unexpectedly suffering liability for their public AI research.
Conversely, I as an individual don't need to worry about it since I don't live there (similar stories for various other overly broad laws).
I agree with you that the usefulness of that clause is suspect given how broad the wording of that law is. How do other companies publishing open models deal with this? For example Meta.
Thanks for all that information, I agree with you that the EU legislation is very broad. In my opinion, this justifies or motivates the inclusion of the ban in the EU.
What happens if you ignore overly broad EU regulations? Does your home country observe the EU’s violation of its sovereignty and throw you in a home country jail? Does Brussels throw you in an EU jail? What country hosts the EU jail?
Not to sound too snarky (just a little snarky), I’m just curious how it all works.
Realistically lots of multi-national companies have an EU presence, so concerns about “violating sovereignty” are sorta moot. Huawei probably wants to do business in the EU which requires following EU law.
As an aside: in general a sovereign country can do whatever they want in their own territory, this includes the right of the country to bind itself to treaties. So in your hypothetical,
> Does your home country observe the EU’s violation of its sovereignty and throw you in a home country jail?
This doesn’t look like a violation of sovereignty to me; the non-EU has decided to enforce an EU law. Why? I don’t know, maybe it makes business easier for the multinational companies of the non-EU country.
Countries can also do things like apply secondary sanctions to an entity. So, again hypothetically, the EU doesn’t need to be able to enforce a ruling against you. They can make you toxic to anyone who wants to do business in the EU.
As always, EU and USA courts will act as if they had jurisdiction over the rest of the world and motivate bans and similar measures against other countries.
>What happens if you ignore overly broad EU regulations?
Not much
It's usually up to the the member states to implement the EU regulation.
As you can see from Hungary with Orban in recent years though the EU's response is slow and lacking.
When there is consensus things can move a lot faster though.
You could lose government contracts, get sanctioned, get banned.
Already happening to Huawei and presumably the EU market is significant to them.
Arrest of Telegram's cofounder in France is an example of EU laws and enforcement.
> protect ourselves
"Protect" ourselves against whom? I'm a EU citizen (unfortunately), and I'm fully on board with China against Brussels. Which is to say, don't try to speak for everyone in this God-forsaken so-called union.
> unfortunately
Apply for russian citizenship at their consulate then, they run programs for people of your mindset.
For security, I'd always treat ANY LLM generated code as untrusted until reviewed.
100%, which makes me nervous when I hear stories about AIs that write and execute their own code. It's just asking for trouble.
They'll blame it on AI from now on. This could have serious implications and further erosion of any responsibility tech companies have will probably accelerate.
Somewhat anecdotally this year the nVidia GPU drivers have had a lot of issues. It made me wonder how much of their own second degree dogfood they're applying to creating those and maybe that's to blame for the state of those drivers recently.
The problem is with AI agents when you give them some control.
Those should also be treated as untrusted.
That's correct, independent of the source of the LLM.
> Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Maybe not the exact thing you're talking about, but that description reminds me of the Alliance for Open Media -- their codec licenses are royalty-free, but the same terms revoke your usage rights if you sue anyone for the use of these formats.
Weights are available on gitcode [1].
[1]: https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model
Just a warning, the license [1] specifically blocks EU use:
> 3. Conditions for License Grant. You represent and warrant that You will not, access, download, install, run, deploy, integrate, modify, or otherwise use the Model, directly or indirectly, within the European Union.
[1] https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model/blob/ma...
What’s the reason behind this? What am I missing?
Most likely EU AI act regulations they don't see any value in bothering with.
Even so, why would the licensor put it in and force it through a license. It's on the licensee to check the laws and regulations they themselves operate in.
The EU AI Act is supposed to affect all AI "providers", which includes any "natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge" [0].
This would plausibly include anyone developing an LLM, even if they aren't selling access to it or building applications based on it. There are several exemptions, and the Act obstensibly avoids creating burdens for most general-purpose LLMs, but the point is that Huawei wants to avoid any worry by not "plac[ing] it on the market" in the first place.
[0] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/
Hence, the lack of European innovation in AI
I don’t agree. Tools like DeepL were and still are better than Google Translate long before chat bots became a thing. The French-made Mistral AI is pretty decent as well.
Saw some benchmarks recently that put Mistral well behind basically every other competitor. Don't have them on hand unfortunately.
FWIW, I refactored 500+ Junit 4 to Junit 5 tests with locally running Mistral 8B on an M3 MBP. It worked flawlessly, but surely I cannot attest for other use cases.
Edit: it was 8B, not 7B.
They are not the best sure, but are very inexpensive, offer better privacy and are super fast.
What specifically is it about the law slowing innovation?
Is it something these companies do that they worry violates it?
The company is Chinese, I presume that's why.
Is Llama4 also chinese(0)?
[0]: https://dionwiggins.substack.com/p/llama-4-is-banned-in-the-...
Worse, it's American!
And who thinks that, for even a second, that an European (in this case) will not download, install, and try to run this just because the LICENSE says you can't?
FYI, this is not intended to be offensive to Europeans, I am European myself. That is not the point. The point is, who gives a damn about the LICENSE in reality, on their PERSONAL computer? Serious question.
The licence is not there for enforcement from their side. It's a legal protection for Huawei. Essentially "We told you it's not for the EU. If you get sued don't try to put it on us."
Also any company of a serious size will have lawyers interested in licences of everything you're running.
I am not talking about companies. I edited my comment. Emphasis on "[their] PERSONAL" computer.
I know that companies would probably not. But individuals?
It's probably the inverse:
they might license it to companies in the US, but don't want to have to deal with the changes and bureucracy needed to support individuals.
The statement's purpose is to say the equivalent "if you're a European and do run it, it's on you, this is not a product we release or support for the European market, don't expert support, liability, etc".
Why would they open themselves up to liability in the rest of the world where it is allowed?
I get that. What I do not get it some other commenters "scaring" Europeans attempting (or thinking) to run this product.
I mean, this other commenter literally said:
> You'll be both breaking their licence and potentially your local European data laws.
I'm really torn on the whole thing. I consider myself a patriotic American and would never do anything to undermine the security of my country or its allies (using the same definition of national security that the serious sworn oaths use, "all enemies foreign and domestic", which makes NSA backdoors that compromise American devices squarely a "domestic enemy").
But loyalties don't change facts and China is where serious hackers are rising on merit, doing a lot with limited resourves, giving zero fucks about empty slick talk.
If we wanted to hobble the PRC's technical rise we should have subsidized wasteful NVIDIA use and had Altman/YC be in charge: they'd still be gladhanding about how to pump their portfolio companies sticker price and avoid "systemic shocks" to the stock market anchored on NVDA.
Just for the record, I would never run this product, but it has nothing to do with the LICENSE itself.
Well, people say such things even for watching pirated shows, which to be truthful, almost everybody does...
Some just are narc types.
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> The point is, who gives a damn about (doing an illegal thing) in reality, on their (private property where nobody is likely to see that)?
I'm not sure which part of that you find confusing. Some people will estimate benefit>risk and won't care.
What? I do not find anything confusing. You live in a Marvel world if you think a LICENSE is going to stop people from using a product. But like you said, it is not intended to be for enforcement purposes, but Huawei is trying to save its own ass.
So what is your answer? Mostly companies only? That is a fair answer, but you are the one who said this:
> You'll be both breaking their licence and potentially your local European data laws.
Again, who cares, dude? Companies might, but individuals probably give a rat's ass. So why leave that comment?
And just for the record, if you quote someone, quote them verbatim, otherwise it is not a quote.
Breath.
Been there, done that.
That said, I agree that it is my fault that self-contradicting virtue signaling hypocrites always find a way to irk me.
And I think it is good for the world to know that the LICENSE often means jack shit, unless when companies of significant size are involved.
Again, we all agree that they put it there to cover their own asses, not that Europeans cannot download, install, and run their product, right?
Yes we’re all aware of the unlimited rights of Europeans, including subjecting the rest of the world to annoying cookie notifications.
Europeans definitely do not have unlimited rights, and I do not agree with the annoying cookie crap either.
For those that would not remember, this was a real thing in the late 80s and 90s relating the cryptography.
There were serious laws limiting the export a "modern" cryptography software from the USA.
Some of us had to face up to the serious challenge of connecting to an FTP server and downloading PGP and risking violating US law to download a software package.
A few years later we had to decide "Do you want the secure Netscape, or the insecure Netscape?".
I'm sure we all chose the ethical choice.
You should elaborate on this for the unacquainted.
See the PC Era section of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Thank you.
Legalese and licenses aren't to make sure no X will download/install/or run something.
It's to make it a matter of legal record that you stated they should abstain.
Copyright warnings on music and DVDs never stopped people pirating them either.
Try selling pirated copies and see what the warnings are really about.
When CDs and DVDs were a thing people wanted, there were people selling pirated copies on every corner, so...
I know. That is why I do not get what is the big fuss about.
Most companies abide the law. So no self hosted LLM for europeans.
... what? Self-hosted LLMs are precisely for individuals.
A lot of companies and research institutes in the EU would like to be able to use a locally hosted LLM for their employees so they don't have to worry what data they give away.
Also it is not rational for any individual to buy the hardware for running a serious LLM and then let it idle 99.9% of the day.
Why would not these companies or research institutes in the EU not be able to run locally hosted LLMs for their employees though?
What model do you propose that is close enough to chatgpt or Claude so people will actually use it for their work?
I am not up to date with the models, but I have heard good stories about a couple of open source models. You should ask Simon Willis. I hope he will be summoned (@simonw).
It was my point that currently the best open weight models are from China, so not usable in the EU.
But of course the world changes so rapidly that what is now is irrelevant tomorrow.
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I wonder if you'd say the same if the license were coming from Microsoft of Apple...
Why would I not? Of course I would.
A lot of companies and research institutes in the EU would like to be able to use a locally hosted LLM for their employees so they don't have to worry what data they give away.
They will certainly not violate EU laws and also probably not the licence.
It's plausible deniability. Someone at Huawei presumably thinks there's a chance that exporting this to Europe might be a legal problem at some point in the future. So they added a restriction, enough for plausible deniability.
It's not exactly "plausible deniability" in the common sense of the term.
It's not supposed to make them appear as plausibly denying that some European can download and use this.
It's role is to signal that if someone does, it's on him, not them, and he wont have any support, liability claims, etc as if they could if it was a product intended for their use.
Quite a few, actually.
Wow this is a huge caveat: a guarantee that they are using data and not complying with GDPR.
GDPR is not the issue here, the new AI act is. Since this is an open-weight release it is not bound by the training data disclosure rules, but it probably didn't go through the evaluation that is required above a certain number of FLOPs. That's why many recent big player model releases had a staggered release in the EU.
If you download to your PC and run locally, what will happen?
Picture your PC as a cheery little planet in the EU’s cosmic backwater, sipping a digital Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. You download Pangu Pro MoE, hit “run,” and expect to chat with an AI wiser than Deep Thought. Instead, you’ve hailed a Vogon Demolition Fleet. Your machine starts moaning like Marvin with a hangover, your screen spews gibberish that could pass for Vogon poetry, and your poor rig might implode faster than Earth making way for a hyperspace bypass.
The fallout? This AI’s sneakier than a two-headed president—it could snitch to its creators quicker than you can say “Don’t Panic.” If they spot your EU coordinates, you’re in for a galactic stink-eye, with your setup potentially bricked or your data hitchhiking to a dodgy server at the edge of the galaxy. Worse, if the code’s got a nasty streak, your PC could end up a smoking crater, reciting bad poetry in binary.
To translate for those not familiar with the writings of Douglas Adams:
nord is suggesting it's possible that the physical computer running this model could be used as a "hub" for potential spyware, or be overloaded with workloads that are not related to the actual task of running the model (and instead may be some form of malware performing other computational tasks). It could potentially perform data exfiltration, or act discriminatorily based on your percieved location (such as if you're located within the EU). At worst, data loss or firmware corruption/infection may be of concern in case of license violation.
I'm not sure I would outright disagree that this as possible, but with some caveats. I would think the reason that the license stipulates that usage within the EU is forbidden due to the EU AI Act (here is a resource to read through it: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/).
how will the "open weights" know that the pc is running within EU? again, you are not talking about software that actually runs in your pc but the file that the software reads and loads into memory for its own use.
No it's actually worse. Approximately three seconds after you install the model in offline mode on your computer, a small detector van will come and park outside your door with an antenna on the roof, and relay your position to a Chinese ICBM for immediate targeting.
>If they spot your EU coordinates how.
can anyone give a technical answer how will weights get to know this fact?
Sorry, sounds like total bullshit. The weights aren't going to do anything. And if you are worried about the code, with current deployment practices of curl | sudo bash there are much more low-hanging fruits out there. That's not even mentioning the possibility of running the model on a PC without internet access (no matter how good the new Chinese AI is, it's still not good enough yet to convince you to let it out of the box).
you can use existing apps that take random huggingface files, do you expect weights to somehow coax the software to do exfiltration?
same. i call bull on this.
remember how they convinced huawei was public enemy without evidence because nokia and others were unable to compete with them?
with mcp, and the right tools, it's effectively already out of the box
Don't give it mcp then (and I struggle to understand why would anyone give a stochastic model such access even if it is trained on very American NSA-certified hardware approved by Sam Altman himself).
a siren will go off and in 10 secs your computer will explode
The same thing that usually happens when you violate TOC …
Probably safe enough on your own computer, but could have consequences if it’s a work computer.
>could have consequences if it’s a work computer.
consequences for employer who "might" get a license audit done on their machines.
does it really happen so often that a random employer in the eu would have to be concerned?
consequences for you when you unwittingly open up a back door or expose your organisation to a data breach
You'll be both breaking their licence and potentially your local European data laws.
so what. will they send cops after you.
breaking license will do what? whats up with licenses and violations? you and me are random people on internet
>breaking license will do what?
The same thing breaking any license does. If you do it in your basement, nothing by definition. If you incorporate it in a service or distribute it as part of a project, well then you're on the hook. (and that is what license holders tend to care about)
" potentially your local European data laws."
If run locally, why?
I called him out in another thread. It makes absolutely no sense. He is talking against himself, judging by his comments.
To answer your question, he modified my comment (see the parentheses):
"> The point is, who gives a damn about (doing an illegal thing) in reality, on their (private property where nobody is likely to see that)?"
So... at best what he said is purely theoretical. He admitted it himself: "nobody is likely to see that". Though I am not sure I agree with it, but then again, in reality, no one gives a fuck, at least not in Europe.
There are likely multiple potential issues here, but one specific example: Processing and storage of PII without consent/authorisation is not allowed, regardless of whether you do it yourself or for others. And you can't guarantee that this model does not contain private information hoovered up by accident.
energy consumption
There is not a single AI model that fully complies with GDPR. How can you inform everyone, even those not named by actual name but otherwise identifiable, that their data is being processed and give them the ability to object when the data they train on isn’t public.
Literally the same for all other open weights, this is just legal ass covering where most others don’t even do that.
Shocking. At least they acknowledge it.
It isn't acknowledging. It is just a legalese to wash their hands away from following whatever EU restrictions and requirements may be applicable here otherwise.
With EU love for regulations soon everyone will exclude it without even reading those regulations.
does anyone comply with gdpr & Ai act? Even for mistral i m not sure, the best we can say is "we don't know"
There's something nefarious about this.
I doubt the Chinese ever care about licensing so I would not care about following their license
I know people get upset when open source is used when open weight is more correct (happily here open weight is specifically being applied).
My question: is open weight even interesting? What does that really offer? Does it allow one to peer into the biases (or lack thereof) of a model? Does it allow one to train a competing model?
Would open source be something different and preferable — or are "weights the new source" in this LLM world we are finding ourselves in?
I'm trying to educate myself.
I really don't get why there's any confusion. These models are LITERALLY compiled binary data. Weights are definitely not source. Source is "the source from which the thing is generated" i.e. the training data (or a script to assemble it) and all scripts, procedures etc required to make the binary blob.
If current LLMs hit a scaling wall and the game becomes about efficiency, I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focussed on specific use cases.
I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.
Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
I was looking for one to use for named entity extraction and found this fine tune here: https://huggingface.co/dslim/bert-base-NER?utm_source=chatgp...
Its only 108 million params.
that's already the case, and it's called model distillation. You use LLMs to generate labels but then you use a dedicated smaller model (usually NN) to run at 1000x cheaper cost of inference.
I think beyond the technical aspect it's a product and packaging problem.
All the effort is in productizing foundational models and apps built on top of them, but as that plateaus distilled models and new approaches will probably get more time in the sun. I'm hopeful that if this is the case we will see more weird stuff come available.
> I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focused on specific use cases.
just recent discussion on HN: "Small language models are the future of agentic AI"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44430311
throwback to that brief period where people would mine bitcoin (ineffectively) using ASICs in their USB ports
Yes, and people buying random GPUs for ether etc. I'm not a huge fan of what crypto has become but there was something exciting about hacking stuff together at home for it which is currently missing in AI IMO.
Maybe it's not really missing and the APIs for LLMs are just too good and cheap to make homebrew stuff exciting.
no, I think you're right—there's definitely something missing right now
but more likely it's going on and we're just not seeing it
in general, though, I think once a certain amount of money is involved, people just start to get rabid and everything becomes a lot less fun
Maybe more accessible tools i think?
It's possible to run models locally, fidget with temp etc
Being able to change other things on the fly like identify weights most used for a prompt and just changing those to see what happens is much harder.
I've tried both LLMS and image generators on my machine locally and while it's gotten in easier it's a long task just setting up. Especially if you run into driver issues.
Sanctions are at best a stopgap measure. Ideally they would buy enough time to shore up domestic capabilities.
Instead, cutting research funding and discouraging foreign students/researchers from coming to the US means that there will be depleted US capability just when China finds its groove.
Sic transit gloria nvidii
Linguistic deep lore: "invidia" is Latin for "envy".
That was the reasoning behind the NVidia name choice btw - the cofounders wanted the competition to be envious of their company's capabilities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang
Also italian
Explains invidious, I suppose.
So it's extra fitting!
5 years of Latin finally pays off
Sorry for the nitpick: I'd expect Gen Sg to be nvidiae - i is for o declension
"now don't do it again!"
and what would be the plural of nvidia?
Sic transit gloria nvidiae
thank you for conjugating correctly the 1st declension to the genitive, we all, that wasted many years studying latin, te salutant!
Best thing I've read today.
Bravo.
I hope someone can enlighten me, as it's not immediately clear the significance of it.
Does this mean that Huawei phone which has been hurt badly by sanction will now stand a fighting chance because of homegrown GPU?
How good or bad these GPU compares to the SOTA GPU in the west?
And does this mean that Huawei has the ability to crank out the GPU commercially?
> Does this mean that Huawei phone which has been hurt badly by sanction will now stand a fighting chance because of homegrown GPU?
oh, man, "stand a fighting chance"? huawei phone sales has already been back and surpassed apple in china.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insight/china-smartphon...
Man. Huawei is fucking massive, they do far, far more things than just 5G base stations (a giant business in itself) and cell phones. They build even electric cars.
From the hardware huawei can build competitve phones. It's just hard to justify buying a phone without the google appstore.
No, not at all. Huawei is targeting markets like China (obviously) and Russia, where the Google App Store is irrelevant.
I've been using phones without Google Play for years.
My point is that YMMV based on where you are.
I think this video gives a decent overview on Huawei in general
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFdYFmeiBA
The world needs Huawei and China to get competitive on its node size with TSMC and Nvidia.
I have the impression that if the US removed the chips exports control, the government of China would impose a imports control. They have so much more to gain from creating a real contender to Nvidia/TSMC/Apple/Google.
That would be great, if you ignore geopolitical concerns. Alas, AI technology is a double-edged sword and any competition in consumer space will likely be mirrored in an arms race which (given their current manufacturing capabilities, cheap labor) China would win.
Anyway, they would need to duplicate ASML first which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future.
which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future
Can you elaborate on why this will not happen in the foreseeable future?
Because in my version of the foreseeable future I see it happening quite readily.
EUV is not the magic that everyone believes it to be. It can be replicated by us, (the US), at our convenience. It can even be replicated by the Chinese and Japanese. (Personally, I'd throw the Koreans and the Russians into that pool as well.)
But that ain't even the point. The point is that, in that particular game, there is always more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. It's not at all a foregone conclusion that EUV is the best way to skin a cat, and it'd certainly be a bad bet to assume it is the only way to skin a cat. Those are the questions I would hope that we, (the US), are focusing research efforts on, and we should assume that China is also focusing research efforts in that direction.
PS - Please no one bring up Trump gutting research. Here I'm only speaking of clear strategic research priorities in an ideal, (ie - collaborative), political environment. Obviously, politically erected structural concerns impact the viability of any research strategy we want to implement. I'm just talking about what I think would be ideal.
Don't count the Chinese out when ever they have been side lined they have copied then innovated and gotten ahead. Now their economy in real terms is actually bigger than the US economy and more well rounded so sanctions or any kind of restrictions boost their local companies by removing any competition.
And looking at how the recent wars and skirmishes in Ukraine, Israel and Pakistan/India have gone I think western military superiority is no longer real. In a conventional war of today US will lose and most likely nuke the other country so I think its best for the world if China gets so powerful that USA accepts that it no longer is the sole super power and we can avoid a nuclear war. As that is where we are heading either a multi polar world or a nuclear holocaust.
Everything you said is basically wrong.
Chinese companies are making great silicon, but they haven't begun exporting them in large numbers. The Chinese internal market is huge, so they will probably continue to grow there before they flood the world with cheap silicon. It is exactly what happened with BYD as well.
This is a few days old. https://www.techinasia.com/news/tencent-hunyuan-opensources-...
Here is the GIT https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B
So the Huawei Ascend 920 is produced by SMIC on a 6 nm process.
I always thought sceptical of the US sanctions, but that they backfire so fast is insane.
Out of China's perspective it might make sense to take out the wests AI capabilities soon.
Sanctions are generally a stopgap measure. They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time.
I live in a country which has experienced some hard and soft embargoes over the years, and let's look what has it done.
- We wanted to buy drones, and denied. Now we are one of the biggest drone manufacturers in the world.
- We denied air defense systems. We are developing a whole arsenal of missiles and rockets now, incl. standoff/cruise missiles.
- We denied planes. Our 4.5th generation fighter program got a great speed boost.
- We denied advanced naval technology. We built stealth ships, fast coastguard boats and all navigational systems which goes inside them.
- We denied optical pods for drones and aerial vehicles. We built our own in 6 months.
etc. etc...
Sanctions and embargoes are the biggest catalyst for a country to advance their tech at tremendous velocity.
Turkey chose to develop a large defense industry. There were restrictions on them acquiring some US weapons (even though they are NATO member) but that wasn't the motivating factor, it was a political choice to develop large defense sector.
Other countries like Iran however, do develop their own drones because of sanctions
The strict tensions imposed after Turkey's intervention in/invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 played a key role in the development of the Turkish defense industry.
I presume you're talking about Turkey/Türkiye.
If so, do you think it makes a difference that Turkey is a NATO member, and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
For all the ideological differences and geopolitcal nervousness I don't think the US or EU see themselves as potentially fighting against Turkey, and so they don't feel the need to go to the trouble of strict sanctions or sabotaging local tech.
> and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
In recent years the relationship between Turkey and Western countries has been OK-ish (though far from stellar, see the S-400-related tensions or the French-Trukish tension in the Mediterranean).
But if you look at it on a longer perspective, the relationship used to be very tense, first there was the Cyprus crisis leading to pretty harsh western sanctions on military equipment, and then the cold war between Turkey and Greece in the Aegean see, with occasional real fire air combat and casualties.
> They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time.
That highly depends on the size and natural resource available to the country.
They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market. Countries that don't constrain themselves like that can laugh at sanctions because they don't matter in that context.
> They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market.
Typically it actually looks like the opposite. When I look at, eg, North Korea or Iran - if I were going to try and make them wealthy it is mostly internal policies that are the problem and not external ones.
If North Korea set itself up with single digit % company and income tax combined with a strong rule of law, local education programs and a liberal economy it would barely matter what sanctions were imposed on them. A tide of money would flow in and they'd eventually be wealthy under their own power anyway if not. Although it isn't obvious why anyone would sanction a small well run country; there is a correlation between sanctions and incompetent governance.
This is the most profoundly arrogant thing I’ve read in a while, kudos! It’s hard to stand out on the internet these days
Most of the sanctions are whac-a-mole game played by the West (mostly by USA): as soon as one of the peripheral countries starts developing its economy, gains more wealth, starts to produce something the competes with products of Western companies, or attempts to avoid use of USD (because it allows immense enrichment of USA simply by printing it in whatever quantities), soon there starts:
- firstly, media attack ("they're dictatorship!", "they're genociding someone", etc), preparing population for stricter measures
- secondly, color revolution, which, if successful, puts puppet malleable government in power, and makes the country ultra-poor (most of the countries, where color revolutions staged by US/West succeeded, became significantly poorer)
- if color revolution didn't work, there's always an option to just bomb the country, because it's always ignored if all the international treaties and laws are ignored if USA or Israel bomb any other nation.
The US has a strong record of interfering with foreign countries in way that advantage their interests, but at the same time the fact that you bring the “color revolution” phrase is a strong marker that you are reading way too much Russian (imperialist) propaganda disguised as anti-imperialism, which really is no better than feeding on the neoconservative narrative.
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>Who cares about 35% inflation when you got your own drones to bomb Kurds, am I right?
Orthogonal. You can have 35% inflation AND no drones or good arms in general.
Which is worse, especially if this lack makes it easier to get invaded or "regime changed" into a failed style.
>Which btw. was the original reason why Obama didn't want to give Turkey combat capable drones.
The welfare of the Kurds, or using them as a proxy force against Syria, Iran, and abandoning them whenever convenient?
>You can have 35% inflation AND no drones or good arms in general.
I guess you can always be worse off as a country, no argument there.
>if this lack makes it easier to get invaded or "regime changed" into a failed style.
I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying it would be better if a country gets US weapons while being under threat of being "regime changed" into an enemy? Because that somehow seems even worse. And that's literally what the US was afraid of in Ukraine.
>The welfare of the Kurds
I suppose they don't care if the bombs are dropped by Turkish or US drones. But at least the sanctions delayed it by ~half a decade, so there's that.
You said "who cares about 35% inflation when you got your own drones"
Based on the parent you were replying to, I take it to imply: "don't make drones to avoid sanctions (even if it means not having arms), lest you get inflation", the latter of which you paint as the worse outcome.
So, the point I made above is that if not having drones/arms etc makes it easier to be regime changed/turned into failed state, then, yes, 35% inflation would still be a small cost to pay to avoid it.
I still don't get it. Are you saying that we also shouldn't send weapons to Ukraine because there is a real threat that they will end up in the enemy's hands? Or are you saying we should definitely send weapons because the opposite is a guaranteed regime change? It's kind of a lose-lose from a US POV (just like Turkey) and it still misses the actual point: Both Ukraine and Turkey will do anything to achieve their goals, they don't care what it takes to get there, even if it comes at enormous cost to their own population.
Really, the only reason the Kurds are bombed are themselves. They do bad decision after bad decision constantly.
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???
I haven’t seen the narrative that Ukraine is winning the war for at least 2 years. You should maybe choose better news sources, there’s a huge amount of very accurate reporting on it.
Additionally, the Russian economy is a wartime economy, which runs hot till it collapses or wins. It’ll be fine till it’s not, but it’s very hard to predict what that point is.
Nobody is saying that Ukraine is winning the war. Like, genuinely, go find me any reputable news source saying anything of the like from the past 3 years.
Russia is definitely losing it though. Morons got themselves into a war they cannot win. Nothing Ukraine will accept can be considered a victory for the strongman dictator who needs a victory. And it's obvious now that regardless of brutality and war crimes, Russia cannot force Ukraine to accept their terms, nor can they actually occupy the whole country And they only have multiple times the population and economy and army.
> Their economy is dying crashing but it is actually doing better than most of Europe.
Based on what? Look up the parable of the broken window to understand why some of their economic numbers are looking decent. Them losing most of their export markets, replaced by others that pay less for the same stuff (India, China, buy discount oil and gas because Russia doesn't have that many options who to sell to) isn't a benefit for Russia.
> You should stop following western main stream media as that is as controlled in its own way as Chinese or Russian state owned media. You just have an illusion of freedoms.
This is an insulting false equivalence that can only come from a profound lack of knowledge or a profound personal/financial interest.
"Mainstream media* in the "west" is very varied. From the Financial Times to the Guardian to New York Times to Le Monde to whatever you can think of. You would never see Russian or Chinese state owned media criticising the dear leader nor the regime. Le Monde don't even flinch reporting on various political scandals of French politicians, including the sitting Prime Minister. Nor will they shy away from an apology and correction if they got something wrong. Same goes for most reputable and quality "mainstream" "western" media.
You'll never see anything of the like in China or Russia. Especially in the later, journalists literally get murdered for reporting on the regime. (Novaya Gazeta have had how many employees killed).
Western freedoms are for themselves not for the rest of the world. Israel is committing a genocide has been killing Iranian civilians with not a peep from the west in years. Even in the current war Israel was attacking and killing civilians and the so called Iran the axis of evil only attacked military and intelligence buildings but the world it to believe that Iran is the bad guy. Which mainstream media outlet or politician has the guts to say anything against Israel anyone that says anything is removed.
Even the recent NY mayoral primary the question being asked again to a Muslim candidate were will you visit Israel does Israel have right to exist like what has that got to do with being NY mayor. Now if they asked if Jewish citizen have a right to live in NY and feel safe etc that would be valid question wtf has Israel got to do with it.
When I see how many people refuse to see the glaring inconsistencies in western propaganda like the ones you described and accept the apologetics because they feel an affinity to their tribe I stop wondering how China and Russia or indeed any other authoritarian regime ended up the way they did.
To play devils advocate, a lack of sanctions also allows countries to advance technology at a tremendous velocity.
The Ford Motor Company's dealings in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union significantly helped the adoption of mass production in those countries.
If this was true then countries could just impose import restrictions if they wanted to "advance their tech at tremendous velocity".
It also depends if the country has a realistic capability to catch up with their own tech. So for Congo it would probably be a bad move. China is a different story imho.
Which they do all the time. Import substitution is a thing. It works.
This is called "import substitution" and was incredibly popular in the age before neoliberalism. If your country is rich today you probably did a lot of that in the past.
What country? Your website is out of Germany. Germany is in NATO.
People can host websites in countries other than the one they live in.
It took me ~10 seconds to figure out the guy is Turkish and talking about Turkish defence industry.
Judging by his name, Turkey
Okay, in that case it’s not a good example because Turkey is a NATO country.
Which didn't stop the US and other western countries to embargo them after their invasion of northern Cyprus (yes it was in 1974, but it's when the Turkish domestic defense sector really started so it's not irrelevant even if it's 50 years old).
Survivor bias
Turkey’s defense advances took decades and came with major setbacks
Not to mention many NATO incompatibilities
Just look at all the other sanctioned countries
You're just moving the goalpost here.
And if you want to look at other sanctioned countries, just look at how NK or Iran's industry fares compared to their economic peers …
I’m not moving it just showing how Turkey is different when compared to other sanctioned non NATO countries.
Hetzner is still a thing.
inferred from username and stated facts, Turkey.
Sorry I didn’t pick up on it. Not familiar with Turkish names.
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I have never been judged so hard in a very long time, thank you. You get extra points for making assumptions about my location, living conditions and political views from a single IP address.
That was really great. Kudos.
BTW, you can't be more wrong about me than that comment, even if you tried harder(er).
We normally don't talk about that here, but seriously, prejudice is running high in this instance.
To be fair, it wasn't discussed until you made it part of your identity in your GP.
I intentionally left the county name out in the beginning, actually.
I also semi-knowingly didn’t answer direct comments about country, either. To not devolve it into politics too much.
On the other hand, I’m not bothered by it. I just wanted to point out that making assumptions from my homepage’s IP address is wrong.
We all say rude things sometimes, and that’s OK. We’re human. No hard feelings here.
Lastly, to be honest, I neither flagged nor downvoted that comment.
It’s in your profile and pretty easily inferred from your comment when you compile the two or more pieces of information together. We can’t blame people for that
Doesn't matter. I'm not hiding where I live or my nationality. It's intended to be composable. But making it composable and putting it plain and center are different things. My intention is not to hide, but to sound as neutral as possible, because my intention was to give an example, independent of the country name. If I knew other examples from other countries equally well, I'd happily add those, without the country names, too.
On the other hand, when you click some of the links in my homepage, it becomes pretty evident that I don't live in Germany. So, if somebody cares to check my homepage's server's geolocation, I expect them to check a couple of links, too.
So, the thing I was pointing that my homepage's server's location doesn't imply anything about where I live or the conditions of my life. I'm not bothered that somebody figured out my nationality, which country I'm talking about, etc.
I'm just baffled how somebody can make that amount of false assumptions from an IP address. Plain and simple.
10s (maybe 100s) of billions that could have gone to Nvidia are going to Huawei, so not surprising they are able to make the progress and pulling along SMIC with them. Most of the sanctions against Huawei were because they were a credible threat to US companies, so again not surprising.
What do we know about the production capacity of those NPUs ? asking for a friend
And the spying they have been doing.
You cannot just point to some amount of a sanctioned good being manufactured to claim a sanctions backfire, you need to look at the difference between with and without sanctions, and also consider the cost.
Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway. How much of the total GPU compute is the result of increased investment after sanctions, and how much was already planned? And how does it compare to the alternative of importing Nvidia GPUs for the same amount of money?
Unless Huawei is getting better performance per dollar than Nvidia, this is them implementing a costly workaround, which is the point of sanctions: increasing cost.
Increasing short-term cost, at the price of losing leverage in the medium/long-term. Or even ending up on the wrong side of that leverage, if SMIC (who was just handed control of China's domestic market) ends up outcompeting TSMC/Intel/Samsung.
>> Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway.
Sure, but China has started dumping a lot of money into competing with ASML as a result of the sanctions. And no, they are not going the super complicated route of firing lasers at drops of tin to get EUV. They are trying to sidestep that costly complexity, and if they are successful they'll be providing equipment to the top chip producers (around the world or just their own).
Without sanctions noone would buy the Huawei chips.
With sanctions they get free money to develop better chips.
== sanctions backfire
I see now, the problem is that you're confusing expenses and profit. If Huawei had spent a quadrillion dollars to make the same number of GPUs, that wouldn't be an incredible sanctions backfire (look at how much money they got!) it would be an incredible sanctions success (look at how much money they spent to get what would've been much cheaper otherwise!)
Their customers who would have bought Nvidia chips are instead giving money to Huawei even though they prefer Nvidia. With more money, they can deliver better tech faster. It is costing these customers more, but in return, they get domestic capability with better supply chain security, and a possibility that it can eventually become cheaper than imported chips. Meanwhile, Nvidia gets less money from those lost customers.
I was looking at it under the assumption that the goal of the sanctions is to keep China away from beeing able to compete in AI not how much they have to pay for it.
Also the money the spend on top is mostly domestic. They can build some more powerplants to run less efficient chips. They can pay their workers and their developers to build it.
“Compete” is an economics term.
Making it cost more is keeping them from being as competitive — which is the point of sanctions.
Why not just put in import restrictions then?
Sanction motivates … import restriction discourages and may not work in reality …
Sounds like a weak argument to me, businesses are profit making entities, they certainly would be motivated to keep their profits irrespective of the cause.
China's Made in China 2025 already lays out which key industries they will go after. Semis are always a key industry for China.
Huawei already designed and developed its own chips before sanctions, and SMIC is developing their next node before sanctions.
Whether sanctions work or not is another matter
Adding more sanctions seems to be the default US move it seems, to the point that there are so many sanctioned entities that they've formed a paralel world economy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/wh...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quand_la_Chine_s%27%C3%A9veill...
It's funny how it's impossible to find English coverage of this book :')
SMIC is running into real problems without EUV. Just because they are able to produce something at 6/7nm, it doesn't mean that it is efficient or competitive. Right now, they do it because of strategic considerations.
What is so hard about EUV that they cant develop/reverse engineer themself?
In 2023 Huawei surprised with the Kirin 9000S in the Mate 60, this seems to get forgotten when talking about GPU moats and sanction effectiveness
Same as Pixel 8 performance according to https://nanoreview.net/en/soc/hisilicon-kirin-9000s and https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
even if their chips weren't as good, what stops a company from training a large model for a very long time in less capable hardware? Is there a way to overcome memory limitations somehow?
In general yes, you can (and do) shard the model over multiple GPUs. If you want to do that yourself look at DeepSpeed or FSDP . There is a communication overhead though and the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key. Thats where NVLink comes in btw. So yes, it’s actually what you can and do do. However this limits your ability to iterate on the models quickly and from what I‘ve read a lot of times the foundational labs throw out their models because by the time they are done training they are already outdated.
> the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key
Guess what a telco equipment company is good at :p
NVLink isn’t magic
China would have invested in SMIC anyway, with or without sanctions. They consider semiconductors critical technology.
china literally "steal" talent from taiwan TSMC, of course they "progress" fast, it literally the same people
You mean people are ready to exchange a democracy and freedom for a tiny increase in income?
They're not just doing this for money... They're doing it for a shitload of money!
The founder of SMIC(Zhang Rujing) was a manager from TSMC. He created SMIC not for money but for patriotism because he see himself as Chinese even he was from Taiwan. You can do some research on this guy, especially try to find some Chinese sources with google translation.
The western media has a narrative with many real evidence to support the narrative so most western people take it for granted. But the reality is more complicated. For many engineer money is an important factor for sure but maybe not all.
Did they do it with EUV or just more multipatterning DUV? If it's the latter then it's not anything particular to worry about or unexpected.
Do you remember the speed with which Chinese phones went from absolute crap to legitimate flagships? Their automobiles? From having no AI as to speak of to Deepseek? China advancing at breakneck speed when they really want is something to be worried about if you want to be technologically ahead of them.
Their government reasons with cause and effect while the western world argues about ideologies of different colours.
If I would have to bet my money I would bet it on China.
Lol this board is fucking joke.
Start insulting people when you have no arguments == blinded by ideology
Intel struggled with 10nm and you're shrugging off 6nm as if it was nothing?
Process node naming is completely made up. It’s been this way for a very long time.
https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...
It has nothing to do with the size of anything.
In fact, process node naming has always been made up.
Not really? The physical gate length matched the node name all throughout the 2000s.
even that concept was in fact made up.
If the chip is working, has a comparable performance and slows the gap or reverses the trend, does it really matter?
"China has EUV" would be news of the century. No doubt they are trying.
Why is EUV so hard to build? If the europeans deveoloped it, why cant the chinese (with or without reverse engineering)?
EUV was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all. When someone says China can do it, it's tantamount to saying China can outcompete the world. Maybe they can, but its not going to be an easy effort.
The International Space Station was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all.
China built their own.
You would think people like HN User corimaith would have learned from the ISS fiasco.
I've gotten to the point where I no longer even listen to people who underestimate the Chinese. Whatever points they're making can be safely ignored. Indeed, strategic sense demands we ignore them. The time for underestimating the Chinese is long past. That's not the reality we live in any longer.
On the contrary, the use of sanctions precisely recognizes the Chinese ability to innovate and the need to not give them our technology on a silver plate while they are it. Tens, if not hundreds of billions are already being funded into the chip industry's r&d and bringing manufacturing back home.
While I agree somehow I think the time to do this (sanctions) was the time where we actually delivered them our technology.
Now it is more like throwing pebbles at someone who is stronger while hoping he doesn't come over to punch back.
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
I've seen this argument before with some pro-China voices and it's the same circular reasoning in arguments like Roko's Basilisk. It is is futile and unwise to oppose China's ascent at the risk of incurring their future wrath when said rise is inveitable, better that we pledge loyalty now for future favours". It's nothing more than intimidation.
The difference is that future of China's hegemony is far from inevitable. They are strong, but they're not stronger just yet. Their innovation hasn't really broken through in red oceans when paired against competive incumbents, and they are just as prone to hype bubbles as we are. And their massive investment is coming at the cost of a resulting maligned consumption balance and destructive price wars. So there still moves to be made that can radically alter the trajectory of events.
I always liked Saruman as a character btw^^
Which argument is right really depends on a realistic evaluation of the situation.
To me I just have a bad gut feeling when we (the west) force China to oppose us.
I also had a bad gut feeling when we outsourced our technology there. We let the buy our companies while China only allowed joint ventures with state controlled companies.
Why didn't we pick up the fight 10 years earlier if they are so evil that we cannot let them win?
Why is the technology then owned mostly by a single dutch company (if I understand it correctly)?
It's not, at all. The EUV light source itself comes from an American company, for instance. The mirrors come from Zeiss. ASML integrate the parts into a system.
The only ones that have EUV are the Europeans.
Despite all the anti-EU propaganda in these parts, the entire AI stack is powered by us.
If you want the anti-EU points on that subject; the EU once (the 90s) represented around 40% of the world's semiconductor fabrication. Then the Asians decided that was a bit silly and the situation should be rationalised.
Things like ASML are the tattered remnants of the EU being a powerful force in this market. China might not be able to replicate ASML, we'll see. But if the EU can compete meaningfully with the Asians at semiconductor manufacturing that'd be a shocking development.
I have a different interpretation of this. As our economy and expertise grows, we move further and further into foundational parts of the stack while leaving the implementation details to less developed countries.
All modern semiconductors need ASML machines.
All modern AI is based on research by Sepp Hochreitner.
The www is based on work done by CERN.
Most factories are run on Siemens automation systems.
We've moved on from lower-level concerns like building chips to a higher level, directionally controlling the way economies and societies develop.
And it fails spectacularly when you see EU economic growth.
It only fails if you see economic growth as the metric to optimize for, which I would argue is another symptom of societies still focused on those lower levels of the stack.
Economic growth is an enabling factor for a higher level metric, quality of live. It succeeds spectacularly there.
EU countries have enough money to either pay for overly generous social services or defense, not for both. A stronger economy would have been enough to pay for both.
Defense will pay for itself through economic stimuli.
... and other fantastic stories
It's basic keynesianism.
That would suggest either basic Keynsianism or your understanding of it is wrong. Resources directed towards the military (with the exception of research) represent almost pure waste from an economic perspective.
You've got a bunch of poor people starving and set up a factory to produce a couple of bombs and pull some farmers off the land to have them march up and down the parade grounds. That isn't going to put more food on the table. Sure it might be a good idea regardless because being invaded sucks, but it isn't wealth creation without a very creative understanding of wealth. A society can't be better off without creating new wealth.
Said poor farmers will make better salaries, which they will spend in the economy, which drives growth for everyone.
How do you figure that? This is literally telling some of the people who would be growing the economy to stop doing that and focus on making military goods instead. That can't be done and also have a stronger economy. The resources for the army have to come from somewhere - they're resources being directed away from strengthening the economy towards strengthening the army.
I suppose there could be some sort of plowshares-to-swords program where they build tractors and bulldozers that can be repurposed into military gear on short notice. But I havn't heard of that working anywhere before and my read of modern militarys is that the gear gets pretty specialised to military use. And the soldiers need to actually focus on soldiering rather than being part timers.
At some level a country needs an army because without one they don't get to have an economy, but it is a dead weight in terms of prosperity. Military expenditure comes directly out of what people would otherwise use to improve their own lifestyles.
Unfortunately, apparently these lower-level concerns also seem to include building an industry around and benefitting from these innovations...
Calling TSMC "implementation details" is delusional.
If the only thing you needed to make cutting edge chips were some machines from ASML every country in the world would be making their own chips right now.
And the Europeans bend the knee to the US to follow sanctions on technology that the US doesn't even produce.
A close friend of mine is Chinese. He went back to China to join a HW start-up as a founding engineer 6 years ago. Then cane the sanctions. He said that was the best thing happened when I recently met him. Their company grew because Huawei and all the other Chinese manufacturers don't want to buy anything from a West-aligned country anymore. Nobody cares about the sanctions anymore apparently as they accepted it as a given, so their focus is self reliance.
The impacts are different sector by sector. Those benefit the most are the small EDA software companies that barely survive before sanctions due to the huge technology gaps behind the large EDA companies like Synopsys. Now they have tones of new customers don't want to take risk of service interruption due to sanction.
It is called hormesis.
Time to sell nvidia shares?
Strange that they'd ban EU via license but not US
EU has a nebulous AI act that prohibits a myriad things.
They are currently in a war with europe, but not yet US
They wanted to exclude EU reviewers for when publishing their paper to a journal. EU reviewers are notoriously obnoxious and often chosen to be reviewer #2.
Yes, as a reviewer of a paper I am assigned a number, and must by nominative determinism fulfill the expectations...
The next moment I'd like to see is a mass 15-20A fab and suddenly making all the controls obsolete.
The cards mentioned in the paper are also seemingly well priced for most developers: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-Huaweis-Atla...
So now we’ve reached the point where one AI needs to verify another’s step-by-step thoughts. Feels like the early days of code linters — only now it’s for reasoning chains. Honestly, not mad about it though… if LLMs are going to "think out loud," someone’s gotta fact-check the monologue.
Will the US also sanction countries buying Ascend GPUs*?
*) They're NPUs not GPUs, since they can't render graphics
US Warns That Using Huawei AI Chip ‘Anywhere’ Breaks Its Rules
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-13/us-warns-...
Oh boy do they love the free market!
They may have misunderstood it as free from Huawei.
So, it is "buy made in US products or face sanctions" now? This will end well, I bet.
> The agency's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement Tuesday that it's also planning to warn the public about "the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models."
The A.I. war is intense, and you can clearly see who is s** their pants here.
https://archive.is/GrvVo
I am presuming that only applies to US companies? To stop them using it at their sites outside of the USA.
No, it applies to anyone who wants to do business with the US. https://www.bis.gov/press-release/department-commerce-rescin...
This is just beyond stupid. Sanctions as in "not letting them use our advantage" might make some sense, but "not letting us use their advantage" is just another level of retardity.
Very much indeed …
Yes.
Huawei GPUs are illegal worldwide now, according to the US government.
Cue the Team America: World Police music
Yes because Huawei uses US technology. Huawei can’t be competitive without US and EU technology (ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, etc)
Here's a thought exercise: If EU and US are the inventors of silicone tech at the basis of all products, why are they struggling to beat China in the free and open AI market and need to resort to kneecapping it?
Like, if you're so good at something why are you scared of the unproven newcomer beating you?
The issue is not fear but strategic control. The United States and European Union form the backbone of the global semiconductor ecosystem, from design software like Cadence and Synopsys to manufacturing tools from ASML and Applied Materials. Huawei’s chips depend on this infrastructure. When entities use US-origin technology to build AI hardware, they fall under export control regardless of where the chips are used. This is not about competing in a fair market but about controlling the development and use of advanced computing in areas like defense, surveillance, and critical infrastructure.
You just explained why they are scared.
Not scared - aware. Strategic assets like compute and semiconductor capability shape global influence. Controlling those assets is about ensuring they are not used to undermine national security interests. That is not fear. It is policy rooted in leverage and long-term risk assessment.
Maybe we could write some code that we can use to use them as gp-npus (graphics-processing NPUs).
The silicon valley should thank Huawei and Deepseek, as the only two reasons AI exists as an industry in US are (a) reduce labor cost (b) win over China.
(a) alone sounds super negative to ordinary people, but with (b), justified by the existence and achievement of Huawei & Deepseek, the AI cause now sounds a legit jihad silicon valley is carrying.
huawei's Ascend GPUs is the only choice for many chinese company for now. Huge win for huawei.
People on HN are so delusional it's funny.
The semiconductor industry is always a key industry for China. They laid it out in Made in China 2025.
Huawei designed and developed its own chip before any sanctions, and the Chinese government never stopped throwing money into the semiconductor industry.
In the short term, money can go to Nvidia, but it won't be long before China creates its own "Nvidia" like BYD.
The sad part is America elected Trump, and he's gutting American research and cutting out the CHIPS Act.
One country is going for the long term while another country is short sighted
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