alt Hacker NewsWhat is truly amazing here is the fact that they trained this entirely on Huawei Ascend chips per reporting [1]. Hence we can conclude the semiconductor to model Chinese tech stack is only 3 months behind the US, considering Opus 4.5 released in November. (Excluding the lithography equipment here, as SMIC still uses older ASML DUV machines) This is huge especially since just a few months ago it was reported that Deepseek were not using Huawei chips due to technical issues [2].
US attempts to contain Chinese AI tech totally failed. Not only that, they cost Nvidia possibly trillions of dollars of exports over the next decade, as the Chinese govt called the American bluff and now actively disallow imports of Nvidia chips as a direct result of past sanctions [3]. At a time when Trump admin is trying to do whatever it can to reduce the US trade imbalance with China.
[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/chinas-ai-startup-zhipu-r...
[2] https://www.techradar.com/pro/chaos-at-deepseek-as-r2-launch...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-customs-agents-to...
Replies
To be fair, the US ban on Nvidia chip exports to China began under the Biden administration in 2022. By the time Trump took office, it was already too late.
US Secretary of State Bressent just publicly said that the US needs to get along and cooperate with China. His tone was so different than previously in the last year that I listened to the video clip twice.
Obviously for the average US tax payer getting along with China is in our interests - not so much our economic elites.
I use both Chinese and US models, and Mistral in Proton’s private chat. I think it makes sense for us to be flexible and not get locked in.
> What is truly amazing here is the fact that they trained this entirely on Huawei Ascend chips
Has any of these outfits ever publicly stated they used Nvidia chips? As in the non-officially obtained 1s. No.
> US attempts to contain Chinese AI tech totally failed. Not only that, they cost Nvidia possibly trillions of dollars of exports over the next decade, as the Chinese govt called the American bluff and now actively disallow imports of Nvidia chips
Sort of. It's all a front. On both sides. China still ALWAYS had access to Nvidia chips - whether that's the "smuggled" 1s or they run it in another country. It's not costing Nvidia much. The opening of China sales for Nvidia likewise isn't as much of a boon. It's already included.
> At a time when Trump admin is trying to do whatever it can to reduce the US trade imbalance with China
Again, it's a front. It's about news and headlines. Just like when China banned lobsters from a certain country, the only thing that happened was that they went to Hong Kong or elsewhere, got rebadged and still went in.
We can conclude that they ll flood the world with huawei inference chips from Temu and create worldwide AI pollution
Exactly. The emperor has no clothes. The largest investments in US tech in history and yet there less than a year of moat. OpenAI or Anthropic will not be able to compete with Chinese server farms and so the US strategy is misplaced investments that will come home to roast.
And we will have Deepseek 4 in a few days...