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I feel the GPU restrictions created an environment for Chinese Devs to be more innovative and do more with less. Kudos to the deepseek team!
by lomkju 2y ago
I feel the GPU restrictions created an environment for Chinese Devs to be more innovative and do more with less.
Kudos to the deepseek team!
- wodderam 2y agoKai-Fu Lee describes the culture so well in AI Superpowers. The roots are well before GPU restriction. Absolute cut throat competition. Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol. The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data. Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should really make it a point to read it in 2025. It is an incredible book.
- Etheryte 2y agoI don't know, I've been hearing the story that China is about to upend the US as the leading global superpower ever since I was a kid. There's always a new vogue and novel twist put on the rationale and how it's gonna happen, but so far it's like fusion, always a few years away.
- solaarphunk 2y agoEconomic superpower perhaps - just take a look at their relative GDP over time.
- kayewiggin 2y agoChina has 900M people making less than $400/month, and 600M people making less than $100/month. relative GDP is a joke, go to China to see what most of them are eating (hint: it's unsafe food filled with chemicals, or its mostly carbs) and where these people are living (hint: it's shoddy constructed condos or run down farm houses)
- bugglebeetle 2y agoIt’s unclear to me why what you’re describing is specific to China and not also what Americans euphemistically refer to as “fly over states.”
- kamarg 2y agoNot sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food. Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
- bugglebeetle 2y agoI don’t have anything against them. I was born and raised in one. I just find it ironic that someone would fail to see this parallel.
- Airodonack 2y agoThe parallel is that there are rich and poor? It is unscrupulous to argue in imprecise, binary terms while ignoring the difference in scale. People in flyover states are not making only $400/mo or even occupying that same societal equivalent of China in America.
- eunos 2y ago> China has 900M people making less than $400/month Most of these folks are illiterate oldies that would pass away in a few years anyway.
- elashri 2y agoI think you mean nuclear fusion.
- Etheryte 2y agoOf course, thanks.
- tossandthrow 2y agoWhat makes you think it has not happened? There has not been an event to establish who the current super power is in new time.
- futureshock 2y agoI think you have the right idea. China has yet to truly flex its muscle. They prefer to quietly grow stronger. Their response to Covid with the largely successful zero covid strategy gives a clue about the power of its government. Silly, you can’t become the champion without stepping into the ring.
- daveguy 2y agoLargely successful? I wouldn't confuse Chinese propaganda to the outside world with success.
- pphysch 2y agoThe Chinese government treated the pandemic as a bioweapon attack by a foreign adversary engaged in a broader hybrid war, and it did so effectively.
- daveguy 2y agoThat's batshit insane.
- pphysch 2y agoA country targeted in an ongoing hybrid war by the world's #1 superpower would have a (relatively) extreme response to a pandemic that originated in an epidemiologically interesting location deep in their inland territory, and that extreme response having any substantial national security impetuous is "batshit insane". Insightful contribution! A big country would never overreact to national security threats. We have the TSA to protect us from that :)
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- jitl 2y agoIf you want to look at an objective numeric metric for this, why not foreign military bases? US has 128+, China had ~2. To project global military power China will need similar order of magnitude presence. I use that number as a check against sometimes breathless and sensational journalism about the topic. It’s harder for me to come up with a simpler metric for “Belt and Road” / IMF style control-through-capital. But, I think it will happen. After visiting China and seeing how much consistent progress both in infrastructure from the government and in daily life from the economy, my impression is US government makes 2 steps forward 1 step back in the same time it takes China to take 100 steps forward.
- bpodgursky 2y agoThe US does not have 128 foreign military bases. It has ~50 nominal bases [1]. Most of them are just the US sharing an airfield with a friendly country; it's a refueling stop that would not be hard for China to replicate. The US does have several large overseas bases but 90% of this list is are indefensible logistics hubs and not a meaningful projection of force. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...
- daveguy 2y agoCalling any US military base an "indefensible logistics hub" reveals that the extent of your research was probably just that Wikipedia listicle.
- bpodgursky 2y agoBelieve whatever you want. Most of these bases are co-located with NATO or other allies for good reason, the US doesn't have to do everything itself wrt air defense, locating an airlift wing with a fighter wing. But then it's a lower bar than people imagine, for China to buy similar friendship.
- daveguy 2y ago
- jurli 2y agoIt's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime
- talldayo 2y agoWhen I was a kid, China was a lot better integrated with the international community. Right now their relationships are far and few between, rarely featuring first-world nations. If Russia couldn't beat NATO in a pitched fight against the rest of the world, neither can China.
- joshbaptiste 2y agoAs a sovereign nation rises in power you'll notice how it slowly starts losing favor from USA
- roca 2y agoIf it's a democracy and reasonably friendly to the USA, it's not a big deal. In the 1990s everyone thought Japan was going to be the next superpower and that was just fine.
- ijidak 2y agoHa! Do you remember the panic induced by a rising Japan in the late 80's and early 90's. The fear of the "Red Sun Rising". The fear that Japan was going to own most of the valuable real estate in America. The forcing of Japanese car companies to onshore to protect American jobs. Blaming of Japanese industrial policy as being unfair competition. It was the collapse of the Japanese growth engine in the mid 90's that finally ended the American panic. The U.S. and U.K. are a dual world power. Whenever powers rise to threaten that duality there is a lot of hand-wringing in Washington.
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- janalsncm 2y agoForget about future tense. In many industries China is already the undisputed leader by far. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-becoming-a-leading-innovator-in-advanced-industries/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be... China leads in Computers and Electronics, Machinery and Equipment, Motor Vehicles, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals, Electrical Equipment. The US leads in IT and Information Services, Pharmaceuticals, and Other Transportation. It’s not about to happen. It already happened, and it is largely due to hubris that the US doesn’t talk about it.
- lopatin 2y agoI never knew Sam Altman threw Bret Taylor out of a window. That makes the OpenAI board drama more understandable.
- modeless 2y agoDidn't Ballmer do that? I'm not sure it indicates success.
- daedrdev 2y agoThe thing is Bejing undercuts this completly by allowing local governments to perform rampant shakedown of investors and ceos through disappearances for bogus charges, even in other provinces.
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- zitterbewegung 2y agoIf you actually believe that NVIDA gpus are import restricted there are many stories that this is being sidestepped.
- manquer 2y agoNot to the volume needed to compete with the training infrastructure setups of Anthropic or OpenAI or other leading players No ban is perfect, there is always some loopholes or illegal exports this is to be expected, but if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. The question is rather do they we need a lot of gpus to train or training with older gen gpus is not competitive is a different problem.
- sangnoir 2y ago> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests. Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of small companies in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. I better not look too closely at them or I won't get my sales bonus for this quarter.
- ricardobeat 2y agoModels like Llama 3 are trained on sixteen thousand GPUs, OpenAI probably 25k-100k GPUs. This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve.
- sangnoir 2y ago> This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve Harder and more expensive, but far from impossible. I doubt they pay more than doubles Nvidia's sticker price, all told. My comment was inspired by recent real-life events; Nvidia got into legal trouble in the last couple of months for turning a blind eye to questionable transactions - if you're curious about the mechanics of GPU sanctions-busting, read up on the governments accusations against Nvidia, and this was for low-hanging fruit. The article has one analyst speculating they used tens of thousands of H100s (50,000 IIRC) instead of the 10,000 A100s the Deepseek CEO owns up to. They can afford to pay exorbitant markups for the logistical nightmare of importation through 3rd party countries at scale. edit: AFAIK, the sanctions don't prevent Chinese AI labs from renting GPUs from any cloud provider. To simplify logistics, a shell company could avoid shipping the cards to the mainland by simply settings up a data center in not-China and give the parent company full access. I suppose the US government has to balance sanctions against Nvidia's share price, so they can't be too aggressive, there are just too many loopholes for demanded shock not to have been a consideration.
- modeless 2y agoSoftware expands to fill the available resources. If you want more efficient software, build it on less powerful hardware. AI training runs are no exception!
- mkagenius 2y agoI just shoved the whole .webvtt file in the header of a audio Response from the server so that I don't have to implement another API just for subtitles [1][2] 1. While building https://gitpodcast.com https://gitpodcast.com 2. Code snip: https://github.com/BandarLabs/gitpodcast/blob/main/backend/app/routers/generate.py#L170 https://github.com/BandarLabs/gitpodcast/blob/main/backend/a...
- kopirgan 2y agoCan't agree more. Especially as I wait to download 1.3gb file to update some Windows driver like Realtek audio or LED display, and you realise a whole effing Debian operating system with Xfce & apps can fit in a lot less.
- Dalewyn 2y agoWhoever are downvoting this really don't understand that expanding a congested highway merely widens the congestion instead of alleviating it. Software today require several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores just to render some simple fucking text because everyone has several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores.
- kopirgan 2y agoThanks..Among many other issues, it is also a serious crippling factor for communities and countries that are low on budget/resources & a disaster for recycling, climate change etc etc.
- jasdi 2y agoThis is one of the biggest reasons why China or India are threat to the West. Because their Engineers are constantly in situations were they have to work with much less resources. And they come up with stuff that constantly surprises people for being much cheaper. The western reaction is to then go and buy them out. Its not going to work forever. They have already taken over large swathes of the tech landscape. Even with AI for example, Real Time inference is not required in majority of cases. But the western engineer and corp exec in big tech, are used to buying new data centers everyday (not because of specific Customer Demand, but because of intent to capture market/snuff out competition/build moats or what ever bs an environment of over abundance has trained them to do) and then they have zillions of machines idling which they use to provide real-time inference raising the cost for everyone. Sooner or later someone in China or India working on non real time inference will offer large corps much cheaper solutions. The Western model is where you forget how to cook a meal at home, and end up relying on McDonalds for food, because they are everywhere, thanks to their prime directive of survival via opening new stores everyday.
- jurli 2y agoMakes sense. When you restrict hardware, you have to spend all your energy on optimizing software that everyone else ignores Imagine if they were forced to use IE7 as the only browser. The frontend frameworks would be blazing fast and we would never have bloatware like React or Angular or npm
- aduffy 2y agoAll of the best systems programmers I know grew up in former Soviet bloc countries.
- Cumpiler69 2y agoWhat's a systems programmer?
- PhilippGille 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_programming
- moralestapia 2y agoYour feel is on the wrong place. That had nothing to do with the creation of this model.