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While that law seems hilarious to us now, and the new restrictions on AI seem equally dumb, we have to admit that the law worked. It did what was intended -- p
by jedberg 3y ago
While that law seems hilarious to us now, and the new restrictions on AI seem equally dumb, we have to admit that the law worked. It did what was intended -- prevented the sale of supercomputers to enemy nations, which in fact held back their weapons and aerospace R&D.
It will be a lot harder this time around to prevent "super AI" from spreading around the world, but it might slow it down just a bit, which again is the goal of the US government.
- zamadatix 3y agoIt's also worth looking at the conditions the law worked under. Up through til the 90s your semiconductors where coming almost exclusively from the West (+Japan, in this case counting the same though) - also the only place you could get all the different high performance products you needed designed at. If you want to avoid both sides of that coin you've got decades of catching up to do. Of these gaps one is already eroded and the other is significantly smaller in that China already has domestic 32 GB 10+ TFLOP GPUs and supercomputers made of domestic CPUs. Will export restrictions slow things more than doing nothing? Sure, but it may not be particularly meaningful just because it worked well when we had the same idea in the 70s. It may, for example, instead be the kind of thing to put enough market pressure to move the tasks to happen somewhere else.