China Keeps Buying Hobbled Nvidia Cards To Train Its AI Models (arstechnica.com) 20
The US acted aggressively last year to limit China's ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems. From a report: Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world. The result has been soaring Chinese orders for the latest advanced US processors. China's leading Internet companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, whose graphical processing units have become the workhorse for training large AI models.
The impact of soaring global demand for Nvidia's products is likely to underpin the chipmaker's second-quarter financial results due to be announced on Wednesday. Besides reflecting demand for improved chips to train the Internet companies' latest large language models, the rush has also been prompted by worries that the US might tighten its export controls further, making even these limited products unavailable in the future. However, Bill Dally, Nvidia's chief scientist, suggested that the US export controls would have greater impact in the future. "As training requirements [for the most advanced AI systems] continue to double every six to 12 months," the gap between chips sold in China and those available in the rest of the world "will grow quickly," he said.
The impact of soaring global demand for Nvidia's products is likely to underpin the chipmaker's second-quarter financial results due to be announced on Wednesday. Besides reflecting demand for improved chips to train the Internet companies' latest large language models, the rush has also been prompted by worries that the US might tighten its export controls further, making even these limited products unavailable in the future. However, Bill Dally, Nvidia's chief scientist, suggested that the US export controls would have greater impact in the future. "As training requirements [for the most advanced AI systems] continue to double every six to 12 months," the gap between chips sold in China and those available in the rest of the world "will grow quickly," he said.
Broken DRM? (Score:1)
All DRM is just a puzzle to be broken. If you can access said item legitimately you can do so via nefarious means.
What isn't to say that the Chinese haven't broken the DRM on the cards and they are running at full-tilt?
The Chinese are just as intelligent as folks in any other country. But, with a population multiple times pretty much anywhere else, they have a correspondingly higher number of pretty smart people. Not higher percentage, just higher number.
Why even bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If countries are found to allow reshipping them, than those countries will stop being able to import them.
They recently started looking at requiring datacenters and cloud service providers to know their customer and not allow Chinese users.
The gap grows OR (Score:2)
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the law of unexpected consequences kicks in and they succeed in making it work with what they have.
Well, its a good job the USA has all that chip fabrication itself and can control the worlds access to the technology. Because all those chips are made in the USA, right?
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Its a US company that owns the IP and the chips that are manufactured, so the US can control the export of them. It isn't necessary that they be fabricated in the US for that to happen.
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Its a US company that owns the IP and the chips that are manufactured, so the US can control the export of them. It isn't necessary that they be fabricated in the US for that to happen.
Personally I think thats bullshit, because if they don't start on US soil, they don't count as being 'exported' from the US. But, of course, the USA is always right. Or else.
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My company can have things manufactured to my specifications anywhere in the world on my dime, shipped to an onsite location, and then they belong to the company. It could be candy or toys. If it's a US company it is subject to the export controls whether you like it or not.
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as if china actually cared about IP... watch them clone or reverse engineer those chips and make better ones
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In the free world the media and government are supposed to be people run, with the media informing on the government. Not a jab, just a commentary, I suspect you know this...
How are they limited? (Score:2)
Re:How are they limited? (Score:4, Informative)
If I remember correctly, It didn't get hacked. The thing story you posted talks about was a case of miners getting leaked code for an unlocked driver for oldest 3060 cards and backporting the changes for that specific card type. It didn't work for any other LHR card, including the revised 3060 that came out quickly after the leak.
The main workaround for LHR cards was to either tweak Ethereum miner to try to fool the detection (usually meaning that instead of 50%, you could run it at around 60-70% constantly trying to avoid engaging the hash rate throttling), or artificially limit the performance below the LHR cutoff (around 50%) and then run multiple shared instances of mining on the same card with other half mining something that wasn't hash rate limited. But this required a lot of VRAM. This was arguably the reason for 12 gig desktop 3060 that had a cut down chip compared to mobile 3060 with only 6 gigs of VRAM, a completely 180 turn on the norm where mobile chip is the one that is cut and desktop one is the full version.
As far as I know, actual implementation of LHR hasn't been cracked to this day in spite of a lot of money being thrown at the problem.
Factorio (Score:2)
Now I realize this is the real world
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They will buy and are buying a lot more chips. Initial limit's idea was to make the new generation completely off limits. Nvidia compensated by severely throttling their latest gen into a "Sanctions compatible" version, which is getting sold to China in droves.
Essentially, this is a case of poorly targeted sanctions. Or alternatively well targeted sanctions that massively inflate profitability of a large US company.
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If we force China to use double the resources(chips, servers, memory, whatever other related things) to get whatever results they want, doesn't that also imply double the energy used?
Already DCs are using megawatts of power. Doubling it does not seem to help with global warming.
It would probably have been better if you just banned them from getting those chips at all(in terms of global warming).
It will probably force China to work on their own FABs, own chips, own everything else. May end up benefitting the
Order twice as many and slow production down (Score:1)
Will there be enough super duper deluxe ones for the US to complete??
Nvidia seemed to prioritize crypto over gaming. Why should anyone expect them to prioritize the US version when they can sell twice as many to China for a similar cost.
CCP Loyalty testing AI and other fun. (Score:3)
I don't see anyone talking about what they want it for.
the answer is shit like this. [zmescience.com]
The AI institute in Hefei recently posted a video on their official Weibo handle. The video demonstrated a mind-reading technology testing the inclination of a human subject towards CCPâ(TM)s ideology and âoethought educationâ.
n the video, a person (subject) is seen entering a glass booth. He sits in front of a screen that starts showing him content promoting CCPâ(TM)s policies and ideology. While the subject is busy watching and reading the content; the smart cameras, brain scanners, and other biometrics installed in the booth are analyzing his facial and mental responses via an AI-based method referred to as"emotionally intelligent computing" (in the summary text). Finally, at the end of the video, a âoeloyalty scoreâ appears on the screen (based on the analysis).
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that's just a more advanced polygraph machine...
both are based on bullshit research