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This is probably a dumb question but if it's so easy to make new chips why is China so behind and dependent on Nvidia's older tech?
Broadcom has been building neural chips for a while.
China is no less dependent on Nvidia tech than the US. What makes you think they're behind?
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @gmd 7 Sep
Everyone keeps making a big deal about China trying to get around sanctions to get Nvidia chips and Nvidia only being able to sell them limited older chips...
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256 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 7 Sep
Most recently in FT, Nvidia and AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US government for an export license for their nerfed chips, which China was skeptical of (but they'll buy them anyway, because energy abundance) (also see: #1197313 and #1076020)
But in the meantime, Huawei has pivoted into AI hardware: How Huawei’s Ascend AI chips outperform Nvidia processors in running DeepSeek’s R1 model (paper) (also see: #965816 and #1075561). They're modeling this closer to Google's TPUs (what Gemini is trained on and for example is powering Colab) than Nvidia's GPUs: ultra modular.
As we all saw with Deepseek R1, export control doesn't work in a prohibitive way; it actually incentivizes innovation. Protectionism hurts the protectionists. I don't believe any US CEO or US state agent telling me China is far behind. They just are peddling US AI, which are consistently underdelivering on the promises.
AGI with GPT-5, right, lol
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Your analysis is well noted, thanks for sharing Sir.
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