Comment by dzonga
7 hours ago
Chinese models brought the building down.
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
It's a little too later for export controls. Chinese models have made massive gains through legitimate research but also being trained on billions of tokens from Claude/GPT. The politicians have no idea how to stop that from happening so they pull the only lever they know.
Also, don't forget that we're only here because the clown-in-chief cut them off from GPUs - forcing them to make do with inferior hardware (and hence superior ideas). I have no doubt that any controls would only make China stronger.
You really think China doesn't have massive amounts of capital expenditure related to AI? They're actively bootstrapping an entire chip industry.... https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
Relatives vs absolutes. America will spend $500B and because of leaky pipes that's effectively 100B going directly to what's needed. China gets a lot of bang for their buck so even if they're spending a fraction of the US, they make it worth their money.
I believe China has leaky pipes as well.
That's true for domestic labor and manufacturing, like shipbuilding, but the bleeding edge chips only come from one place and the US labs get the best while Chinese labs do not (unless they smuggle them). China gets creative, sure, but it can't overcome the fundamental issue that the US labs have more magic rocks that do math faster than their magic rocks. And the current state of the art is to just "do more math".
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China’s chip industry is 7-10 years behind, and that is because they are desperate and have been throwing money at it. But technological progress requires more than just money.
Jensen said the Huawei Ascend 950 is roughly comparable to the NVidia H200[1]
The H200 was released Nov 2024.
Even allowing for Jensen exaggerating the risk there is no way China is 7-10 years behind.
Looking at manufacturing process nodes, SMIC N+3 is a a 5nm process. 5nm was introduced by Samsung and TSMC in 2020 so at most that is 6 years.
But the chips they can produce on it are roughly comparable to "roughly level with Android flagships from three years ago"[2]
TL;DR: China is more like 2-4 years behind than 7-10 years. If China developed EUV lithography then all bets are off.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kxw6b9/nvidia_... - see video.
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/se...
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I trust Chinese companies with my data way more than the corporations of the 4th Reich.
[flagged]
-3 homer discount