People are bending over backwards to come to try to find some deep reason, but I think the reason is simple - the people in charge are not particularly farsighted nor insightful. It's simply short-term thinking without consideration of long-term consequences - it's not limited to just businesses.

For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.

And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.

It's just myopia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

> Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.

Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?

It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.

This. And this happened before, see the China Sovjet split

AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.

NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.

End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.

Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?

Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?

Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.

If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.

Why wouldn’t they have done that by now then? Where is their ASML or TSMC? They’ve had decades to catch up already.