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Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs
- gkbrk 1y agoWeights are available on gitcode [1]. [1]: https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model
- ssddanbrown 1y agoJust a warning, the license [1] specifically blocks EU use: > 3. Conditions for License Grant. You represent and warrant that You will not, access, download, install, run, deploy, integrate, modify, or otherwise use the Model, directly or indirectly, within the European Union. [1] https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model/blob/main/LICENSE https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model/blob/ma...
- pfortuny 1y agoWow this is a huge caveat: a guarantee that they are using data and not complying with GDPR.
- imiric 1y agoShocking. At least they acknowledge it.
- 2Gkashmiri 1y agoIf you download to your PC and run locally, what will happen?
- rusk 1y agoThe same thing that usually happens when you violate TOC … Probably safe enough on your own computer, but could have consequences if it’s a work computer.
- 2Gkashmiri 1y ago>could have consequences if it’s a work computer. consequences for employer who "might" get a license audit done on their machines. does it really happen so often that a random employer in the eu would have to be concerned?
- rusk 1y agoconsequences for you when you unwittingly open up a back door or expose your organisation to a data breach
- viraptor 1y agoYou'll be both breaking their licence and potentially your local European data laws.
- lukan 1y ago" potentially your local European data laws." If run locally, why?
- johnisgood 1y agoI called him out in another thread. It makes absolutely no sense. He is talking against himself, judging by his comments. To answer your question, he modified my comment (see the parentheses): "> The point is, who gives a damn about (doing an illegal thing) in reality, on their (private property where nobody is likely to see that)?" So... at best what he said is purely theoretical. He admitted it himself: "nobody is likely to see that". Though I am not sure I agree with it, but then again, in reality, no one gives a fuck, at least not in Europe.
- sigmoid10 1y agoGDPR is not the issue here, the new AI act is. Since this is an open-weight release it is not bound by the training data disclosure rules, but it probably didn't go through the evaluation that is required above a certain number of FLOPs. That's why many recent big player model releases had a staggered release in the EU.
- seydor 1y agodoes anyone comply with gdpr & Ai act? Even for mistral i m not sure, the best we can say is "we don't know"
- waffleiron 1y agoThere is not a single AI model that fully complies with GDPR. How can you inform everyone, even those not named by actual name but otherwise identifiable, that their data is being processed and give them the ability to object when the data they train on isn’t public. Literally the same for all other open weights, this is just legal ass covering where most others don’t even do that.
- p2detar 1y agoWhat’s the reason behind this? What am I missing?
- worldsavior 1y agoThe company is Chinese, I presume that's why.
- Toritori12 1y agoIs Llama4 also chinese(0)? [0]: https://dionwiggins.substack.com/p/llama-4-is-banned-in-the-eu-open https://dionwiggins.substack.com/p/llama-4-is-banned-in-the-...
- axus 1y agoWorse, it's American!
- Iolaum 1y agoMost likely EU AI act regulations they don't see any value in bothering with.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoHence, the lack of European innovation in AI
- p2detar 1y agoI don’t agree. Tools like DeepL were and still are better than Google Translate long before chat bots became a thing. The French-made Mistral AI is pretty decent as well.
- seanw444 1y agoSaw some benchmarks recently that put Mistral well behind basically every other competitor. Don't have them on hand unfortunately.
- yard2010 1y agoThere's something nefarious about this.
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- johnisgood 1y agoAnd who thinks that, for even a second, that an European (in this case) will not download, install, and try to run this just because the LICENSE says you can't? FYI, this is not intended to be offensive to Europeans, I am European myself. That is not the point. The point is, who gives a damn about the LICENSE in reality, on their PERSONAL computer? Serious question.
- _joel 1y agoQuite a few, actually.
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- viraptor 1y agoThe licence is not there for enforcement from their side. It's a legal protection for Huawei. Essentially "We told you it's not for the EU. If you get sued don't try to put it on us." Also any company of a serious size will have lawyers interested in licences of everything you're running.
- johnisgood 1y agoI am not talking about companies. I edited my comment. Emphasis on "[their] PERSONAL" computer. I know that companies would probably not. But individuals?
- viraptor 1y ago> The point is, who gives a damn about (doing an illegal thing) in reality, on their (private property where nobody is likely to see that)? I'm not sure which part of that you find confusing. Some people will estimate benefit>risk and won't care.
- knowitnone 1y agoI doubt the Chinese ever care about licensing so I would not care about following their license
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI know people get upset when open source is used when open weight is more correct (happily here open weight is specifically being applied). My question: is open weight even interesting? What does that really offer? Does it allow one to peer into the biases (or lack thereof) of a model? Does it allow one to train a competing model? Would open source be something different and preferable — or are "weights the new source" in this LLM world we are finding ourselves in? I'm trying to educate myself.
- HPsquared 1y agoI really don't get why there's any confusion. These models are LITERALLY compiled binary data. Weights are definitely not source. Source is "the source from which the thing is generated" i.e. the training data (or a script to assemble it) and all scripts, procedures etc required to make the binary blob.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoWill the US also sanction countries buying Ascend GPUs*? *) They're NPUs not GPUs, since they can't render graphics
- ronsor 1y agoYes. Huawei GPUs are illegal worldwide now, according to the US government.
- falcor84 1y agoCue the Team America: World Police music
- firesteelrain 1y agoYes because Huawei uses US technology. Huawei can’t be competitive without US and EU technology (ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, etc)
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoHere's a thought exercise: If EU and US are the inventors of silicone tech at the basis of all products, why are they struggling to beat China in the free and open AI market and need to resort to kneecapping it? Like, if you're so good at something why are you scared of the unproven newcomer beating you?
- firesteelrain 1y agoThe issue is not fear but strategic control. The United States and European Union form the backbone of the global semiconductor ecosystem, from design software like Cadence and Synopsys to manufacturing tools from ASML and Applied Materials. Huawei’s chips depend on this infrastructure. When entities use US-origin technology to build AI hardware, they fall under export control regardless of where the chips are used. This is not about competing in a fair market but about controlling the development and use of advanced computing in areas like defense, surveillance, and critical infrastructure.
- yanhangyhy 1y agohuawei's Ascend GPUs is the only choice for many chinese company for now. Huge win for huawei.
- xbmcuser 1y agoThe world needs Huawei and China to get competitive on its node size with TSMC and Nvidia.
- amelius 1y agoThat would be great, if you ignore geopolitical concerns. Alas, AI technology is a double-edged sword and any competition in consumer space will likely be mirrored in an arms race which (given their current manufacturing capabilities, cheap labor) China would win. Anyway, they would need to duplicate ASML first which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future.
- xbmcuser 1y agoDon't count the Chinese out when ever they have been side lined they have copied then innovated and gotten ahead. Now their economy in real terms is actually bigger than the US economy and more well rounded so sanctions or any kind of restrictions boost their local companies by removing any competition. And looking at how the recent wars and skirmishes in Ukraine, Israel and Pakistan/India have gone I think western military superiority is no longer real. In a conventional war of today US will lose and most likely nuke the other country so I think its best for the world if China gets so powerful that USA accepts that it no longer is the sole super power and we can avoid a nuclear war. As that is where we are heading either a multi polar world or a nuclear holocaust.
- trainerxr50 1y agoEverything you said is basically wrong.
- bilbo0s 1y agowhich will probably not happen in the foreseeable future Can you elaborate on why this will not happen in the foreseeable future? Because in my version of the foreseeable future I see it happening quite readily. EUV is not the magic that everyone believes it to be. It can be replicated by us, (the US), at our convenience. It can even be replicated by the Chinese and Japanese. (Personally, I'd throw the Koreans and the Russians into that pool as well.) But that ain't even the point. The point is that, in that particular game, there is always more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. It's not at all a foregone conclusion that EUV is the best way to skin a cat, and it'd certainly be a bad bet to assume it is the only way to skin a cat. Those are the questions I would hope that we, (the US), are focusing research efforts on, and we should assume that China is also focusing research efforts in that direction. PS - Please no one bring up Trump gutting research. Here I'm only speaking of clear strategic research priorities in an ideal, (ie - collaborative), political environment. Obviously, politically erected structural concerns impact the viability of any research strategy we want to implement. I'm just talking about what I think would be ideal.
- seydor 1y agoSic transit gloria nvidii
- HPsquared 1y agoLinguistic deep lore: "invidia" is Latin for "envy".
- fennecbutt 1y agoExplains invidious, I suppose.
- madmask 1y agoAlso italian
- fakedang 1y agoThat was the reasoning behind the NVidia name choice btw - the cofounders wanted the competition to be envious of their company's capabilities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang
- WithinReason 1y agoSo it's extra fitting!
- smitterle 1y agoSorry for the nitpick: I'd expect Gen Sg to be nvidiae - i is for o declension
- seydor 1y agoand what would be the plural of nvidia?
- Intermernet 1y ago"now don't do it again!"
- 1y ago
- randomNumber7 1y agoSo the Huawei Ascend 920 is produced by SMIC on a 6 nm process. 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.
- seydor 1y agoeven if their chips weren't as good, what stops a company from training a large model for a very long time in less capable hardware? Is there a way to overcome memory limitations somehow?
- umgefahren 1y agoIn general yes, you can (and do) shard the model over multiple GPUs. If you want to do that yourself look at DeepSpeed or FSDP . There is a communication overhead though and the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key. Thats where NVLink comes in btw. So yes, it’s actually what you can and do do. However this limits your ability to iterate on the models quickly and from what I‘ve read a lot of times the foundational labs throw out their models because by the time they are done training they are already outdated.
- checker659 1y agoNVLink isn’t magic
- rfoo 1y ago> the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key Guess what a telco equipment company is good at :p
- corimaith 1y agoDid they do it with EUV or just more multipatterning DUV? If it's the latter then it's not anything particular to worry about or unexpected.
- 1y ago
- roenxi 1y agoThis 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.
- logicchains 1y ago>The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible It's already technically feasible: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-2 https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-2
- ryoshu 1y agoPeople are doing it: https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche/ https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche/
- am17an 1y agoDeepseek-R1 is at the level of GPT 4.1 already, it's open-weight, open-source and they even open-sourced their inference code.
- whizzter 1y ago[flagged]
- leeoniya 1y agowasnt it shown recently that the filtering layer is on the prompt input and llm output, and not on the training set or model weights. https://www.socialscience.international/making-deepseek-speak-about-tiananmen https://www.socialscience.international/making-deepseek-spea...
- foursilly 1y agoSince 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.
- seydor 1y agoIt's not up to Huawei to tell EU citizens what to do. In fact they did not need to add this restriction to their license at all. As EU citizens we shoud know the laws of the land and protect ourselves by avoiding using these models like the plague.
- Fluorescence 1y agoIANAL but the EU legislation is very broad about what it covers e.g. "AI systems should fall within the scope of this Regulation even when they are neither placed on the market, nor put into service, nor used in the Union." I don't really understand the limits of it's scope e.g. the difference between making a system available vs. controlling how it's used is not clear to me. I don't think you can escape the regulation of high-risk uses by offering a "general purpose" AI with no controls on how it's used. In terms of the open-source nature - I can see it being treated like giving away any other regulated product e.g. medication, cars, safety equipment etc. The lack of cost won't transfer the liability from the supplier to the consumer. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52021PC0206 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
- Havoc 1y agoStrange that they'd ban EU via license but not US
- seydor 1y agoThey wanted to exclude EU reviewers for when publishing their paper to a journal. EU reviewers are notoriously obnoxious and often chosen to be reviewer #2.
- mzl 1y agoYes, as a reviewer of a paper I am assigned a number, and must by nominative determinism fulfill the expectations...
- 123yawaworht456 1y agoEU has a nebulous AI act that prohibits a myriad things.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThey are currently in a war with europe, but not yet US
- JSR_FDED 1y agoSanctions 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.
- Havoc 1y agoTime to sell nvidia shares?
- nsoonhui 1y agoI hope someone can enlighten me, as it's not immediately clear the significance of it. 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?
- cenamus 1y agoI think this video gives a decent overview on Huawei in general https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFdYFmeiBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFdYFmeiBA
- randomNumber7 1y agoFrom the hardware huawei can build competitve phones. It's just hard to justify buying a phone without the google appstore.
- tazjin 1y agoNo, not at all. Huawei is targeting markets like China (obviously) and Russia, where the Google App Store is irrelevant. I've been using phones without Google Play for years. My point is that YMMV based on where you are.
- qkhhly 1y ago> Does this mean that Huawei phone which has been hurt badly by sanction will now stand a fighting chance because of homegrown GPU? oh, man, "stand a fighting chance"? huawei phone sales has already been back and surpassed apple in china. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insight/china-smartphone-share https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insight/china-smartphon...
- elzbardico 1y agoMan. Huawei is fucking massive, they do far, far more things than just 5G base stations (a giant business in itself) and cell phones. They build even electric cars.
- crowcroft 1y agoIf 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.
- hmottestad 1y agoI was looking for one to use for named entity extraction and found this fine tune here: https://huggingface.co/dslim/bert-base-NER?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://huggingface.co/dslim/bert-base-NER?utm_source=chatgp... Its only 108 million params.
- bjord 1y agothrowback to that brief period where people would mine bitcoin (ineffectively) using ASICs in their USB ports
- crowcroft 1y agoYes, and people buying random GPUs for ether etc. I'm not a huge fan of what crypto has become but there was something exciting about hacking stuff together at home for it which is currently missing in AI IMO. Maybe it's not really missing and the APIs for LLMs are just too good and cheap to make homebrew stuff exciting.
- bjord 1y agono, I think you're right—there's definitely something missing right now but more likely it's going on and we're just not seeing it in general, though, I think once a certain amount of money is involved, people just start to get rabid and everything becomes a lot less fun
- MangoCoffee 1y agoPeople on HN are so delusional it's funny. 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
- 8927663313 1y ago[flagged]
- Beijinger 1y agoThis is a few days old. https://www.techinasia.com/news/tencent-hunyuan-opensources-hybrid-ai-model https://www.techinasia.com/news/tencent-hunyuan-opensources-... Here is the GIT https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B
- zeld4 1y agoThe 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.
- bgnn 1y agoA 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.
- jjcc 1y agoThe impacts are different sector by sector. Those benefit the most are the small EDA software companies that barely survive before sanctions due to the huge technology gaps behind the large EDA companies like Synopsys. Now they have tones of new customers don't want to take risk of service interruption due to sanction. It is called hormesis.
- vkaku 1y agoThe next moment I'd like to see is a mass 15-20A fab and suddenly making all the controls obsolete.
- vkaku 1y agoThe cards mentioned in the paper are also seemingly well priced for most developers: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-Huaweis-Atlas-300I-DUO-96G_1601450305670.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-Huaweis-Atla...
- logic_node 1y agoSo 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.