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I'd been assuming that the Chinese AI labs producing excellent LLMs despite the NVIDIA export restrictions was due to them finding new optimizations for trainin
by simonw 8mo ago
I'd been assuming that the Chinese AI labs producing excellent LLMs despite the NVIDIA export restrictions was due to them finding new optimizations for training against the hardware they had access to.
I wonder if any of those $2.5B of smuggled chips ended up being used for those training runs.
- John23832 8mo agoThe answer is, of course lol? Gamers Nexus did a whole deep dive which basically proved that Chinese researchers had access to whatever they wanted. https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI?si=ojlxOC7uiPqZxv0N https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI?si=ojlxOC7uiPqZxv0N edit: not sure if this was sarcasm
- simonw 8mo agoSome of the big LLM labs have written about their training hardware. DeepSeek v3 was trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437 MiniMax M1 used 512 H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585 The H800 wasn't banned in the first round of export controls - but was after October 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-chips-including-nvidia-h800-to-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-ch... Z.ai say they used Huawei hardware: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawei_hardware/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawe... Qwen and Kimi haven't disclosed their hardware as far as I can tell.
- tyre 8mo agoIf they were using banned chips they wouldn't declare them in public papers. There have been multiple documented/alleged cases of chips being routed through Singaporean shell companies. For example: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/singapore-company-alleged-to-have-helped-china-get-usd2-billion-worth-of-nvidia-ai-processors-report-claims-nvidia-denies-that-the-accused-has-any-china-ties-but-a-u-s-investigation-is-underway https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- tcdent 8mo agoI'm kindof surprised by this take. Did you think the hesitancy of westerners engaging and relying on Chinese labs was due to vibes? There are fundamental cultural differences at play, wether we are comfortable admitting that or not.
- platinumrad 8mo agoIf you're so brave, you should state what these fundamental cultural differences are.
- beeflet 8mo agobear bile https://youtu.be/F9FCDfcGQqg https://youtu.be/F9FCDfcGQqg
- throw2827364 8mo agoI'm kind of surprised by this comment. I wonder if someone made a comment citing "fundamental cultural differences" with how Israeli people did business, it would be as well received. From my experience, dealing with Israeli companies and Chinese companies are pretty much the same.
- tcdent 8mo agoCommunism. I'm talking about communists.
- junofan 8mo agoSimon, love your work. Hope this is sarcasm. If not, imagine the opposite: Sam Altman and co suddenly started producing tons of content about how smart they are in Mandarin. Why do they even need a story to begin with, let alone one they push halfway around the world? The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.
- platinumrad 8mo agoOf course they're using the best chips they can get, but this is a bizarre theory. English is the lingua franca of scientific publishing.
- segmondy 8mo agocombination of both, they published papers so we can clearly see they are not just duplicating old methods but coming up with new optimizations. ... yet we can't rule out that they used Nvidia. I don't even see how the export restrictions work, it's stupid. A Chinese company can go to another country, say France or Canada, setup a business buy a bunch of GPUs then make it available to their subsidiary in China. The export restrictions doesn't restrict usage/sharing/renting as far as I know...
- whatevaa 8mo agoThey don't work. Chinese are skilled enough to desolder and smuggle just the ships themselves. They make the rest of GPU in-house. With more VRAM than the nvidia offers, comically, in case of 4090.
- genewitch 8mo agoi have seen 96GB claimed on a 3090ti, but i anecdotally know someone with a 48GB 3090 bought from china, somewhere.
- monocasa 8mo agoThey definitely are using Nvidia. Part of deepseek's special sauce was using an "undocumented" ptx instruction to get a cute microoptimization with the memory hierarchy. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iEda8_Mvvo4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=iEda8_Mvvo4