Chinese AI experts are circumventing Joe Biden’s export bans to obtain advanced microchips, academic papers have shown.
High-end AI chips made by the US tech giant Nvidia have been used by an employee at a blacklisted Beijing company as well as academics at China’s national science institute, according to studies published online.
The Biden administration has barred Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips in China amid a global race to develop powerful AI systems and concerns about possible military uses.
However, four academic papers published on the open access science website ArXiv in recent weeks demonstrate experiments done in China using Nvidia’s H100, the company’s most powerful AI chip.
The studies include using AI systems to solve logic problems and carrying out tests of their mathematical ability.
While the researchers are using the H100 chips in small numbers – eight chips or fewer, compared to the thousands that have been acquired by US tech giants – the studies show that they are having some success circumventing US controls.
The people who run the varied US export control programs – for nuclear, military, dual use and so on and on – are not entirely insane. Yes, yes, I know, bit of a revelation that.
If you can buy it retail then it’s not controlled. On the obvious grounds that if you can buy it, from the shelf, at Walmart (or, OK, Frys) then there really is no damn point in trying to control who can get on a ‘plane with it. Sure, we might even want to control still, but as it’s obviously lunatic to think that we can let’s not bother.
Can you buy these chips retail? Well then…..
I can only concede your point Tim!!
Most likely exported to Thailand or Vietnam and driven across the border.
I’m not quite sure what this is really about. It’s not about the Chinese military getting hold of technology to do AI workloads. You don’t need H100s to do that. You just buy more of the previous generation chips. The latest Nvidias are just faster chips. There’s no special magic in them.
So, it’s either just making people feel safe in their beds. China can’t get the magic tech, so can’t start nuclear war, sleep safe citizen government is protecting you.
Or, it’s about trying to stymie Chinese tech companies from being able to compete, particularly in cloud computing and AI services.
The reaction in China seems to be lots of investment going into RISC-V chip production to remove the risk of the US government banning other chips.
“US tech giant Nvidia”
I saw somewhere that it’s Chinese-owned and nominally based in Singapore. Was I misled?
Don’t overlook the other useful aspect of such legislation, viz, its selective application against the politically unfavoured. Everyone knows that ITAR restrictions are hopelessly-ineffective at preventing the movement of highly-sought-after technologies, but they are extremely-effective at jailing those who are carefully-chosen for jailing.
llater,
llamas
– I saw somewhere that it’s Chinese-owned and nominally based in Singapore. Was I misled?
Nvidia was founded in California in 1993. The boss is Taiwan born but has lived in the US since age 10.
– Can you buy these chips retail? Well then…..
You can use retail / consumer GPUs for AI but it’s not where the big action / money is. Nvidia makes* dedicated server farm / data centre style scalable AI processors that won’t be available in Walmart.
*Nvidia is a “fabless” design company; it outsources hardware manufacture.
.
– You don’t need H100s to do that. You just buy more of the previous generation chips. The latest Nvidias are just faster chips. There’s no special magic in them.
Not really. There is newer technology in each new generation. There are specific technologies in the A/H100 series that are prohibited or limited for the Chinese market. That tech also exists in the consumer versions (gaming and creative) which is why those are also prohibited. Nvidia has made “Chinese” versions of the retail cards that lack the full tech but are still over 90% as fast in traditional use.
The just launched H200 series is very AI focussed; I doubt much of that will make its way to China.
PJF,
“Not really. There is newer technology in each new generation. There are specific technologies in the A/H100 series that are prohibited or limited for the Chinese market. That tech also exists in the consumer versions (gaming and creative) which is why those are also prohibited. Nvidia has made “Chinese” versions of the retail cards that lack the full tech but are still over 90% as fast in traditional use.”
Yes, and that optimises particular processing, but you could still do AI processing on an old Intel 486 if you have enough time. The Chinese military have the money to build massive farms of off-the-shelf GPUs.
I once watched a BBC programme that was fretting about the Soviet Union getting access to the “advanced” Z80 CPU.
As used in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
The USSR was still largely using valve technology at this point.
CM – they had their own fabs in Ukraine, East Germany and Russia that could clone Western 8 bit to 32 bit designs.
The Soviet Union was better at computers than you might think, but because Communism didn’t work they couldn’t really benefit from it.
So the cheap, WH Smiths scale availability of ZX Spectrum eventually led to me, and a whole generation of other British and European nerds eventually finding careers in IT. But in early 80’s Russia, if you wanted a computer in your house you literally had to build your own ZX Spectrum clone out of bits of wood and scrounged components and hope it didn’t get you in trouble with the authorities.
There is still an active Russian demo scene based around their unlicensed ZX Speccy clones and derivatives. They made Doom run on a Speccy.
Depends when that was, Steve. Spectrum clones were incredibly popular in Russia in the ’90s. In the Z80’s heyday in the West, it was way ahead of anything they had.
Oops. Didn’t see your next comment. Still, it’s the timing. And that widespread availability. Soyuz didn’t have an on-board computer for about twenty years.
“you could still do AI processing on an old Intel 486 if you have enough time”
The military and other “interesting” applications are often time-constrained. If not, they are also size- or heat-constrained.
I suppose there’s a little of “slowing down technology transfer” (stealing) in there, but we’ve seen that it’s not all that effective.
Still, the argument against that is like the argument against border walls. Just because it’s not 100% effective, doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Defense in depth is a thing after all.
Sam – I still remember the skeptical tone of the BBC news when Mrs Thatcher was talking about putting *a* computer in every school.
Madness!
And most of the kids didn’t get it either. But we, the geeky few, who were entranced as soon as we saw these magical devices with their harsh beeps and crudely drawn phosphorescent dreamscapes… we saw the possibilities. We fell in love.
Russia was of course miles behind. No shock there, what’s surprising is that Britain once led the world in adopting microcomputers.
True. Although there aren’t many big-name indigenous businesses, we still punch above our weight. Of course, the BBC was happy to fawn all France’s Minitel, whereby the government put a subsidized terminal in every home. That held back internet adoption in France by at least a decade.
M,
“The military and other “interesting” applications are often time-constrained. If not, they are also size- or heat-constrained.”
Sure, but no-one is running this work as a single threaded process. You have a colossal number of calculations that are distributed across the available server capacity. You fill a warehouse with boxes and run parallel processes across them. Can’t get the latest machine? You buy double of the previous number of machines. Costs a bit more, but so what?
“Still, the argument against that is like the argument against border walls. Just because it’s not 100% effective, doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Defense in depth is a thing after all.”
The problem this stuff always comes down to for me is this: if the Chinese military is such a perilous threat to our interests if they get to do some computing, why are we allowing them to have any western chip technology?
It’s why I suspect this is bullshit and that “Chinese military” just gets citizens to blindly nod and say “Oh OK”.
“ The USSR was still largely using valve technology at this point.”
There were two schools of thought when it came to their military:
1. They lacked the technical capabilities and capacity.
2, valves have better EMP resilience.
There’s probably a bit of truth in both and the latter was was used as a propaganda tool and taken up by the useful idiots.
ITAR doesn’t completely seal off technology from export, it’s not designed to. What it prevents is trade in industrial quantities of those technologies. So Chinese academics can smuggle in small quantities of the forbidden chips, but try equipping a data center with them.
Soviet electronic equipment of the 1980s was big. Components and circuits were similar to what we used in 1960s televisions. They were very clever about using what they had, it worked quite well despite the limitations. Of course my National Guard unit I was in at the time was still using Korean War age equipment.
Western Bloke: “if the Chinese military is such a perilous threat to our interests if they get to do some computing, why are we allowing them to have any western chip technology”
I don’t know why we do. Or rather, I do – cutting off all trade would have enormous knock on effects, both for us and for them.
As for “just build more”? Well, there’s a reason why crypto miners put their plants in places where either power and cooling are really cheap, or else they steal it. It’s why you pay more for a new card instead of rigging up some way to use 12 of cheap cards from 3 generations ago. The new stuff is more efficient and therefore costs less per calculation. Power and cooling cost money, and installing twice as many cards costs more than twice as much.
Sadly, Fry’s Electronics went out of business a few years ago.
I’m in Canada, and there was one close to Disneyland, in Anaheim. So went we went down for a Disney vacation, we’d head over and browse through it.