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USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoTrump is winning the intimidation wars so far. But I wonder when "everybody else" the 7.6bn or so get fucked off and start creating treaties and deals that are bad for the US.
- _t9ow 2y agoThis policy was introduced by the Biden administration.
- bushbaba 2y agoPolicy is from Biden admin not trump.
- genewitch 2y agoI expect this refrain a lot; US eggs are 90 days farm to table give or take a month, so egg shortages began at least 3 months ago. Drborah birx explained we culled 107mm fowl in the US last year to prevent human mutation of bird flu. Started in June. Also the menthol ban was a biden admin sneak. Anyhow I'm a big fan of accountability and I'm already seeing this phrase pop up.
- belter 2y agoHe is only wining the intimidation wars, the same way everybody on a flight tries to tolerate and ignore a drunk and disruptive passenger....
- sauravt 2y agois this somehow linked to greenland ?
- belter 2y agoThis was a Biden administration decision. The new administration will probably do worst.
- lclc 2y agoSwitzerland had much better relations with the US under the Trump administration (especially thanks to the very friendly ambassador) than under the Biden administration (with a new, very hostile ambassador). They started talks about a free trade agreement under Trump, which was frozen under Biden.
- kleton 2y agoDo the Swiss want to be considered someone's ally or neutral?
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoYes.
- Cumpiler69 2y agoAll of them at the same time, they want to eat their cake, have their cake, sell their cake and rent their cake. Neutral means you get to profit from doing business with all sides at the same time while spinning some virtuous BS PR how you don't take any sides while you deal under the table with bloody war lords. That's how Switzerland and later Austria got rich in the cold war, by being the middle men between the NATO and USSR deals. Today it's being a middle man between NATO, China, Russia. There's always gonna be demand for middle men to wash dirty laundry of various countries' deals that they prefer to keep secret so they can pretend to stay clean on the public scene. European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense since the US never hesitates to flip the switch from "you're a valuable ally" to "you're our bitch, whaddaya gonna do about it?" whenever it needs to strong-arm you into complacency, and so the EU should invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry, but who am I kidding, this is always falling on deaf ears and nothing's gonna change.
- lukan 2y agoIt also means not wanting to interfere into other peoples buisness so much. Swiss has not invaded anyone in a long time.
- aktuel 2y agoTo be fair, what country doesn't act like they have this cake replicator technology? Certainly the U.S. and England are firmly in cakeism territory.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
- roenxi 2y ago> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax. Corporations are the legal structure that enables, creates and sustains modern life. Taxes reduce the amount of money that will be pushed through that structure. There are people who's entire worldly possessions were made by companies. It is a little more qualitative, but the people with the most and best corporations are typically the people with the most rapidly improving standards of living too. Although it makes sense that people want to tax them, instituting a global minimum tax has always been a stupid idea. It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on. If anything there should be a global maximum tax rate. Leave countries the option to make the world better.
- bilekas 2y agoThis is a bit of a nieve view and I also get the sentiment you think taxes are some kind of punishment. Taxes are a charge on running the country and infrastructure good enough so that your business can profit and enhance an economy. If you think compabies are being taxed too much then you don't grasp how much profits they're actually making. And how much of the countries resource and infrastructure they take up.
- roenxi 2y agoI don't think you have gotten the sentiment at all. How did you get from what I wrote to seeing taxes as a form of punishment?
- ricardobeat 2y ago> It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on Sounds like you think that’s a bad thing (aka punishment). By the way, the former is called “holidays” and is regulated by law in the majority of the world, the US is the odd one out. Even China has a 11-day minimum vacation policy.
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- Aldo_MX 2y agoThis restriction makes no sense. The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips". China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.
- sofixa 2y ago> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US. Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there. But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".
- genewitch 2y agoAre the machines German or am I misremembering? The ones in the video were maybe 14nm and I vaguely recall the machines being manufactured in Germany and flown and assembled for TSMC. I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.
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- sschueller 2y agoIt doesn't matter now as deepseek has shown. Also this was done under Binden so we have no idea what Trump will do. However it does spoil the relationship and maybe the next time around when Switzerland is ready to spend 6B Swiss Francs on planes it won't be US made ones. Additionally if Trump doesn't follow the agreed upon global minimum tax which Switzerland also bent over backwards for why would it do any such agreement with the US in the future?
- karmasimida 2y agoWhy? Serving is still a massive effort, requires massive amount of GPU memory to hold those models. I don't understand the logic that deepseek somehow is a blow to GPU demand. If anything, more people will try to build on top of R1 style model now, it is only going to drive demand, for customized training.
- sschueller 2y agoWe can buy old chips at any volume. The restriction is only on the latest and greatest. DeepSeek has shown that you can achieve the same or better result on old hardware with less computing power.
- karmasimida 2y agoH800 is essentially H100, and it is not old. And GPUs do expire, it breaks down constantly. You need to swap them in and out. Buying old chips isn't related to deepseek what so ever, you can buy A100 also.
- raincole 2y ago> It doesn't matter now as deepseek has shown People keep saying that DeepSeek R1's training cost is just $5.6M. Where is the source? I'm not even asking for the proof. Just the source, even a self-claimed statement. I've read the R1's paper and it doesn't say the number of $5.6M. Is it somewhere in DeepSeek's press release? Google just gives me a lot of medium articles and journalist sites. It sounds awfully like a number made up by some analyst and got parroting around. I've even seen people on X saying DeepSeek is "lying", while I can't even find what the exact DeepSeek's claim is.
- godelski 2y agoThis is odd, ETH Zurich is one of the top ML research labs in the world. They routinely work with Disney! Are they going to block Germany and Max Planck Institute as well? (who commonly work with ETH Zurich) https://studios.disneyresearch.com/researchlab/disney-research-zurich/ https://studios.disneyresearch.com/researchlab/disney-resear... https://www.youtube.com/disneyresearchhub https://www.youtube.com/disneyresearchhub
- jjallen 2y agoI think that Germany is much more of a bona fide ally of the US at this point than Switzerland.
- Gud 2y agoSwitzerland is not an ally to the US. Switzerland is a neutral country, although on friendly terms with many countries.
- dathinab 2y agoLet's be realistic EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either, reality is more complex then a dump black and white world few a lot of fictional stories love to have). Meta, OpenAI and similar have made it through their action very clear that they: - Want to abuse legislation to make sure no future competition can rise to rival them (When it comes to foundational models, close to all AI startups use fundational models from tech startups even if they speak of "having their own model" (which nearly always is just a minimal domain adaption of a foundation model from a US tech giant). OpenAI was very well open okay, or lets better say visible, about that - Are not okay and will penalize any country with legislation which states you can't just train on copyrighted content without getting a license which allows training (i.e. it's not fair use, which it theoretically shouldn't be either in the US as it's in general trying to replace the people of which content they train on). E.g. various "open source" models from Meta aren't available in the EU and that was before export restrictions. - Both have no access to influence US government decisions, so removing access from a Uni or even Country which tries to create their own foundation models. Which much less legal copyright issues. Is just kind of the natural consequence of giving tech giants which try to make sure they stay quasi monopolies to much governmental influence. So I think if the US wouldn't be worried of EU then teaming up with China for ML compute ships the EU might already have been on the "reduced access" list. Or at least some key EU states which have understood how important it is to have a non US foundational model. Through also to be fair Swiss "neutrality" is complex, and involves having decent political and trade relationships which any super power as far as relevant for them and viable (e.g. not really Russia anymore). Which includes China. This didn't prevent them to criticize China e.g. about Honkong but they are in discussions to improve trade agreements between them and China since last year (see Wikipedia). So my guess is the main reason is to put pressure on Swiss wrt. future "improvements" of trade agreements with China. But I think the points listed first still are something the EU has to highly worry about and they might have very well played a secondary role for this decision. You know like testing out the waters how exuding alleys from free chip access will be treated by other alleys.
- belter 2y agoRecent discussion: "Poland fumes over US block on AI chips" (114 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778386
- nisten 2y agoIt's no surprise the Swiss have been classified as second tier country given plenty of evidence Switzerland has enabled money laundering for an adversary. You can't both deny an ally amo to claim neutrality while holding their enemies cash amo. Russia’s Alpine Assets: Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion in Switzerland. https://www.csce.gov/press-releases/hearing-russias-alpine-assets-money-laundering-and-sanctions-evasion-in-switzerland/#:~:text=Swiss%20banks%20are%20estimated%20to,Swiss%20banks%20at%20the%20time. https://www.csce.gov/press-releases/hearing-russias-alpine-a...
- ricardobeat 2y agoSwitzerland is historically neutral going back 500 years. You can’t be neutral while picking sides, and the munitions block was precisely to protect that neutrality. It’s not difficult to understand.
- jjallen 2y agoSwitzerland restricts access to its own allies of weapons that it sold to other countries because of internal concerns about how that could affect the country in the future. This seems to be at least partially similar to that. At this point AI could absolutely be considered potentially threatening in the future.
- Semaphor 2y ago> Switzerland restricts access to its own allies of weapons that it sold to other countries because of internal concerns about how that could affect the country in the future. This is regarding resale, right? IIRC pretty much every country does that?
- lukan 2y agoYes, but in this concrete case it meant, that the Swiss prevented germany from transfering ammunition to Ukraine (over ammunition of the anti air tank Gepard, if I recall correctly).
- teew 2y agoThat argument would bite itself in the ass. Switzerland doesn't have issues with selling arms to neutral countries. So the presumption would be that Switzerland might turn non-neutral and wage offensive war with this technology? But at the same time the underlying tone is "we're punishing you for 'not being as ally,' aka for being neutral". And during all of this the US is delivering recently purchased F35s to Switzerland as well.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago>Switzerland doesn't have issues with selling arms to neutral countries. That's a very poor case. Any country declaring itself neutral stops being neutral the moment it gets attacked by another country (see Belgium and Netherlands in WW2 when they declared themselves neutral but still got steamrolled by Nazi Germany anyway, and Ukraine today). So then you won't be able to get any ammo or spare parts for those expensive Swiss arms you bought making them paperweights (again see Ukraine right now with it's Swiss Oerlikon AA guns on the German Gepards). So why would anyone buy swiss arms then if the moment you actually need to use them to defend yourself you can't because the Swiss government puts an embargo on you?
- maeil 2y ago> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax. Corporations are the legal structure Well well well, who'd have thought! 3 months ago on "Italy stiffens terms of digital services tax in 2025 budget": > I thought this was what was being implemented to fix that -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r... > You can sit around and wait for decades until this might get meaningfully implemented, loopholes get closed and enforcement is strict. Great step by Italy to refuse that and just implement a measure in the meantime. Can always be repealed if indeed things get fixed on a global level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41942974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41942974
- HraGab 2y agoWell, Switzerland should restrict access to what is now called "The Magnificent Seven" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla): https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-tightens-its-grip-ai-chip-flows-across-globe-2025-01-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u... This article falsely claims that "the US leads AI development right now". A very high percentage of research and implementers is from the EU, China and Russia (e.g., Sutskever).
- Towaway69 2y agoA good example of how fragile technology really is. First off, you need rare metals to make chips, so you need access to them. Then you need complex chip frabrication technology that a single company[1] in The Netherlands creates and owns. Then you need to build these incredible sterile and complex factories of which there are only a hand full across the global. Or having built up a relationship to a country that can get you the chips that you can't manufacture yourself, either that country has a change of political system or a third country threatens you with sanctions if you continue to have dealings with that country. It all seems to be built on shifting sources of silicon. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/asml-the-biggest-company-in-europe-youve-probably-never-heard-of.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/asml-the-biggest-company-in-...
- sixthDot 2y agoIronically Swiss has recently ordered a batch of F35, supposily to maintain good relationship w/ the U.S.
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- sebazzz 2y agoHow realistic is blocking anyway? Europe’s sactions on machine parts towards Russia are just being bypassed by buying via intermediaries in countries which are not sanctioned. I dont see how this can be different for tiny computer chips.