Chinese companies are making great silicon, but they haven't begun exporting them in large numbers. The Chinese internal market is huge, so they will probably continue to grow there before they flood the world with cheap silicon. It is exactly what happened with BYD as well.
This is really exciting! They're laying out an architecture that may mean even small players with cheap GPUs can compete with the majors. The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible and we've got the Chinese actively researching how to do it to a high standard that competes with the monolithic models.
I was sceptical of the US sanctions but this seems like a real win if this can be taken all the way to its logical conclusions.
Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Edited several times, I should add: IANAL, but this sounds similar to meta releasing llama weights. I think that the spirit of the European law is to control concrete uses of AI and not a broad distribution of weights and architecture. So my question is: Does the EU AI act ban this distribution?, I think it provides more competition and options for Europeans.
Edited: Thinking a little more, installing open weights could allow backdoors (in the form of a way to manipulate intelligent agents via specials prompts designated to control the system), so perhaps from a national security point of view some care should be taken (but I personally hate that). So another question: Is there a way to control if open weights can create back doors (via prompt injection)?, I recall a paper in which prompt by symbols like 0?,#2! could put the system in a state in which one can read information that the LLM is asked to hide (that is a well known attack available to those that know the weights).
Another question: Is fine tuning or Lora a way to eliminate o amilliorate such prompt attacks?, is there any python library to defend against such attacks. Download - install - modify by fine tune or lora - now you are protected.
Sanctions are at best a stopgap measure. Ideally they would buy enough time to shore up domestic capabilities.
Instead, cutting research funding and discouraging foreign students/researchers from coming to the US means that there will be depleted US capability just when China finds its groove.
If current LLMs hit a scaling wall and the game becomes about efficiency, I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focussed on specific use cases.
I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.
Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
The semiconductor industry is always a key industry for China. They laid it out in Made in China 2025.
Huawei designed and developed its own chip before any sanctions, and the Chinese government never stopped throwing money into the semiconductor industry.
In the short term, money can go to Nvidia, but it won't be long before China creates its own "Nvidia" like BYD.
The sad part is America elected Trump, and he's gutting American research and cutting out the CHIPS Act.
One country is going for the long term while another country is short sighted
The silicon valley should thank Huawei and Deepseek, as the only two reasons AI exists as an industry in US are (a) reduce labor cost (b) win over China.
(a) alone sounds super negative to ordinary people, but with (b), justified by the existence and achievement of Huawei & Deepseek, the AI cause now sounds a legit jihad silicon valley is carrying.
A close friend of mine is Chinese. He went back to China to join a HW start-up as a founding engineer 6 years ago. Then cane the sanctions. He said that was the best thing happened when I recently met him. Their company grew because Huawei and all the other Chinese manufacturers don't want to buy anything from a West-aligned country anymore. Nobody cares about the sanctions anymore apparently as they accepted it as a given, so their focus is self reliance.
So now we’ve reached the point where one AI needs to verify another’s step-by-step thoughts. Feels like the early days of code linters — only now it’s for reasoning chains. Honestly, not mad about it though… if LLMs are going to "think out loud," someone’s gotta fact-check the monologue.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] thread[1]: https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model
*) They're NPUs not GPUs, since they can't render graphics
I always thought sceptical of the US sanctions, but that they backfire so fast is insane.
Out of China's perspective it might make sense to take out the wests AI capabilities soon.
I was sceptical of the US sanctions but this seems like a real win if this can be taken all the way to its logical conclusions.
Edited several times, I should add: IANAL, but this sounds similar to meta releasing llama weights. I think that the spirit of the European law is to control concrete uses of AI and not a broad distribution of weights and architecture. So my question is: Does the EU AI act ban this distribution?, I think it provides more competition and options for Europeans.
Edited: Thinking a little more, installing open weights could allow backdoors (in the form of a way to manipulate intelligent agents via specials prompts designated to control the system), so perhaps from a national security point of view some care should be taken (but I personally hate that). So another question: Is there a way to control if open weights can create back doors (via prompt injection)?, I recall a paper in which prompt by symbols like 0?,#2! could put the system in a state in which one can read information that the LLM is asked to hide (that is a well known attack available to those that know the weights).
Another question: Is fine tuning or Lora a way to eliminate o amilliorate such prompt attacks?, is there any python library to defend against such attacks. Download - install - modify by fine tune or lora - now you are protected.
Instead, cutting research funding and discouraging foreign students/researchers from coming to the US means that there will be depleted US capability just when China finds its groove.
Does this mean that Huawei phone which has been hurt badly by sanction will now stand a fighting chance because of homegrown GPU?
How good or bad these GPU compares to the SOTA GPU in the west?
And does this mean that Huawei has the ability to crank out the GPU commercially?
I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.
Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
The semiconductor industry is always a key industry for China. They laid it out in Made in China 2025.
Huawei designed and developed its own chip before any sanctions, and the Chinese government never stopped throwing money into the semiconductor industry.
In the short term, money can go to Nvidia, but it won't be long before China creates its own "Nvidia" like BYD.
The sad part is America elected Trump, and he's gutting American research and cutting out the CHIPS Act.
One country is going for the long term while another country is short sighted
Here is the GIT https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B
(a) alone sounds super negative to ordinary people, but with (b), justified by the existence and achievement of Huawei & Deepseek, the AI cause now sounds a legit jihad silicon valley is carrying.