News President Trump wants tighter AI chip export restrictions but may face staffing shortage and other issues

[Admin]

President Trump's administration believes restrictions on AI processors exports are not strict enough for close allies, also plans to persuade Japan and the Netherlands to curb services of ASML and TEL machines in China.

President Trump wants tighter AI chip export restrictions but may face staffing shortage and other issues : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Companies worry that stricter limits on chip exports could harm business interests while encouraging Chinese firms to develop domestic alternatives faster.

That's already been happening for quite a while. I doubt they can develop any faster.

 

[JTWrenn]

The biggest issue I have with this is from everything I can see...it just doesn't stop the chips from getting there. It still happens just through black market means. It's one of those waste of money ideas that seems like it makes sense. We are giving away our market share for chips to keep AI services ahead and I just don't think it works out. I think you can draw a directly line of this sort of thing to DeepSeek pushing efficiency so much, and I don't think the Chinese government has any problem getting around these blocks for their higher end government programs.

Feels a lot like the Russian oil embargos of the last few years that just ended up enriching them because there is always some way to do it. Unless we have a lot of countries on our side for this, it just doesn't work out.

 

[bit_user]

The biggest issue I have with this is from everything I can see...it just doesn't stop the chips from getting there.

We don't know exactly what they mean by Validated End User status. That's probably the key.

I think you can draw a directly line of this sort of thing to DeepSeek pushing efficiency so much,

It's not like DeepSeek is better, though. It's competitive in some areas, and turns out actually to have used quite a lot of GPU power to train. There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be further ahead in AI, if they could buy all the compute they wanted. The reason DeepSeek caught so much attention is precisely because it's an outlier, rather than the norm.

oil embargos of the last few years that just ended up enriching them because there is always some way to do it.

No, they weren't counterproductive. That oil had to be sold at a discount, due to the smaller market for it. Just because the market didn't shrink to zero doesn't mean the measures had no effect.

Unless we have a lot of countries on our side for this, it just doesn't work out.

That's why the list of unrestricted countries is so small. It has to be countries with the means and will to minimize trafficking, or else we end up with the black market situation you mentioned.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

It's not like DeepSeek is better, though. It's competitive in some areas, and turns out actually to have used quite a lot of GPU power to train. There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be further ahead in AI, if they could buy all the compute they wanted. The reason DeepSeek caught so much attention is precisely because it's an outlier, rather than the norm.

I'd say they are competitive in many areas and still used less GPU power to train compared to western models. And after the release of DeepSeek, Alibaba followed suit with capabilities not far behind (albeit not open source).

 

[HideOut]

President Trump's administration believes restrictions on AI processors exports are not strict enough for close allies, also plans to persuade Japan and the Netherlands to curb services of ASML and TEL machines in China.

President Trump wants tighter AI chip export restrictions but may face staffing shortage and other issues : Read more

The real problem with this is we dont export them. Our engineers/companies design them but they are made in Taiwan. Its basically china. We are actually importing them, not slowing their exports...

 

[zsydeepsky]

It's not like DeepSeek is better, though. It's competitive in some areas, and turns out actually to have used quite a lot of GPU power to train. There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be further ahead in AI, if they could buy all the compute they wanted. The reason DeepSeek caught so much attention is precisely because it's an outlier, rather than the norm.

DeepSeek is currently releasing 5 of their in-production repositories. which provides a glimpse into what they use. For example this FlashMLA:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1893836827574030466

View: https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1893836827574030466


it's a perfect demonstration of why the US sanctions failed to stop them: they made this FlashMLA specific for H800 (a severely nerfed H100 so it can sell in China) and made it on par with H100 in computing power & Memory bandwidth.

which means, DeepSeek got their work done on hardware they can acquire legally.

which also means, there's no room for any further sanctions to stop them: either you also limit their access to already crippled cards to even more crippled cards (something as low as modded 48/96G VRAM 4090) which will lead to a total embargo of consumer level graphic cards, or they simply just switch to Huawei's Ascend 910C which is already more capable than H800.

and Financial Times just had a report yesterday about 910C manufacturing yield rising to ~40% and aiming for 60%, which means the quantity will also not be a problem as well:
Huawei Ascend 910C reportedly hits 40% yield, turns profitable; aims for 60% industry standard

I even wonder, with DeepSeek's newly earned reputation, their deep understanding of GPU algorithm optimization, and the support from the Chinese central government, could they have been invited to the 910D development process? if so, we might see a new type of hardware that provides a magnitude of performance gain for AI tasks, even on the older nodes.

and even Nvidia is doing this kind of optimization since the demand for R1 deployment is just enormous...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1894172956726890623

View: https://x.com/NVIDIAAIDev/status/1894172956726890623

 

[rambo919]

The biggest issue I have with this is from everything I can see...it just doesn't stop the chips from getting there.

That is not the primary goal though, the goal is long term national and economy security.

The US tech industry has basically been farmed off and they are now too dependent on foreign factories.... this is like trying to steer a massive ship.... turning takes a long time.

The AI part is just the newest concern... and it's even more difficult because no one actually knows the capability of anyone else... they just know what gets released to the public for PR and social programming.