What's so weird about that (not surprising because lawmakers/politics) is that A100s are actually terrible at inference. Assuming the model can fit in RAM my 30

What's so weird about that (not surprising because lawmakers/politics) is that A100s are actually terrible at inference. Assuming the model can fit in RAM my 3090 handily beats them across the board at everything I've tried. My 4090 blows them away. So by the most commonly accepted definition of "performance" the GPUs banned in China are actually /lower/ performance. The only thing this ban does is slow down from scratch training of very large models. There's a lot of effort on finetuning these large models on < 80GB VRAM hardware but significantly more effort on "running" them on < 24GB VRAM hardware (3090/4090 and lower). In the end your point stands - between any efforts by those impacted by sanctions or just the hobbyist/low-mid range commercial applications research into cramming these huge models into "consumer" hardware are accelerating dramatically.