Chinese frontier AI models carry the fingerprint of export-controlled GPUs (unemploymentlabs.com)

108 pointsby firloop2 hours ago27 comments

flowerlad 16 minutes ago

Chinese AI companies are free to use any Nvidia GPU they want as long as the GPU is not physically located within China. It is entirely consistent with US export controls for Chinese AI companies to remotely use GPUs located in Singapore or Malaysia.

“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.” See [1].

[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/beyond-the-spy-sc...

x313 an hour ago

The author of this piece is a SWE-turned-influencer "China hawk" from OpenAI (i.e. the primary advocate of export bans along with Anthropic), and this isn't an academic paper despite the theming.

I have no idea whether this is legit or not (there's no link to any code), I'm mentioning this because all the comments here are assuming truth without verifying the contents.

cptcobalt 27 minutes ago

This post is from Will Depue

The supposed “China Hawk” you mention, on google searching, seems to be David Perdue.

Is there a chance you are confusing similar yet different last names as the same person?

x313 8 minutes ago

No, the names are correct. OpenAI has quite a few SWEs who spend a lot of time advocating for positions on social media.

basiccalendar74 an hour ago

as the post mentions, the models could have been trained on 1. GPUs within China or 2. GPUs outside China for example datacenters in Singapore.

The 2nd option is perfectly legal and allowed by US government.

cadamsdotcom an hour ago

What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose?

Black & grey market devices marked up many times cost buyers heavily, while still suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty.

If nvidia selling to China tolerated for the realpolitik and gets undone by incoming powers to create an appearance of change, is it really the right thing to do? Is it the smart thing to do?

It's an interesting thought experiment, though, we will probably never know.

layoric an hour ago

Yup, I think the same applies to traffic of arms regulations.. Private firms sell to countries they are 'allowed' to, passing it between organisations in a chain until they get to the original customer they couldn't sell to directly.. Cuts are taken along the way, and people making money look the other way..

kspacewalk2 an hour ago

Why on earth would that be suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty? The whole thing makes developing sovereignty an existential priority. When one critical part of your AI technology stack is subject to whims of your adversary, it's not really fully your AI technology stack. Today they turn the tap partially on, but only unofficially, tomorrow they'll shut it off. Time to buy your own tap.

epistasis an hour ago

When Xi visited, Trump offered to sell him US made weapons.

What's the chance that these GPUs got to China without Trump getting a cut somehow?

Pretty much zero. Trump sat on knowledge of the affair for an entire year. That's extremely guilty behavior, he was either extorting Huang or covering g for him.

The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level.

esseph an hour ago

> The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level.

Bigger than Watergate by far

whynotmaybe 19 minutes ago

... So far

schainks an hour ago

> What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose?

Given the track record of this administration, they were probably paid to tolerate said exports.

GenerWork 11 minutes ago

It's insane how many articles have dropped in the past 24 hours that all have a similar tone. At this point it's hard to see this as anything other than a broad coordination from someone who wants to destroy Jensen/Nvidia.

saidnooneever 2 hours ago

i dont know what is expected of export controls... they are never effective. they also find western chips in iranian drones etc. there is a huge gray area of resellers who resel to resellers etc. its pretty much uncontrollable....

wmchen 2 hours ago

Export controls inherently raise the cost of doing business with parties you don't like, the other party has to either invest more resources acquiring them, or make the decision to forego acquiring them. The grey market exists precisely because there's an opportunity to exploit this for profit. At the end of the day, when these effects of these export controls are discussed, they usually seem to revolve around export controls setting a specific program or effort back by a span of months, not in stopping a specific commodity from accessing another market whatsoever (excepting some hyper-specific components).

krona 2 hours ago

> its pretty much uncontrollable

As Hezbollah discovered in 2024, covert supply-chain interdiction is very possible and I'd be surprised if the CIA didn't know what was going on, at least to some extent.

andy_ppp 2 hours ago

Yes or indeed supplying cards to the Chinese market with extras...

0cf8612b2e1e an hour ago

During the Cold War, America used various shell companies to get valuable titanium out of Russia for building spy planes. If someone is willing to pay, smugglers will find a way.

LarsDu88 an hour ago

Simply banning things causes the price to go up. That alone is good enough to motivate the policy decision.

Cameri an hour ago

So export controls are more like export friction

nullc 33 minutes ago

Cute trick but it's not exactly a secret, e.g. deepseek recently published their own inference engine -- and it only has kernels for SM100 (blackwell) and Huawei Ascend 950, and all its published performance results using blackwell.

And these were completely openly disclosed as headline properties of the software: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/tree/main/#performa...

No one found it remarkable a couple weeks ago, ... but now the fact that DS is using blackwell is apparently some super secret requiring clever RNG init stats???

netvarun an hour ago

@dang curious, is this post getting heavily downvoted or flagged?

I get that the geopolitical angle is sensitive, especially with the backdrop of today's big news - but I thought this was a really well-researched technical deep dive, right up HN's alley. (TIL: you could fingerprint gpu hardware just from an llm weights!)

liuliu an hour ago

I need to double check PyTorch code, I am not sure how robust this fingerprinting is without PyTorch "bug". Parallel philox based PRNG is a well-researched area and I am surprised (even if it is not secure-PRNG) it can fingerprinting like this. But obviously there are more people who are more knowledgeable on this can give their perspectives here.

exabrial an hour ago

I guarantee you this isn't an "accident". Whatever is being sent over there is loaded with its own special spyware lol