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Comment by jhancock | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. blocking advanced chip sales to China has ensured China increased their efforts to someday no longer need them.

In effort for us to see clear eyed, it would be good to stop assuming someone is a spy without a shred of credible evidence. Avoiding trade restrictions by routing them through another country does not indicate spy craft.

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I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.

* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.

* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.

* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.

* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.

In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.

meh. This is the only part that matters:

* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.

I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.

I would be surprised if that's even her real name.

to u. because presumably u're not us citizen

I think you have a very strange definition of spying if you preclude the Chinese government using an operative to sexually compromise the world's most influential tech leader running the world's most influential tech business into breaking US laws to materially benefit China to an almost unprecedented degree.

I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.

This is not a courtroom. Jensen has been very open that he wants to be able to sell his chips to China. As of today it comes out that he has had other affairs. Jenson may have knowing broken the law. Perhaps the law will have its way with him.

My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."

Covert actions in the interest and by the request of a foreign power is spy craft. If you do this openly, then it would not be called spying, it is done all the time; sometimes it is called diplomacy. If you hide the fact that you are working for a foreign power, you are a spy. It is not a necessary condition, but it is sufficient.

China or any other country is not required to follow the U.S.'s laws. If they don't see U.S. rules to their advantage they may work around it.

We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.

Folks here tend to forget US laws are just that - US laws. Mostly done to benefit US and nobody else. Its not like US respects any European laws, does it.

Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.

Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.

Sounds more like a gun runner but for GPUs

I don't have a horse in this race, but from a US perspective it makes sense to ban chip sales. This is an arms race and any advantage however small makes a difference.

NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.

I agree with you and I find it sad. I grew up during the last Cold War. Dario Amodei often writes in new Cold War rhetoric. Is this really the best we can do as humans?

What do you think about USA withdrawing support for Taiwan and letting China take it?

The USA has already shown it will remove its soldiers and military hardware from east asia when a certain middle eastern country seems to require it more. Taiwan should study and meditate a bit on what happened to South Korea.

It will take years for China to catch up without these GPUs, that's the whole point. By that time we have advanced AGI and can just stay ahead of them

China already makes GPUs that are good enough, even if they are slower and less efficient than the NVIDIA GPUs.

Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.

This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.

I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.

Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.

2030 is an eternity. We will almost certainly have advanced AGI before then. Read the METR report.

They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.

Which METR report? The one about Anthropic's acceleration rate for improved benchmark results, that put the value at anywhere between 1.1 and 3x per year.

I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.

The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.

Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times. Just a single one would do. That would make me believe this theory that keeps being repeated.

Are you living in some parallel universe where china is reliant on the US for Teslas or something? They are even certifying their own commercial jet engines now.

Don't mistake china's reliance 40 years ago while purchasing US technology to what it is capable of reverse engineering now...

Your reply comes off a bit rude and not within the tone expected on HN. First off, China is not my enemy. I am a humanist (at least try to be).

Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?

I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.

> Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?

False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.

Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working? Or are you just parroting what Jensen has been saying because he wants to sell his hardware in the Chinese market?

I doubt that you actually even believe what you are parroting. Would you say that selling US stealth fighter technology to China causes a longer term reliance on the US and stops China's pursuit of stealth tech? If the US sold stealth fighter tech to China and asked China to pinky swear they won't do anything that is against the US interests with it, do you think China would respect that?

And since it seems paramount for you to bring up, let me make this clear: I'm not saying China is a bad actor here, it's just reality. There's no rational world where China has the most advanced time travel technology, the US is a half a decade behind, and China starts selling it to the US in the hopes that the US becomes reliant on China for time travel technology. It doesn't make any sense.

> Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times.

Sure - jet engines. China still can't replicate the material for turbine blade and has to buy them from other countries.

They've had decades from the first aircraft sales to do the R&D to make their own blades. They've failed so far.

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