[elp]

I'm sure there are LOTS of issues that need to be addressed, but the demand for the chips are so high that the incentives are overwhelmingly in favor of this continuing. If the reported margins on the Nvidia chips are as high as the claims make it out to be (73+% ??) this will easily find a world wide market.

It was also frustratingly predictable from the moment the US started trying to limit the sales of the chips. America has slowed the speed of Chinese AI development by a tiny number of years, if that, in return for losing total domination of the GPU market.

[johndhi]

>America has slowed the speed of Chinese AI development by a tiny number of years, if that, in return for losing total domination of the GPU market.

I'm open to considering the argument that banning exports of a thing creates a market incentive for the people impacted by the ban to build aa better and cheaper thing themselves, but I don't think it's as black and white as you say.

If the only ingredient needed to support massive innovation and cost cutting is banning exports, wouldn't we have tons of examples of that happening already - like in Russia or Korea or Cuba? Additionally, even if the sale of NVIDIA H100s weren't banned in China, doesn't China already have a massive incentive to throw resources behind creating competitive chips?

I actually don't really like export bans, generally, and certainly not long-term ones. But I think you (and many other people in the public) are overstating the direct connection between banning exports of a thing and the affected country generating a competing or better product quickly.

[filoleg]

> If the only ingredient needed to support massive innovation and cost cutting is banning exports, wouldn't we have tons of examples of that happening already - like in Russia or Korea or Cuba?

That's just one of the ingredients that could help with chance of it happening, far from being "the only ingredient".

The other (imo even more crucial) ingredients are the actual engineering/research+economical+industrial production capabilities. And it just so happens that none of the countries you listed (Russia, DPRK, and Cuba) have that. That's not a dig at you, it is just really rare in general for a country to have all of those things available in place, and especially for an authoritarian country. Ironically, it feels like being an authoritarian country makes it more difficult to have all those pieces together, but if such a country already has those pieces, then being authoritarian imo only helps (as you can just employ the "shove it down everyone's throat until it reaches critical mass, improves, and succeeds" strategy).

However, it is important to remember that even with all those ingredients available on hand, all it means is that you have a non-zero chance at succeeding, not a guarantee of that happening.

[antonvs]

Russia and Cuba? Why not mention Somalia and Afghanistan? They're about equally relevant in this context.

South Korea might have the capability to play this game (North Korea certainly doesn't), but it hasn't really had the incentive to.

Which brings us to the real issue: an export ban on an important product creates an extremely strong incentive, that didn't exist before. Throwing significant national resources at a problem to speculatively improve a country's competitiveness is a very different calculation than doing so when there's very little alternative.

[lukevp]

Russia and Korea and Cuba don’t have the economy, manufacturing and competent research scientists that China has

[teyc]

Head of SMIC was ex TSMC IIRC. They were able to poach TSMC engineers because Taiwan didn’t pay as well.

[brazukadev]

The catch-up would happen one way or another but with the exports ban it definitely accelerated

[smokefoot]

I mean, I don’t know how long the NVIDIA moats can hold. With this much money at stake, others will challenge their dominance especially in a market as diverse and fragmented as advanced semiconductors.

That’s not to say I’m brave enough to short NVDA.

[mark_l_watson]

I think that NVIDIA’s moat is the US government. Remember our government’s efforts to prevent the use of Huawei cell infrastructure in Europe and around the world?

I am a long time fan of Dave Sacks and the All In podcast ‘besties’ but now that he is ‘AI czar’ for our government it is interesting what he does not talk about. For example on a recent podcast he was pumping up AI as a long term solution to US economic woes, but a week before that podcast, a well known study was released that showed that 95% of new LLM/AI corporate projects were fails. Another thing that he swept under the rug was the recent Stanford study that 80% of US startups are saving money using less expensive Chinese (and Mistral, and Google Gemma??) models. When the Stanford study was released, I watched All In material for a few weeks, expecting David Sack’s take on the study. Not a word from him.

Apologies for this off-topic rant but I am really concerned how my country is spending resources on AI infrastructure. I think this is a massive bubble, but I am not sure how catastrophic the bubble will be.

[dworks]

"Your margin is my opportunity" as someone said. Certainly Google must have plans to sell its chips externally with this much up for grabs?

[mrktf]

As long as only TMSC is only top performance chip producer and it is possible to reserve all it manufacturing capacity for one two clients the NVIDIA will hold without problem...

My opinion, the problems for NVIDIA will start when China ramp up internal chip manufacturing performance enough to be in same order of magnitude as TMSC.

[StopDisinfo910]

> That’s not to say I’m brave enough to short NVDA.

Their multiples don't seem sustainable so they are likely to fall at some point but when is tricky.

[xbmcuser]

google has already started offering its TPUs to other neocloud providers

[catigula]

Slowing AI development by even one month is essentially infinite slowness in terms of superintelligence development. It's a kill-shot, a massive policy success.

Lost months are lost exponentially and it becomes impossible to catch up. If this policy worked at all, let alone if it worked as you describe, this was a masterstroke of foreign policy.

This isn't merely my opinion, experts in this field feel superintelligence is at least possible, if not plausible. This is a massively successful policy is true, and, if it's not, little is lost. You've made a very strong case for it.

[jyscao]

>in terms of superintelligence development

doing a lot of heavy lifting in your conjecture