Comment by rsync
15 hours ago
“ Or, are you saying this is a tactical move from a higher level (Chinese gov interests)?”
What country produces all of the ASICs used in contemporary bitcoin mining?
The faster we get to a good enough open model, the sooner it gets burned to hardware, and the sooner the transition to (relatively) low tech, low margin, high volume cards to run it on …
… and those are built in China.
Maybe they are assembled in China?
You're not going to make money buying a new 14nm bitcoin miner, and that is where the China foundries are for cost effective silicon. They're great at 28nm+ and good at 22nm pricing.
Most new design modern sub 7nm ASICs are made in Taiwan/Korea by TSMC and SLSI. That is where miners are profitable.
Whatever speculation you have on China’s foundry capabilities or a gap to TSMC will be wildly out of date within a year or 2. I’ll bet on it.
Go bet on it @=^D It's not speculation, it's what they sell to the world and build processors for globally available Huawei/Honor phones. It's not a secret.
If they had a solution to get to >90% yields on sub 5nm they'd be doing it now. They don't, even the 7-10nm isn't there. Best hope is they get to buy the entire world's supply of EUV in 2027, then they install all of them, then they bring them up, then they build processes around them and make masks, then they ramp the yield on 3-4nm by copying exact TSMC.
The hilarious thing is that TSMC couldn't do this at a new fab in Taiwan, with full access to equipment, supply chain, and people. So, nope.
That’s part of the equation but there’s almost certainly interest in the open models guiding information trends for the interests of the Chinese government as well. So not only to help their economy in a variety of ways, but to help undermine the US AI efforts in the process and put them finger on the scale of what models ultimately do output.
oh I love the thought that there is a future where I get my models burned in hardware same as I used to get games in cartridges