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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Well the US did follow up by also banning the exports of the A800/H800 models tailored to precisely comply with the earlier sanctions, so presumably the intent was to stop export of GA100/GH100 silicon altogether and they didn't anticipate Nvidia rules-lawyering the sanctions by reconfiguring it.

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> so presumably the intent was to stop export of GA100/GH100 silicon altogether

They should have just written this in the regulations.

Instead they're making nvidia waste resources making a product that complied with regulations.

I mean fuck around and find out. Folks want to slide right up to the edge of legal definitions that's fine, but playing victim when the powers that be see you do it and nudge the line closer to the spirit of the original intent is laughable. It's not like the concept of legislation was invented two weeks ago and folks are shambling around trying to figure out what it all means.

It's just frustrating for me to see people write rules, and then say "hey not like that!". It wastes everyone's time, the point of regulations is to draw the line and have no ambiguous meaning.

It's like putting up a speed limit sign that says "55mph" and then ticketing them for speeding going "53mph".

If they want people to go 35mph, they should just made the limit 35mph!

Consider that regulations are hard to get right and all the people responsible might not have known in advance all the edge cases that were possible. After all, if they knew it in advance, the regulation would have been made before it ever became a problem in the first place

This is one of those situations where how the government works is not like your personal life experiences. Nvidia wasn’t some anonymous individual out of hundreds of millions subjected to a capricious law. They were the direct target of the law, and almost certainly had a seat at the table when it was written. I’m sure it wasn’t what they wanted, but they certainly had to know what the intent was, including backroom, private conversations.

They thought the government wouldn’t dare stop them. The government called their bluff.

I sympathize with your position but have you ever participated in any activity where large numbers of relatively intelligent people are incentivized to probe the boundaries of "permissible" behavior? Video game design and development would take a tenth of the effort if corralling users away from game-breaking edge cases wasn't required, and that's a zero risk low reward endeavor. Now just imagine what those same folks would get up to if there was a few billion in loose cash thrown into the mix. All of that is to say defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior precisely is easily one of the hardest things to get right, and usually impossible to get right the first time.

Eh, there's some reason to be annoyed here. They would have banned GPU export entirely, I'm sure, except for industry lobbyists who said that doing so would make Chinese companies fill the void in offering GPUs for the lucrative Chinese gaming market, then it'd be a short step from there to having created the capability they rely on the west for. NVIDIA, AMD, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc. all lobbied for this outcome saying, essentially, "let us keep the gaming market, but just outlaw export of GPUs for AI training: that will be more effective because then there's no market for a local competitor to serve."

Then they went and made AI-trining equipment anyway that skirted the letter of the law.

I don't disagree with you but this is still very much on NVidia. They have the resources to contact the government and ask, "what if?" but they didn't because they were trying to pull a fast one.

NVidia knew that was a possibility when they were working around the intent of the trade restrictions. The Department of Commerce was quite transparent in their intentions, and NVidia undermined that and the obvious happened.

They absolutely anticipate that, its just about how well the people actually draft regs, or not

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