A couple of years ago Bloomberg reported about spy chips/hw backdoors in SuperMicro mainboards but to my knowledge without a smoking gun proof. Maybe they had to settle outside of court and also had to sign papers to help protect the company from further damage in the future. Using (other) Bloomberg material may have triggered this. Of course this is a wild speculation. I have no evidence or insider knowledge.
GN used Bloomberg clips of US Gov officials speaking on AI chip matters, fully under fair use.
And Bloomberg did a DMCA takedown through youtube, copystrike in parlance which pulled the video down for a week. GN had no recourse other than to wait and counterclaim.
Week timed out, Bloomberg did nothing but be the bully.
As always, Louis is being a bit sensationalist and stretches the truth to whip up outrage. Contrary to what he claims, GN could have easily quoted the president without Bloomberg's video, and that would be fine. "that outlet now has a monopoly on who is able to quote the president" is just a totally false premise. Moreover he tries to argue that GN's video falls under fair use, because it's a 1 minute clip in a 3 hour video. However it's not hard to think of a rebuttal to this. If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches, who would bother going out and making such recordings? Usually how this would be resolved would be by citing precedents, but he doesn't bother citing any.
They did have the video uploaded to archive.org (or at least link to someone else who did) and gave permission to anyone else to repost it. Which is how I saw it, some rando burner account on YouTube :)
It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.
Remember when Singapore buyers were an abnormally high percentage of nvidia's revenue? You have to wonder if these companies are this brazen because they know the DoJ will have political pressure not to nuke the bubble which is more important than being China hawks.
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.
Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form?
I understand its complex and there many parts to it, but which is the most complex part making it difficult for China to copy it?
Let's say they don't have access to 3nm process, what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance with CUDA compatibility? Or other option could be less tensor units, training will take longer, but they might be able to produce it cheaply
I've had my own dealings with this awful company. Including Wally.
Let's just say that none of this comes as any surprise.
Now, what people should be asking is how much Jensen knew. In May he said there was nothing going on. But the videos of the Chinese guy holding H1/200's ... never got to him?
Also interesting how they waited until just after GTC...
Violating sanctions isn't exactly the same thing as smuggling. It also doesn't seem like it should be a crime to disagree with your state on who deserves what service... i never voted for the dingbats who control who is called a terrorist, let alone the people scared of china.
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And the entire Bloomberg takedown drama added fire to the flames.
And Bloomberg did a DMCA takedown through youtube, copystrike in parlance which pulled the video down for a week. GN had no recourse other than to wait and counterclaim.
Week timed out, Bloomberg did nothing but be the bully.
Louis Rossmann's excellent explainer video here on the Bloomberg bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJvrTC6oTI
>Louis Rossmann's excellent explainer video here on the Bloomberg bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJvrTC6oTIAs always, Louis is being a bit sensationalist and stretches the truth to whip up outrage. Contrary to what he claims, GN could have easily quoted the president without Bloomberg's video, and that would be fine. "that outlet now has a monopoly on who is able to quote the president" is just a totally false premise. Moreover he tries to argue that GN's video falls under fair use, because it's a 1 minute clip in a 3 hour video. However it's not hard to think of a rebuttal to this. If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches, who would bother going out and making such recordings? Usually how this would be resolved would be by citing precedents, but he doesn't bother citing any.
https://hindenburgresearch.com/smci/
I wonder if any of those $2.5B of smuggled chips ended up being used for those training runs.
Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form?
I understand its complex and there many parts to it, but which is the most complex part making it difficult for China to copy it?
Let's say they don't have access to 3nm process, what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance with CUDA compatibility? Or other option could be less tensor units, training will take longer, but they might be able to produce it cheaply
Let's just say that none of this comes as any surprise.
Now, what people should be asking is how much Jensen knew. In May he said there was nothing going on. But the videos of the Chinese guy holding H1/200's ... never got to him?
Also interesting how they waited until just after GTC...
A (classically) liberal society can only work if everyone is held to the same standard of the law.
"sorry guys, I did something token-bad a while ago that got you more money."
that's the sort of meaculpa I'd expect to get rewarded these days...
Edit: Officially-debunked, I should note
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/
[2] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/chinese-suppl...
[3] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-severed-ties-w...