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…..