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Literally my first thought. Noone can stop them from training in data centers that are located elsewhere. It's not like some military hardware that needs to be physically shipped to China for them to make use of it. In fact why would they bother with Chinese compute providers if those are limited because of GPU export controls? They knew this for a long time and probably have been knocking on the door of providers in other countries for a while. Heck, they could be training inside the US. They already distribute their open model weights from the US.

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This post is from Will Depue

The supposed “China Hawk” you mention, on google searching, seems to be David Perdue.

Is there a chance you are confusing similar yet different last names as the same person?

The method seems sound and the findings correct. But I think many are missing that (as the research itself says) this doesn't prove any illegal behavior. It's perfectly legal for Chinese companies to train models on GPUs that they rent outside of China. It's also legal for companies to buy GPUs and install them in Malaysia with the intention of renting them to Chinese companies.

There isn't even an allegation that the Chinese companies lied about this. They simply didn't disclose which chips were used. In all cases where they did disclose the training chips, this research found the disclosures to be accurate.

it's funny because it convinces me that export controls don't work so why do them

Some people seem to think that American sanctions and export controls are some form of absolute justice, and that any violation is an affront to humanity.

If GPUs are going to be priced out of consumer reach anyway, I would rather see the GPUs used to create open weight models than just to make these AI companies richer.

Matrix multiplication is a human right

Is the U.S. government OK with this if the money to buy those GPUs and run inference on them comes from Chinese companies?

> What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose?

Given the track record of this administration, they were probably paid to tolerate said exports.

Why on earth would that be suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty? The whole thing makes developing sovereignty an existential priority. When one critical part of your AI technology stack is subject to whims of your adversary, it's not really fully your AI technology stack. Today they turn the tap partially on, but only unofficially, tomorrow they'll shut it off. Time to buy your own tap.

Yup, I think the same applies to traffic of arms regulations.. Private firms sell to countries they are 'allowed' to, passing it between organisations in a chain until they get to the original customer they couldn't sell to directly.. Cuts are taken along the way, and people making money look the other way..

When Xi visited, Trump offered to sell him US made weapons.

What's the chance that these GPUs got to China without Trump getting a cut somehow?

Pretty much zero. Trump sat on knowledge of the affair for an entire year. That's extremely guilty behavior, he was either extorting Huang or covering g for him.

The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level.

During the Cold War, America used various shell companies to get valuable titanium out of Russia for building spy planes. If someone is willing to pay, smugglers will find a way.

Simply banning things causes the price to go up. That alone is good enough to motivate the policy decision.

Export controls inherently raise the cost of doing business with parties you don't like, the other party has to either invest more resources acquiring them, or make the decision to forego acquiring them. The grey market exists precisely because there's an opportunity to exploit this for profit. At the end of the day, when these effects of these export controls are discussed, they usually seem to revolve around export controls setting a specific program or effort back by a span of months, not in stopping a specific commodity from accessing another market whatsoever (excepting some hyper-specific components).

> its pretty much uncontrollable

As Hezbollah discovered in 2024, covert supply-chain interdiction is very possible and I'd be surprised if the CIA didn't know what was going on, at least to some extent.

Not seeing how that could happen since all the "distillation" attacks i've seen are just token level, not logprob level, and definitely not vector level. So, I don't see how that could be the case.

This is how the news works on a story of major importance. As details of corruption come out, they all get reported.

One bigger aspect of this is that it was all saved from being leaked until right after the election.

Somebody was playing partisan politics with national security.

One key question: did Trump recently sell NVDA? How much and when? He's known of this for more than a year.

if we're going paranoid mode, on 9th of November Trump said that "leader of one large company connected to artificial intelligence" was almost sent to prison by Ministry of Justice due to wrongdoings connected to Ai, and this threat caused immediate correction by that company

I need to double check PyTorch code, I am not sure how robust this fingerprinting is without PyTorch "bug". Parallel philox based PRNG is a well-researched area and I am surprised (even if it is not secure-PRNG) it can fingerprinting like this. But obviously there are more people who are more knowledgeable on this can give their perspectives here.

We need deep investigations at the CFTC and SEC level on who took short positions and put options on NVDA. My bet is there are Singaporean propshops backed by the likes of Goldman and others who are rightsizing this market.