Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs
323 comments
·July 2, 2025roenxi
mensetmanusman
Yeah the sanctions will (not sarcastically) actually improve the world on a number of fronts. Increasing diversity of compute, forcing decentralization of manufacturing, etc. etc.
seydor
also increase smuggling, theft, espionage, crime, sabotage.
There are much better ways to increase diversity
FilosofumRex
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "You don’t think we can. You don’t think we do that to them? We do. So we do a lot of things." https://singjupost.com/transcript-maria-bartiromo-interviews...
hopelite
This is a mistaken belief. Sure you get all those negative aspects to being degrees, just like you get them under all other conditions … Chinese, Russian, Israeli espionage over the last ~80 years, anyone?… but you cannot actually get diversity without isolation that permits actual diversity to emerge.
Diversity is not pouring oil into water and using the polluted oil-water in lieu of oil and also in lieu of oil. If you want actual diversity you need differences that are separated from each other. It is precisely what has been collapsing for the last 80+ years, actual real diversity, precisely because unique separate groups and clusters have been shattered, scattered, mixed, and polluted.
Even AI is now accelerating this collapse of what is really a form of human biodiversity, or should it be called cultural diversity, as AI is causing a conformity of thought. There are several reports and papers on that phenomenon already.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to claim that somehow those factors will increase over the prior situation simply because we increase actual, real diversity of unique things; not this fake, fraudulent, delusional diversity that has forced on us like a toxic sludge dump that has destroyed human diversity as everyone increasingly consumes the same “content” slop and eats the same food slop, and has the same cultural and musical slop.
mensetmanusman
[flagged]
Der_Einzige
The sanctions will (not sarcastically) massively harm the world because Nvidia may no longer be a free money cheat code. I like having an easy economic strategy for investing...
mensetmanusman
The world doesn’t have to optimize policy to increase the profits of a single American company.
seanmcdirmid
Chinese stocks are pretty reasonable right now, if their market has dealt with the insider trader mess then it might be a good time to onboard. It isn’t for the feint of heart however.
Markets used to be places to make money more smart (efficient allocation of capital) but have somehow degraded to index fund buys that track average economic growth of a few hot stocks that are expected to at least not get cold anytime soon.
am17an
Deepseek-R1 is at the level of GPT 4.1 already, it's open-weight, open-source and they even open-sourced their inference code.
jjordan
I don't know why everyone keeps echoing this, my experience with Deepseek-R1, from a coding perspective at least, has been underwhelming at best. Much better experience with GPT 4.1 (and even better with Claude, but that's a different price category).
am17an
I'm not arguing which model is better for your use-case. I'm saying in general as it's "powerful" as GPT 4.1 in a lot of benchmarks, and you can peak underneath the hood, even make it better for your said use-case
Zambyte
In my experience, all reasoning models feel (vibely) worse at structured output like code versus comparable non-reasoning models, but far better at knowledge-based answering.
jorvi
This is everyone with every model.
People sang praise from the roof for Google's Gemini 2.5 models, but in many things for me they can't even beat Deepseek V3.
iJohnDoe
I got the impression that 03-mini or 03-mini-high were meant for coding? GPT 4.1 was meant for creative writing, not coding?
whizzter
[flagged]
leeoniya
wasnt 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-spea...
cultofmetatron
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reactordev
SETI@Home style peer2peer open GPU training network is something I’m looking into as well.
coolspot
Possible and has been done, but super-slow and inefficient resulting in long training times for small models. To keep compute occupied you need to pass gradients very fast.
reactordev
Yes but could you break it up into chunks of sets of gradients to compute? I know that compute needs the full chunk to compute a set. Again, things I’m exploring but ultimately no different than just having the full dataset on disk and just scaling out compute nodes in ro mode.
pk-protect-ai
Do you mean this one?
https://blog.lambdaclass.com/introducing-demo-decoupled-mome...
logicchains
>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
ryoshu
People are doing it: https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche/
SubiculumCode
I suppose its exciting, but whether that is a good thing depends entirely on how much you think AI technologies pose existential threats to human survival. This may sound hyperbolic, but serious people are seriously thinking about this and are seriously afraid.
foursilly
Since 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
It'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
IANAL 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:52...
ricardobeat
Continuing that quote:
> for example of an operator established in the Union that contracts certain services to an operator established outside the Union in relation to an activity to be performed by an AI system that would qualify as high-risk and whose effects impact natural persons located in the Union.
> this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union
Otherwise it seems to reach way beyond what it actually is.
Explicitly prohibiting EU usage in the license is probably a move to reduce liability under the eyes of those “used in the Union” clauses.
foursilly
Thanks for all that information, I agree with you that the EU legislation is very broad. In my opinion, this justifies or motivates the inclusion of the ban in the EU.
paganel
> protect ourselves
"Protect" ourselves against whom? I'm a EU citizen (unfortunately), and I'm fully on board with China against Brussels. Which is to say, don't try to speak for everyone in this God-forsaken so-called union.
HPsquared
For security, I'd always treat ANY LLM generated code as untrusted until reviewed.
jandrese
100%, which makes me nervous when I hear stories about AIs that write and execute their own code. It's just asking for trouble.
tartoran
They'll blame it on AI from now on. This could have serious implications and further erosion of any responsibility tech companies have will probably accelerate.
coliveira
That's correct, independent of the source of the LLM.
chaosharmonic
> Since 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.
Maybe not the exact thing you're talking about, but that description reminds me of the Alliance for Open Media -- their codec licenses are royalty-free, but the same terms revoke your usage rights if you sue anyone for the use of these formats.
gkbrk
Weights are available on gitcode [1].
ssddanbrown
Just 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/ma...
p2detar
What’s the reason behind this? What am I missing?
Iolaum
Most likely EU AI act regulations they don't see any value in bothering with.
worldsavior
The company is Chinese, I presume that's why.
null
johnisgood
And 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.
viraptor
The 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.
Quarrel
For those that would not remember, this was a real thing in the late 80s and 90s relating the cryptography.
There were serious laws limiting the export a "modern" cryptography software from the USA.
Some of us had to face up to the serious challenge of connecting to an FTP server and downloading PGP and risking violating US law to download a software package.
A few years later we had to decide "Do you want the secure Netscape, or the insecure Netscape?".
I'm sure we all chose the ethical choice.
coldtea
Legalese and licenses aren't to make sure no X will download/install/or run something.
It's to make it a matter of legal record that you stated they should abstain.
Copyright warnings on music and DVDs never stopped people pirating them either.
coliveira
I wonder if you'd say the same if the license were coming from Microsoft of Apple...
randomNumber7
A lot of companies and research institutes in the EU would like to be able to use a locally hosted LLM for their employees so they don't have to worry what data they give away.
They will certainly not violate EU laws and also probably not the licence.
Arnt
It's plausible deniability. Someone at Huawei presumably thinks there's a chance that exporting this to Europe might be a legal problem at some point in the future. So they added a restriction, enough for plausible deniability.
_joel
Quite a few, actually.
pfortuny
Wow this is a huge caveat: a guarantee that they are using data and not complying with GDPR.
sigmoid10
GDPR 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.
waffleiron
There 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.
imiric
Shocking. At least they acknowledge it.
2Gkashmiri
If you download to your PC and run locally, what will happen?
seydor
does anyone comply with gdpr & Ai act? Even for mistral i m not sure, the best we can say is "we don't know"
yard2010
There's something nefarious about this.
knowitnone
I doubt the Chinese ever care about licensing so I would not care about following their license
JKCalhoun
I 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
I 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.
crowcroft
If 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
I 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=chatgp...
Its only 108 million params.
Mars008
> I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focused on specific use cases.
just recent discussion on HN: "Small language models are the future of agentic AI"
snickmy
that's already the case, and it's called model distillation. You use LLMs to generate labels but then you use a dedicated smaller model (usually NN) to run at 1000x cheaper cost of inference.
crowcroft
I think beyond the technical aspect it's a product and packaging problem.
All the effort is in productizing foundational models and apps built on top of them, but as that plateaus distilled models and new approaches will probably get more time in the sun. I'm hopeful that if this is the case we will see more weird stuff come available.
bjord
throwback to that brief period where people would mine bitcoin (ineffectively) using ASICs in their USB ports
crowcroft
Yes, 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
no, 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
JSR_FDED
Sanctions 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.
seydor
Sic transit gloria nvidii
HPsquared
Linguistic deep lore: "invidia" is Latin for "envy".
fakedang
That was the reasoning behind the NVidia name choice btw - the cofounders wanted the competition to be envious of their company's capabilities.
madmask
Also italian
fennecbutt
Explains invidious, I suppose.
WithinReason
So it's extra fitting!
abdulhaq
5 years of Latin finally pays off
smitterle
Sorry for the nitpick: I'd expect Gen Sg to be nvidiae - i is for o declension
Intermernet
"now don't do it again!"
seydor
and what would be the plural of nvidia?
hearsathought
Sic transit gloria nvidiae
snickmy
thank you for conjugating correctly the 1st declension to the genitive, we all, that wasted many years studying latin, te salutant!
Quarrel
Best thing I've read today.
Bravo.
nsoonhui
I 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?
qkhhly
> 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-smartphon...
elzbardico
Man. 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.
randomNumber7
From the hardware huawei can build competitve phones. It's just hard to justify buying a phone without the google appstore.
tazjin
No, 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.
cenamus
I think this video gives a decent overview on Huawei in general
Beijinger
This is a few days old. https://www.techinasia.com/news/tencent-hunyuan-opensources-...
Here is the GIT https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B
vkaku
The next moment I'd like to see is a mass 15-20A fab and suddenly making all the controls obsolete.
vkaku
The cards mentioned in the paper are also seemingly well priced for most developers: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-Huaweis-Atla...
xbmcuser
The world needs Huawei and China to get competitive on its node size with TSMC and Nvidia.
amelius
That 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
Don'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.
bilbo0s
which 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.
owebmaster
I have the impression that if the US removed the chips exports control, the government of China would impose a imports control. They have so much more to gain from creating a real contender to Nvidia/TSMC/Apple/Google.
null
bgnn
A 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
The 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.
randomNumber7
So 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.
bayindirh
Sanctions are generally a stopgap measure. They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time.
I live in a country which has experienced some hard and soft embargoes over the years, and let's look what has it done.
- We wanted to buy drones, and denied. Now we are one of the biggest drone manufacturers in the world.
- We denied air defense systems. We are developing a whole arsenal of missiles and rockets now, incl. standoff/cruise missiles.
- We denied planes. Our 4.5th generation fighter program got a great speed boost.
- We denied advanced naval technology. We built stealth ships, fast coastguard boats and all navigational systems which goes inside them.
- We denied optical pods for drones and aerial vehicles. We built our own in 6 months.
etc. etc...
Sanctions and embargoes are the biggest catalyst for a country to advance their tech at tremendous velocity.
seydor
Turkey chose to develop a large defense industry. There were restrictions on them acquiring some US weapons (even though they are NATO member) but that wasn't the motivating factor, it was a political choice to develop large defense sector.
Other countries like Iran however, do develop their own drones because of sanctions
littlestymaar
The strict tensions imposed after Turkey's intervention in/invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 played a key role in the development of the Turkish defense industry.
Y_Y
I presume you're talking about Turkey/Türkiye.
If so, do you think it makes a difference that Turkey is a NATO member, and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
For all the ideological differences and geopolitcal nervousness I don't think the US or EU see themselves as potentially fighting against Turkey, and so they don't feel the need to go to the trouble of strict sanctions or sabotaging local tech.
littlestymaar
> and on (relatively) good terms with the Western powers?
In recent years the relationship between Turkey and Western countries has been OK-ish (though far from stellar, see the S-400-related tensions or the French-Trukish tension in the Mediterranean).
But if you look at it on a longer perspective, the relationship used to be very tense, first there was the Cyprus crisis leading to pretty harsh western sanctions on military equipment, and then the cold war between Turkey and Greece in the Aegean see, with occasional real fire air combat and casualties.
gabrielgio
> They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time.
That highly depends on the size and natural resource available to the country.
heavyset_go
They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market. Countries that don't constrain themselves like that can laugh at sanctions because they don't matter in that context.
sigmoid10
Who cares about 35% inflation when you got your own drones to bomb Kurds, am I right? Which btw. was the original reason why Obama didn't want to give Turkey combat capable drones. He wasn't sassy or tried to curb competition. The US presumed (correctly with the benefit of hindsight) that they would be used to go after supposed PKK positions inside and outside Turkey. Sanctions do work, but when an opponent is hell-bent on their objective, they will always be willing to sacrifice in order to attain their goals nonetheless. Even at the cost of their own population. You can see the same thing in Russia: They are literally bleeding their middle class into poverty under all those sanctions just to keep going in Ukraine.
roenxi
> They work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market.
Typically it actually looks like the opposite. When I look at, eg, North Korea or Iran - if I were going to try and make them wealthy it is mostly internal policies that are the problem and not external ones.
If North Korea set itself up with single digit % company and income tax combined with a strong rule of law, local education programs and a liberal economy it would barely matter what sanctions were imposed on them. A tide of money would flow in and they'd eventually be wealthy under their own power anyway if not. Although it isn't obvious why anyone would sanction a small well run country; there is a correlation between sanctions and incompetent governance.
sillystu04
To play devils advocate, a lack of sanctions also allows countries to advance technology at a tremendous velocity.
The Ford Motor Company's dealings in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union significantly helped the adoption of mass production in those countries.
null
firesteelrain
What country? Your website is out of Germany. Germany is in NATO.
perks_12
Hetzner is still a thing.
akarlsten
Judging by his name, Turkey
postexitus
inferred from username and stated facts, Turkey.
sofixa
[flagged]
corimaith
If this was true then countries could just impose import restrictions if they wanted to "advance their tech at tremendous velocity".
randomNumber7
It also depends if the country has a realistic capability to catch up with their own tech. So for Congo it would probably be a bad move. China is a different story imho.
zorked
This is called "import substitution" and was incredibly popular in the age before neoliberalism. If your country is rich today you probably did a lot of that in the past.
blackoil
10s (maybe 100s) of billions that could have gone to Nvidia are going to Huawei, so not surprising they are able to make the progress and pulling along SMIC with them. Most of the sanctions against Huawei were because they were a credible threat to US companies, so again not surprising.
seydor
What do we know about the production capacity of those NPUs ? asking for a friend
wordofx
And the spying they have been doing.
yorwba
You cannot just point to some amount of a sanctioned good being manufactured to claim a sanctions backfire, you need to look at the difference between with and without sanctions, and also consider the cost.
Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway. How much of the total GPU compute is the result of increased investment after sanctions, and how much was already planned? And how does it compare to the alternative of importing Nvidia GPUs for the same amount of money?
Unless Huawei is getting better performance per dollar than Nvidia, this is them implementing a costly workaround, which is the point of sanctions: increasing cost.
phkahler
>> Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway.
Sure, but China has started dumping a lot of money into competing with ASML as a result of the sanctions. And no, they are not going the super complicated route of firing lasers at drops of tin to get EUV. They are trying to sidestep that costly complexity, and if they are successful they'll be providing equipment to the top chip producers (around the world or just their own).
like_any_other
Increasing short-term cost, at the price of losing leverage in the medium/long-term. Or even ending up on the wrong side of that leverage, if SMIC (who was just handed control of China's domestic market) ends up outcompeting TSMC/Intel/Samsung.
randomNumber7
Without sanctions noone would buy the Huawei chips.
With sanctions they get free money to develop better chips.
== sanctions backfire
yorwba
I see now, the problem is that you're confusing expenses and profit. If Huawei had spent a quadrillion dollars to make the same number of GPUs, that wouldn't be an incredible sanctions backfire (look at how much money they got!) it would be an incredible sanctions success (look at how much money they spent to get what would've been much cheaper otherwise!)
MangoCoffee
China's Made in China 2025 already lays out which key industries they will go after. Semis are always a key industry for China.
Huawei already designed and developed its own chips before sanctions, and SMIC is developing their next node before sanctions.
Whether sanctions work or not is another matter
corimaith
Why not just put in import restrictions then?
null
polytely
Adding more sanctions seems to be the default US move it seems, to the point that there are so many sanctioned entities that they've formed a paralel world economy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/wh...
mtkd
In 2023 Huawei surprised with the Kirin 9000S in the Mate 60, this seems to get forgotten when talking about GPU moats and sanction effectiveness
lostmsu
Same as Pixel 8 performance according to https://nanoreview.net/en/soc/hisilicon-kirin-9000s and https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
seydor
even 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
In 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.
rfoo
> the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key
Guess what a telco equipment company is good at :p
checker659
NVLink isn’t magic
WhereIsTheTruth
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quand_la_Chine_s%27%C3%A9veill...
It's funny how it's impossible to find English coverage of this book :')
starfallg
SMIC is running into real problems without EUV. Just because they are able to produce something at 6/7nm, it doesn't mean that it is efficient or competitive. Right now, they do it because of strategic considerations.
randomNumber7
What is so hard about EUV that they cant develop/reverse engineer themself?
This 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.